Re: macbook air and fcpx- the new portable edit suite

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[Aindreas Gallagher] " Is this an unseen new FCP on an unseen new ipad? how do they function? How am I working with the timeline? Am I exposing full OSX to manage events? is the ipad in landscape? Am I viewing the entire interface? how is project management functioning?"

I've spent a lot of time with the iPad versions of iWorks, and I have two general conclusions:

1) Wow! These things are amazing! You can do so much with them!

2) Wow! These things are awful! You can't do sh^t with them!

Please indulge me. This might look off-topic, but it's not.

You can use your iPhone as a remote control for Keynote on a laptop or desktop - awesome! You can actually see the slides on your iPhone. But you can't use iPhone to control a presentation on an iPad. Not a deal-breaker, but dang!

You can BUILD a presentation in portrait mode. You can click through it. Looks AWESOME on an iPad. Perfect for a pitch related to a MAGAZINE, like the one I edit for Creative COW. Only one problem - you BUILD in portrait, but can't actually PRESENT in portrait. Only in landscape.

You can do a portrait preso on a laptop or desktop, but why not be able to do it on something that actually looks fantastic in portrait? For example, that's how they mostly show iPad on TV...as they should. Which is why I should be able to actually make a presentation in portrait if I want to...like I can on a desktop...where it makes no sense. Grrrr.....
---That was my plan, btw. I was pitching something magazine-ish to four people. I was going to give them each their own iPad, and was going to control it from my iPhone. How cool would that be?!?! Except it didn't work at all. Would have on a laptop or desktop, but....
I rebuilt the preso in landscape (harder than it sounds), and decided to just live with it. People were going to have to figure out how to tap the screen when I told them to.

Here's the kicker. You build the preso on your laptop or desktop, so you want to use iTunes to transfer it to your iPad. Right? Apple makes that nice and easy. Except that using iTunes to transfer strips out all the fonts and the stock backgrounds you built on your desktop! You have to connect to the internet and REDOWNLOAD them.

Do not try to do this on hotel wi-fi on the Monday morning of NAB. Downloading two fonts and a very simple 2-color background JPG to four iPads -- took a little over an hour.

Remember when I said that you can only do a presentation in landscape mode? Well, if you want to project it on a screen, you can only put it in the iPad dock in PORTRAIT mode!!! I can feel the deal starting to break.

Then there's the well-documented bug in Pages, where you create a document on your main machine with, say, footnotes. A feature that doesn't exist on your iPad version of Pages. Having learned your lesson with iTunes and Keynote, you decide to use iDisk. Sweet! Then when you open the document on your iPad, you see there's a typo. Oops! No prob. The file is in the cloud. Two clicks, Save. The best part: the file will be corrected everywhere else you need it too!

Except now when you open it back up on your desktop, ALL THE FOOTNOTES ARE GONE. By making one tiny change, and saving it on iDisk, EVERY feature not available in the iPad version is stripped from the original version created on the desktop. How's THAT for version tracking.

Look, I get that having 100% of the laptop toolset on an iPad would be a nightmare. Not good at all, even for something as simple as Pages. But I'd love to be able to change the word "to" to "too," and not destroy an entire set of mission-critical attributes on the original. Deal: officially broken. I now do everything with PDFs. Inelegant, but it works every single time, which I simply can't say for iWork when using it to actually work.

I surely have a detail or two wrong, and Apple surely fixed some of these bugs, right? RIGHT?

But this is why, when I hear about FCPX on an iPad, I think two things:

1) This is going to be amazing! Next-gen hardware and software for on-set and location workflows that were never possible before!

2) This is going to be a nightmare! Apple's simplest software cannibalizes itself on iPad! This could decimate workflows in ways that were never possible before!

I still come down on the side of "It's probably going to be insanely great someday," but seriously, let's start with today. Keynote and Pages are very simple apps that have been around a long time, and as awesome as it is when it works, working with documents across a laptop and iPad can be torture, and can undo days of work with a keystroke that can't be done. "Save" should never be an act of destruction.

FCPX is both complex and new. Will the first app that Apple does RIGHT on iPad really be FCPX? Can Apple make FCPX on iPad more proficient and more stable than Keynote or Pages? With better version tracking than for a TEXT file? Really?

Note that iPads are my all-time favorite Apple products. iPods were always overpriced and underfeatured. No use for them whatsoever. Macs? Been using 'em since my father ran Apple's first manufacturing facility. He actually started in 1979. I've used nearly every model computer Apple made since then, but hey, I like Windows too. Whatever. iPhone? The worst piece of tech I ever owned, at least on AT&T. My bowels still loosen just thinking about the agony I went through with that thing.

iPad? I love every single thing about it. I can't think of a single thing I don't absolutely love, and I mean LOVE about it. iPad! Woo-hoo! I actually have a tattoo of an iPad ON my actual woo-hoo! I love everything about it!!!

Oh yeah, except one thing. I hate how Apple software runs on my iPad.

I'm just saying.