News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

September 18, 2007

ihnatko

Ordinary People

Posted Sep. 18, ’07, 11:40 AM PT by Andy Ihnatko
Category | Ihnatko

When the new edition of iLife came out a while back, I made some noise about my disappointment with iPhoto ‘08. Big surprise. My complaints about iPhoto tend to come out about as frequently as new Harry Potter books. The only real difference is that J.K. Rowling seems to have lost interest in her subject after only 5,000 pages. And (I wish to add, by way of insisting that I’m way, way better than she is) I didn’t need $1.2 billion dollars’ worth of motivation.

My motivation was a timeless, pure and holy one: smug self-righteousness.

“The glass ceiling is still way too low,” I sniped. “A great app like iMovie inspires and motivates the user to become more passionate about a task that he once considered to be dull drudgery. But with iPhoto, managing and editing photos is still utterly mundane.”

Fortunately, I’m a regular on several podcasts, so there was absolutely nothing stopping me from completely contradicting myself the very same week.

“I know that lots of hardcore iMovie users are really upset about the latest version,” I said. Upset? Users keep driving to the home of iMovie’s lead developer and rearranging his lawn ornaments into lewd positions. “But you know, I find that when I approach iMovie as a brand new app, I rather like it. iMovie ‘08 is a terrific upgrade when it comes to the simple task of turning 60 minutes of raw footage into a five minute video that friends and family will happily watch without text-messaging Amnesty International halfway through.”

I got lot of emails that were more hurtful than your earlier opinions about what my clothes say about my personality. Oddly enough, most of them made an identical charge: that I don’t know what I’m talking about, because I’m not a normal user.

As a photographer, I’m way above the curve because I use a spiffy black Nikon SLR and shoot nothing but RAW images, and my ambition is for my photos to not suck. As a filmmaker, I’m a dullard. I have never spent an evening setting buckets of jellied gasoline around a middle-school campus because I wanted my video of my niece’s winter chorale to look like the end credits of “Apocalypse Now.”

Still, they bring up a good point. I don’t know whether God kicked my butt in a previous life or if He intends to kick my butt in my next life. All I know is that He’s feeling pretty damned guilty about something so he’s making my current loop through the Karmic spin cycle a highly pleasant one.

My job is to experience as much of what technology has to offer as time and editors’ deadlines allow. I can get my hands on nearly anything that’s new and wonderful and take it out for a spin for a month or two, just for the cost of an email to the company.

I mean, for criminy’s sake: just the other week, I emailed one of the largest wireless companies in the U.S. and asked them to send me six dozen phones. “I want to run them through a washing machine,” I said, with a completely straight voice, “and then see if burying a wet phone in kitty litter does a better job of preventing moisture damage than, say, soaking it in vodka.” And whaddya know… a big box arrived the next week.

Does this sort of thing happen to you very often?

In my defense, I’m not just a provider of commentary and criticism… I’m also an avid consumer. Thursday nights are like Christmas Eve, because the next morning Santa will deliver reviews of the week’s new movies, written by all of my favorite critics. Some, like Roger Ebert, I read because they have a keen eye and a terrific writing style. There are others whom I’ve bookmarked because it’s wonderful to get a weekly reminder that my taste and sophistication are so much greater than a man who so brashly claims to be an actual authority on film, and yet can fail to see the clear homages to the Platonic farces of Vaclav Kliment Klicpera in “Mr. Bean’s Holiday.”

I’m not out to get a pronouncement from one critic. I want to get several opinions, and gauge the latest offerings from as many perspectives as I can.

I note with satisfaction that Ebert himself is currently facing the same sort of criticism. A reader responds to his scathing review of a recent slasher movie by accusing him of being prejudiced against the whole genre. Ebert replies that he’s seen thousands of sexy teens thrown facefirst into farm machinery over the course of his career, and he considers himself a very capable of determining whether it’s been done well or not.

Another reader responds to a recent essay on video games, saying that a man who doesn’t play games himself is in no position to judge anything. “On the contrary,” he writes. “I would think that the opinion of a man with a fresh set of eyes would be valuable.”

What readers and writers of criticism need to keep in mind is that there’s really nothing terribly special about what we write. The fact that I like the new iMovie but continue to regard iPhoto as a colorful bird who likes to roost above my car whenever I leave the sunroof open shouldn’t be given the weight of a papal encyclical.

The “Normal User” is a phantom and a tawdry ideal for anybody to seek out. The only thing a movie critic or a technology columnist can offer is their own crooked perspective on a subject, but within those hundreds of petty prejudices, cockeyed expectations, and profoundly-entrenched fits of tunnel vision that have been squirted into websites and printed pages there lies a sort of collective wisdom.

It’s like the path from an anthill to a mound of sugar. Each individual’s wobbly path from Point A to Point B improves upon the last one until, after a hundred trips, a direct and incontrovertible reality becomes clear. And sometimes, it’s the crazy one who goes off in entirely the wrong direction for no particular reason save for barking insanity who ultimately stumbles across the greatest discoveries of all.


1 Comments

closethipster Author Profile Page said:

I'm stuck on iView Media 2 while I wait for my dream app to come along.

I rarely do digital photography; I mostly scan in old family photos and slides or new stuff I've taken with a Lomo. What I wouldn't give for an app with scanning capabilities and presets so all my scanned photos have the same dimensions, compression, color correction and file format. And ideally I would be able output to Flickr, send photos to a Ceiva, and interface with my Lomohome.

But in the end, I'd settle for an app that just supports multiple libraries. I have enough apps fighting for space without introducing an enormous i-P-h-o-t-o (shh.. I don't want my MacBook Pro to hear the "i" word) library into the mix.

October 15, 2007 9:29 AM

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