Is the trust for Apple gone for good?

OneRiver Media Blog by Marco Solorio

In the blink of an eye, the release of Final Cut Pro X has caused a ripple in the Matrix so huge, I’m not sure Neo could even fix this catastrophe. But it’s much more than good software gone astray, it’s deeper than infrastructure changes; it’s about the loss of trust, faith and even livelihoods.

The writing was on the wall for some time actually, but myself, like many others didn’t see it coming—at least not this badly. Let’s go back a few years. Apple’s acquisition of Shake from Nothing Real was huge, and ultimately sold under the Apple Store for a mere $499 (original price was $9900 prior to the Apple buy-out). People, myself included, felt that Apple was really getting serious about post-production based software. The excitement was huge and people (large companies included) really started to take notice. But by 2009, Shake was quietly removed from Apple’s line-up and officially EOL’ed (End-Of-Life).

This really should have been the first hint that Apple didn’t have a huge interest in the pro apps market. Why they initially bought them out in the first place, I do not know. Even worse, why they EOL’ed an awesome app like Shake is even more strange to me. It’s as if Apple became the black hole of pro apps software—they buy it and kill it.

But Shake isn’t the only app gone astray. It seems that with the FCPX release, Color is now the next major pro app to hit the chopping block. I received an NFR (Not For Resale) copy of Final Touch HD directly from Silicon Color (along with some control surface hardware that I still have today) before Apple bought Final Touch out and renamed it to Color. First using Final Touch HD, my mind was blown, despite the fact that, at the time, the software was in dire need of video card hardware acceleration (which later came about). But like Shake, Apple bought it, and “chopping-blocked” it. read more...