I'm only just starting to get to play with the copy of Final Cut Express 4 that Apple recently sent me. I decided to start by taking a quick look at the Apple site to find out what had changed, and one page really caught my eye. Take a look at this page...

http://www.apple.com/finalcutexpress/

On the page about what is new is a movie showing how you can import iMovie '08 projects into FCE. Take a good look at it and what struck me the most was how different the "way of working" (for want of a better term) is between these two applications.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/technology/16pogue-email.html

Criticism related to iMovie focused on a number of things, most notably its removal of the notion of a timeline for editing. Apple had taken the whole analogy of a timeline and removed it from the application because they felt that users had ideas in mind as to how to edit video that were different.

Now Apple have long been seen as a company innovative in their design and generally understandable of how users work. At the same time, they have been willing to experiment with their vision about how we should work and interact.

Apple often stand by their convictions as to how we should interact with their software even whilst users are unhappy.

Mostly, when Apple convinces itself that their way of doing things is the way we should all be doing things, they prove their point by adopting that new way of working across all their applications.

So why does Final Cut Express...an application that came out after iMovie '08....not adopt the new analogy, but instead sticks firmly with the concept of a timeline?

Its timeline concept is "old school" compared to iMovie's "new school"...or is it actually "right school" as opposed to "wrong school"?

Take a look at that video about importing iMovie '08 projects into FCE and again see how different the two applications are. Now imaging you are someone moving from iMovie '08 to FCE. All analogies you had are suddenly lost.

OK, the fairly standard argument would be that iMovie is not and never should be considered a Pro application. But Apple hasn't been one to mix analogies in interaction so much as they have between iMovie and FCE. As someone very interested in the way we work and interact with computers, I find the iMovie decision as curious and as confusing as when they first released it.

From a basic user perspective I can kinda understand why they did what they did with iMovie...but now Apple seems to not have had the courage of their convictions to continue with that analogy in their Pro apps.

In other words, despite appearance recently to the contrary, the timeline DOES matter to Apple!