by Jason Snell
Randy Ubillos leaves Apple
Thursday was Randy Ubillos’ last day at Apple.
After an amazing 20 years working on Apple products, today is my last day. I look forward to retirement and the adventures ahead. 🙂
— Randy Ubillos (@ubillos) April 23, 2015
As Six Colors reader John Buck noted to me via email, “modern nonlinear video editing is almost certainly based upon the work of three people and their teams,” Adrian Ettlinger in the 1970s with CMX, Bill Warner in the 1990s with Avid, and Randy Ubillos with ReelTime, Premiere, KeyGrip, Final Cut Pro, and iMovie. (Thanks to John for the perspective.)
My Ubillos story is a little more personal: When the all-new iMovie came out, there were a lot of complaints, as there always are when something changes a lot. I complained somewhere (on Macworld? on Twitter?) about how losing the keyboard shortcut to the Split Clip command really ruined my iMovie workflow.
Later that same day I got an email from Randy Ubillos thanking me for my comment (!) and asking if there were any other keyboard shortcuts I’d like to see. And sure enough, in the very next update to iMovie, there was a keyboard shortcut assigned to the Split Clip command.
I can count on one hand (with fingers left over) the number of interactions like this—directly with key people who are creating software at Apple—that I’ve had in two decades of covering the company. That Randy Ubillos himself cared enough about his product and comments about it to answer and ask for more feedback… it blew me away. It still does.
All the best in retirement, Randy. Plenty of time to take more photos and videos.