Final Cut Pro X

How to take a bad thing and make it worse?  This was a good effort.

I'm using a trial version and find it operates by seeming side effect more than a user intention being properly inferred by him (thanks to transparent design) into a required action that is then faithfully interpreted by the app.  Apple used to do that.

Delete a clip... and watch in dismay as the successive clip's detached audio track disappears (or not), based on some condition of perfect/imperfect leading edge alignment.  How to achieve perfect alignment?  Not really suggested.  Move a clip and watch some random assortment of other material follow the motion while others remain in place.  Resize a clip and watch the preceding or succeeding one leap to the next line when they conflict.  How do you get the one you're adjusting to just move so it precisely fits?  No idea. Magnetic timeline?  What?

Create a text title.  Ok.  Now edit the sample text provided... how?  No idea.  Spend 10 minutes examining about 5 different hypotheses.  Nothing.  Delete the text title.  Guess that isn't something for this project.

I feel as though the app is trying to out-think me, when it should be doing what most brilliant apps do:  respond directly to my action rather than guess at some clever riposte.

Find an audio clip... try to guess how to find its duration.  CMD+I?  No, it brings up an Import panel.  An import is something so weighty and so sporadically done that it in no way merits displacing "Information" as a hotkey action.  I still do not know how to find these durations.

I find the continual "scrubbing" of sound and vision as I move the mouse about incredibly annoying.  There are toggle buttons to disable this, but I just want to uninstall the whole mess.  I feel like a palsied DJ skritch-skratching in a night club.  Toss the scrubbing line and give me a cursor or a hand that moves things when I drag them.  I don't want anything to play or move unless my finger is down on a button or a key.

It organizes your footage into "events".  Great.  Apple seems to think we all value thinking of our life and its data in terms of discrete events.  I sure don't.

Video editing will leap forward when someone dares to discard dated, traditional words like slip/slide/duck/dodge/frolic/etc presently used for common timeline actions.  Why?  Because these words in no way convey their result.  I used FCP 7 for a year and still did not know which of these I wanted at a given moment.

Mac OS X Finder annoyances

The OS X Finder is exceptionally annoying in where it chooses the scope of a search or where to place a new folder.

The "New Folder" function (shift+cmd+N) places the newly-created folder in the folder selected in the left sidebar. An entirely more useful and consistent choice would be within the folder selected in the right panel. This is more useful in that the means of obtaining this function is, at present, extremely cumbersome and the present function is easily supported within the design I recommend by selecting no folder at all in the right panel. It is more consistent because the "Duplicate" (cmd+D) function places the duplicated file in the folder of the original item -- not in the folder selected on the left. The present design is inferior by any evaluation. It is neither the expected behavior nor is it as flexible.

Note: I did find an Applescript which permits the behavior I'm looking for, but for the life of me I cannot see where that was installed. I'll try to identify that.

Similarly, the Spotlight search function only offers options for the scope of the search as the entire Mac or the folder selected in the left sidebar. Once again, the workaround is similar, but tedious -- one can move the folder one would like to use into the left sidebar and then select it, but this makes more work and necessitates a clean-up step of removing the folder from the left sidebar afterward. It is once again the suboptimal choice and not even the simplest, most apparent design.