One benefit from this exercise is that I've been disabused of the idea that things would be systematically better were I to ditch Linux and switch to MacOSX. Macs seem to be approximately as finicky and fragile as real Unix systems, except that they like to fail silently instead of giving you obscure error messages. I've already developed a deep and abiding hate for that hidious little spinning rainbow disc that means "something has probably gone horribly wrong, but I'm going to protect you from knowing what."

E.g., I was using an external Firewire hard drive, and Firewire kept going away and taking all file access with it. Disk Utility would lose the ability to even see the internal drive! I was having flashbacks to trying to get USB working on Linux. I finally just gave up on using that disk at all.

I also find it infuriating that window-management is done in-process: that means that when a program is stuck, you can't drag its windows out of the way to wait for it to un-stick! You can raise other windows above it, but you can't drag it or (I think?) iconify it. Macs still seem to have this "users only ever want to run one program at a time" legacy that just doesn't work for me; I've always got 3-6 things going at once, and I switch between them while waiting for the computer/network to catch up. It had never occurred to me before that you really need window management in a separate process for that to work at all.

So anyway, here's some more things that suck about iDVD:

• When you've exported from iMovie to iDVD, it saves pathnames to the raw DV clip files in iMovie: so you can't rename (or delete) the iMovie project until you never want to burn that DVD again.

• When you burn a DVD, it first spend ~30 minutes creating the data (swelling the iDVD project to 4.7G, the disk image). You can write as many DVDs as you want in that session, but if you ever quit iDVD, it starts over from the iMovie files, even though the disk image is still there. I'd like to just keep the 4.7G files around to be able to write more copies later, but no, to do that, I'd need to keep the ~27G iMovie files around instead. I guess when I want more copies, I'll just use Toast or something to dup the already-written disc. But it's stupid that iDVD can't do this.

• Disc-burning success rate is currently running at 22%:

  
  

  • Disc 1: for some reason, it ejected the disc while the dialog said "17 minutes left." iDVD was hung, had to Force-Quit it.
  • Disc 2: it wrote the whole disc; but when I put it in my PS2, it wasn't able to read it. I later discovered that this disc works fine -- after you've waited five to eight minutes for it to load.
  • Disc 3: works fine (loads immediately.)
  • Disc 4: (my second project) it ejected the disc while the dialog said "22 minutes left." I'm sensing a pattern here.
  • Disc 5: ejected at "4 minutes left."
  • Disc 6: wrote all the way; 5+ minutes to load.
  • Disc 7: "1 minute left."
  • Disc 8: works fine.
  • Disc 9: (third project) "9 minutes left."

  Maybe the media is bogus, but it's the Official Apple Media. This would be less irritating if DVD-R media was essentially free, like CD-R media is. But, well, it's not. Also: an average of over ten hours to get a good disc (at three tries each) is somewhat less than optimal performance.

And I'm not even going to try and list the plethora of hair-pulling bugs and stupidities in the iMovie UI, since I've learned to dance around most of those mines ("first select a different clip, then try to move the play head." "Always click-release-wait before trying to drag anything anywhere." etc.) But man. Bug level Smithsonian.