With the purchase of my MacBook I was converted to a Mac fan, not a die-hard fan, but still… A lot of Apple technologies behave just the way I expect things to work. I also noticed that for the first time I didn’t hesitate to purchase licenses for extra software. I seem to be getting my money’s worth. I have a feeling that the folks writing pieces of independent software (independent from Apple I mean) for the OS X platform work to higher standards than those coding for the Windows platform. Of course, this is highly subjective and I haven’t thoroughly thought about the possible reasons behind this, but I’ve had this impression more than once.

Often I felt the same way about Apple’s own software and services, too. So I bought iLife ’08 and signed up for a .Mac account and was more or less happy to pay for it, too. It seemed worth it.

Now I consider upgrading from QuickTime to QuickTime Pro. Why? I need to cut pieces of a short movie (.avi) I recently shot with my FujiFilm FinePix F31fd, a great camera by the way. So, together with all the photos the movie was loaded into iPhoto and I started experimenting what I could do with it. Not much, it turned out. The movie can be loaded into QuickTime, this is the default behavior, but that’s about it. The editing features are greyed out in QuickTime’s standard edition.

Before throwing more money down Apple’s maw I started looking for alternatives. Movie Cutter seems very promising but it keeps crashing due some trial-key related issues. Also, SimpleMovieX seems to do a fine job. However, it is unable to save the .avi file it manipulates as .avi again. Hence, a no-go.

Buying something usually involves an emotional component. You want something, you buy it, and you’re happy that you got it. The emotional component here is, that I’m angry at Apple that, starting with version 7.2, they dropped QuickTime’s Windows 2000 support; even before Windows 2000 reached end-of-life. As a matter of fact iTunes met the same fate. So, will I unleash my standard QuickTime by shelling out another $30 to Apple? We’ll see…