Running to stand still

It's quite a scary moment when the "minimum requirements" for a new program almost exactly match those of the machine you're using. What the software maker is saying, in effect, is: "You can come along if you like, but don't expect to be comfortable – this is meant for newer stuff than you've got".

If the software is an update to a program that already works fine, then one must wonder seriously whether to change.

That's the dilemma facing many of the people considering installing Apple's iMovie 3, the upgraded version of its free digital editing suite (it also has paid-for ones, which I'll cover next week).

Although iMovie 2 is a pretty good program, its successor is an even better program, though not without faults, including (but not limited to) a tendency to make whizzy computers from 18 months ago seem like sluggards. People using the old "clamshell" (aka "toilet seat") iBooks are out of luck: insufficient screen resolution. You should have at least a 400MHz machine (equivalent to about a 1GHz Intel, though Apple programs won't run on Intel chips).

But Apple gains if the must-have programs for its users demand more processor power. As a hardware company that lives and dies by its computer sales, releasing software that makes people want to buy new gear is strategically smart.

Apple has been busy on the software front, though. The update to iMovie came alongside the release of a new browser, Safari, and a new version of iPhoto, the photo organisation and editing program. All of these are key to Apple's "digital hub" strategy, and each interacts more or less with the others. From iPhoto, you can pick music from iTunes; from iMovie, both photos from iPhoto and music from iTunes. They are very nice touches.

What's not so nice about iMovie is its chronically bad playback and tendency to bring on the "spinning pizza of death", the OS X operating system's equivalent of that damn Windows hourglass. It can't be down to any bells or whistles. Just playing back footage imported from a camera led to stutters on the 18-month-old G3 iBook I was using (the same footage played perfectly on the brand-spanking-new 12in PowerBook I also tried it on). By contrast, iMovie 2.1 was fine with the same operation.

Some people reckon this sluggishness can be fixed by doing an arcane disk operation called "Repair Disk Permissions" (it's an option under "Repair" in the "Disk Utility" program). Could be – the underlying Unix-based OS X operating system (for which this version is only available) is definitely rock-hard and very powerful; for example, while I type this (on that 18-month-old machine), it's also capturing one of my old vinyl records as a digital stream, without missing a note or a keystroke.

While iMovie 3 does introduce much-desired options such as altering the sound volume within a clip, and of different sound clips, it also has some glaring errors. The most annoying: camcorders in the US record in "NTSC" format, the same as they use for TV; in Europe we use a format called PAL. Any half-decent programmer could set up the NTSC/PAL default as a choosable preference in a morning, probably before their first coffee. (You tweak a file called "Localizable.strings", if you're into hacking.) But it's just set to NTSC, so if you don't have a PAL camera hooked up when you start a new project it assumes you work in NTSC, and won't let you work on a PAL clip. Why not? Simple lack of testing? Whatever, it's symptomatic of a culture where you push stuff out instead of doing the full tests.

Similarly, iPhoto 2 has some really nice additions – its "Enhance" and "Retouch" controls – but is clunkily slow. (Again, the "Repair Permissions" procedure works wonders for some people.) It's still didactic about where your photos must be, unlike iTunes.

I wonder why. Is it because iTunes originated outside Apple, as a shareware program that had to fight for survival amid the blossoming of MP3 software players? That ingrained flexibility may be why people love iTunes yet are often indifferent about some of the Apple-grown "iSoftware" such as iCal (its treacle-slow calendar program), and potentially now iPhoto and iMovie. The jury's still out on the synchronisation program iSync: it covers a lot of ground, but on an 18-month-old machine it's achingly slow. Praise be that OS X lets you run it in the background and do useful things in the foreground.

Such as? Such as surfing the Web with Safari. (Why the name? Some suggest it's backwards "iRafas". Others point to The Beach Boys' "Surfin' Safari". Given Steve Jobs's age, the latter seems likelier.)

Like iTunes, this is an outsider brought in, and all the better for it. Based on the KHTML browser, it is amazingly fast – very much faster than Internet Explorer – if you're on a broadband connection, and renders pages as their authors planned. It's still in its early stages; and I find that it's not faster than Chimera (aka Navigator, based on the Netscape code) or iCab (www.icab.de) if you're on a dial-up connection. Both those also have other benefits ("tabbed" browsing for Chimera, general flexibility for iCab) that so far outweigh the beta version of Safari.

It also has the "brushed aluminium" metallized look common to the other "hub" programs of iTunes and iPhoto, which given a few windows makes your screen look like a toxic waste dumping ground. Again, some hacking, or free programs available on the Web – notably Unsanity's Haxies – will get rid of that look.

Of course a broadband connection is rather useful if you want to try the new products; while Safari is only a 2Mb download, iMovie 3 is 81Mb and iPhoto 32Mb. Apple seems to have given up its previously useful habit of offering "segmented" downloads, breaking such huge files into smaller chunks for the dialup world. No, you have to buy "iLife", which bundles the latter two with iTunes 3 and iDVD 3, though the latter only works if you have an Apple machine with a built-in DVD burner; add-ons don't qualify. Vexing behaviour, surely. One has to hope that the economy picks up soon. Because the lack of competition in writing really good software is starting to show.