An Open Letter to Apple

A little bird told me that Apple SG reads my blog. I’m writing this letter to document some of my mental diarrhea in time for the release of the iLife ’09 suite late next year. The letter verbalizes some ideas of combining the UI of GarageBand with some of the features of iMovie ’08, especially fixing the UI for the “paste over playhead” option which is found in iMovie HD.

Dear Apple,

First off, I’d like to congratulate you guys for a successful iLife ’08 suite launch alongside the success of the iPod line in the Philippines. I’m writing this letter as a consumer who’s been dabbling with your latest release of GarageBand and iMovie ’08. I’ve documented my praises and frustrations of iMovie ’08 not including some functions such as the paste over playhead feature, which you can only do on the HD version of iMovie. I’ve been doing basic podcasting and movie productions and I came to a small scale epiphany on how the user interface could be improved when you release the next version of iMovie ’09.

I’ve done a rough sketch of my idea for an improved user interface for iMovie ’09. It combines the live scanning feature implemented with iMovie ’08 alongside the track editing features present in GarageBand. There is emphasis on the “priority arrows” that, if you infer from the drawing will be used to show priority for the paste over playhead feature.

For instance, if I wanted to insert a photo or a clip within a movie without disturbing the audio, all I would need to do is to drag my media file to the track and position it where I would want the item to be displayed. This eliminates the need to use the extract audio feature. In addition, the priority arrows can be used to determine how visible the media will be:

Say a video clip is inserted with secondary priority, the video will be played through a smaller window. The paste over playhead function works best in this case if the media that is inserted is a photo. The same goes with audio effects.

My idea obviously needs some work as I am not a developer or a movie producer. I do hope though that you take this suggestion into your file for future reference and as an example of intelligent customer feedback.

Thank you very much!

Jayvee Fernandez