Pre-MWSF Rumor of the Week

Seth Weintraub:

I’ve heard that iMovie will largely (if not entirely) be a Web Application and Apple would offer its users to “upload your movies to us and edit them there.”

Sure, iMovie as a web app. Uh-huh. Slogan: And you thought USB was slow.

Weintraub has also reported that the iWork ’09 apps are going to be web apps too. (I like how, when linking to the one and only report of iWork-suite-as-web-apps, which is his own report, that he says the move is “largely believed”.)

There may well be a germ of truth in here — some sort of online web-based document viewing/editing for iWork document formats (tied to MobileMe, perhaps?). But the idea that these top-line iWork and iLife apps are going web-based strikes me as impossible. The whole appeal of the iWork suite is that the user experience is extremely polished; nothing web-based comes even close to the polish of iWork ’08 today. The way Apple stays ahead of the web app trend is by creating native Cocoa experiences that can’t be duplicated in web apps — both on the Mac and iPhone.

★ Thursday, 1 January 2009