Edits and Clips
Wes Davis (via John Gruber, Mastodon):
Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with TikTok. Edits is available for preorder on the iOS App Store.
The Edits app announcement was likely planned to take advantage of the TikTok ban and entice people to move to Instagram Reels right away. Videos posted from Edits to Reels will get performance metrics provided in the app.
[…]
Apple has worked at the edges of social media for years without diving all the way in. The company is still clearly bruised after the failure of Ping.
Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little fanfare and has been forgotten since.
Baz:
I don’t know about CapCut or Edits, but Clips was a half-arsed copy of the editor built in to TikTok (although I’ve not used that for a few years either).
The best thing about Clips was it made your videos stand out from TikTok-made ones as it had different effects. UI-wise, it was just a clone.
Apple makes a lot of apps, and they could easily afford to assign a team to make Clips truly great. It’s no different than 20–25 years ago, when Apple dedicated itself to making iMovie and Final Cut both great apps. It’s no different than the motivation to create GarageBand.
[…]
There are actually a lot of interesting UI ideas in Clips. But if Apple isn’t interested in making Clips truly great for people who actually love editing videos using their phones, they should just abandon it. Make it great or give up. Keeping it around as an also-ran that no one uses is a bad look. This is the sort of thing Apple should pride itself on: best-of-breed creative tools.
Clips is alarming, a dead canary.
Mark my words, Apple’s Journal app is the next Clips. Clever, well executed. Then abandoned. Also like Clips, and in a more glaringly limiting way, iPhone only. Could be amazing, but no reason to invest in it as a user.
Previously:
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I thought Clips was the name of the mini apps that can be run from scanning an NFC or QR code? It’s also an iMovie type of app? So confusing.
Those are App Clips. This is Clips.app. Totally not confusing. ;-)
As for Journal, it sounded interesting when announced, and I thought it might get me started journaling. After poking around and reading about it, I realized it's a bit of a black hole for data, like many apps, including quite a few made by Apple. Data goes in, but you can only get it back out in very constrained, simplistic, "we know what's best" ways. There isn't robust and flexible search. I'm not willing to jump into another one of those scenarios. Bad enough that so many apps that used to provide power users tools to search have been dumbed down or search/automation/export has become flaky (iTunes, Mail, Notes, Reminders, and so many others). You used to be able to easily create real exports/backups of Notes and Reminders, for example. Now, every export method is lossy.
I have a very simple wish for Apple: don’t drop the ball.
If it’s a product, a service, or even a feature—basically anything that has its own name—there should be at least one developer dedicated to it. At the very least, keep it up to date with all the new UI and platform changes, but ideally, improve it. There could also be another level of people to help all those engineers with style and convention decisions, ensuring they are all on the same page from a look-and-feel point of view.
Apple can definitely afford it, and it feels like an obnoxious insult to users that they don’t maintain everything they ship. Situation with Clips just illustrates it again.
