The net is buzzing with fierce and fiery comments about Apple and their recently released Final Cut Pro X.

However, for me it doesn’t really matter. I’ve played with previous releases of FCP and although there is no doubt that Apple released FCPX very and admittedly early, for the non-pro user (like myself), it is simply an amazing application.

I grabbed a copy of it along with Compressor and Motion to work on a few promotional / marketing videos for Aanval (http://www.aanval.com). The change in technology-realms helps to clear my mind and removes me from my daily grind of information security, development and book writing.

Surprisingly, I found I really enjoyed working with FCPX and have since grabbed a Blue Yeti, M-Audio FastTrack Pro and a couple of KRK Rokit studio monitor speakers to create my own tiny audio / video editing studio. I can now definitely understand the magnetic addiction that so many people have to audio / video editing. So much fun.

Ultimately after investing a little bit into my new hobby, I wanted to first throw together a short video preview of Aanval to cut my teeth and put some of my newly learned skills to test.

I did this in the form of a 1 minute, Aanval Preview (Rough Edit — I call it this, because it still needs quite a bit of work). It can be found at http://www.aanval.com/preview/ or on Youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY1uhlqR1BI.

Have a look and enjoy.

~moses

We need to understand that Cairngorm is not a solution to a problem. It is an architecture to force stricter standards compliance with the MVC concept.

MVC (“Model-View-Controller”) is a concept, and we as developers are free to adhere as closely or as loose to this concept as we like.

Each project will have different requirements for the structure that is used to follow an MVC concept and this is where true developers shine.

Common problems or pitfalls in current languages are solved by the use of well known design patterns, not architectures. Design patterns hand a solution to a developer and allow him/her to integrate it in the most appropriate fashion.

Architectures such as Cairngorm create many layers of communication that for some projects may be perfect but for others just too much. They are heavy, commonly break development standards such as encapsulation and programming to interface as well as create vast amounts of linked classes that are near impossible to re-factor in large projects.

Cairngorm has its benefits if used sparingly, but all too often there is an overkill of usage, in which adding one simple feature can cause an avalanche of class modifications.

I find that I become easily annoyed with the half dozen layers, retyping the same code over and over again in each class component and begin to find myself breaking out of Cairngorm standards after only a few hours of development.

Creating a common standard is a good thing, but isn’t that what the language is in itself? A developer is taught standards, best practices and theories for design and some will expand upon these basics and become experts, while others will become lazy and produce poor results.

Let’s all not be punished by those with poor coding practices and be forced to use these training wheels.

… and don’t get me started on rails.