What ever happened to the manual?
In: Random
7 Mar 2008When everyone has their very own Amazon Kindle, we can talk about it, but until then explain this to me.
I just purchased Apple’s Final Cut Express 4 software recently and thought, like an idiot, that it would be an easy transition from iMovie. I could piddle with it and learn.
Unfortunately for me it’s an extremely complex application. So with that in mind, I went back to the CD Jewel Box sized packaging and searched up and down for the big color manual that teaches me how to use it.
What I found instead was a 5 MB, 1,100 page PDF packed neatly on the DVD-ROM. Seriously? An application this complex and they expect you to learn it by reading a PDF? Now I get PDF, and for release notes, tutorials or other reasonably sized documents, it’s great.
Other than that, PDF is a ridiculous format for a document this size, at least one that you actually need to read, not search for content.
There should at least be an option to purchase a printed version. The software costs $200, give us a book!
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Jason Burns is a technology enthusiast, Microsoft guy, photographer, musician and all around geek. This blog is the general rambling one, check out the links for the specific ones!
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4 Responses to What ever happened to the manual?
Wil Harris
March 7th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Agreed. There’s nothing like having an actual book to come back to to check something. It sucks that these days, you’re better off buying a third party product (EG a Dummy’s Guide) rather than paying any attention to the included documentation.
If they’re going to skimp on the manual, they could at least give you a video tutorial. The more Mac apps I’m playing around with, the more I’m finding cool video tutorials. Check out the video introduction for OmniFocus – 10 minutes and I understand the app and all its concepts. How hard would it be to do one for Final Cut Express?
For what it’s worth, Final Cut Studio does come with paper manuals – although, it has to be said, not very good ones. Serves you right for not sticking another 0 on the end of that software package
SHRIKEE
March 7th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
thats what express means… slim stuff, minimalistic…
If you get Final Cut pro it comes with all that on paper in a huge box being all slick and sexy and 8 DVD’s totalling up to 30GB of data to install for your creative pleasures…
But you only got Express
solon
March 7th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Except for things like IRS forms where you input and print, pdf is the most ridiculous and overused file type ever created.
Simple HTML documents are so much more usable.
Katir
March 8th, 2008 at 1:50 am
Yes, as Shrikee wrote, you got yourself and express, maybe that’s is definition of express. To think of it, I’m not a huge fan of PDF either, it’s just that there will be times when you can’t do without it.