iLife ’04

January 16th, 2004 | Tags:

On the new iLife Suite (from the users point of view), it should be great. From the programmmers point of view, it’s not as good: GUI AppleScripts written for iMovie 3 may no longer work with iMovie 4. With out appreciable changes in the look to the GUI.
* The name of the main window has now change from just “iMovie” to now include the name of the movie being edited. My scripts now need to reference window 1 instead of window “iMovie”
* The area to the right of the preview (where iDVD Chapter markers are defined) has changed from group 5 to group 2. This was fun to track down since Apple’s UI Element Browser doesn’t give the number of the particular element, only the name (which is NULL).

iDVD also has a number of problems on the user’s end:
* The new version is even slower than the previous version.
* There is now no way to encode in the background unless you are only recording 1 video. This means more sessions of leaving the computer on to crank out a DVD. Over-night.
* The new 8 chapters per page themes make exporting from iMovie much more difficult. (Make sure you have a theme with the right number of chapters already open.)
* If the main window was resizable, the map would be usable. As is, there is not much room to see what is going on.
* The burn has a much greater propensity for just stopping in the middle with no warning.

I think in the end they will be better, but here’s hoping for 4.01.

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