Apple's Clips tries for that Snapchat/Instagram mojo

LOS ANGELES — Apple’s track record with successful hit apps is very spotty.

For every iMovie and Garage Band that does catch on, there’s also Live Photos, Ping and Music Memos, which didn't become household names.

Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook did make it by using the iPhone camera to nab a fan base, via Apple tools to snap photos and their own features to pretty up the images and share.

So now Apple is trying to get some of that Snapchat/Instagram mojo with Clips, a new app coming in April, to create videos from your footage and photos, with filters, music, graphics, bubbles, shapes and the like. Apple announced Clips along with updates to its hardware, with the lowest priced full featured iPad ($329), a red iPhone 7, and a new version of the smaller iPhone SE, with more storage than the previous edition.

After years of training people at Apple Stores and elsewhere to use their professional video apps (Final Cut Pro) and full-featured amateur apps (iMovie) to edit videos for display on iPhones and Macintosh computers, Apple now is appealing to the masses, telling folks they can soon do it “without timelines, tracks or complicated editing tools."

Instead, with Clips, they press record, and then get to work adding tools from the Clips palate.

In what’s billed as the star attraction of Clips, you can dictate captions, which can be played back with text and audio. If you have captions all the way throughout, the app promises to populate the captions as you play the video, using the soundtrack of the clip. This sounds fabulous, and I can't wait to download the app and put it through a serious workout.

The app seems positioned as an alternative to the "Story," feature on Snapchat, which has since been cloned by Facebook for Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The basic gist is that in a Story, you collect photos and videos from the day, and share with your friends, to show a more complete version of the 24 hours.

However, the finished Apple "Story" could be more graphics rich and fun to look at than what we now see in Snapchat and Instagram. The question is whether people will put in time to jazz up their images. Unlike the Story, your finished (edited) clips from Apple won’t disappear within 24 hours, but will remain in your Camera Roll.

The clips can be shared to any social network, says Apple.

Unlike other apps, which limit clips to 15-30 seconds, the Apple Clips can be long--as much as one hour's worth.

On today’s edition of the #TalkingTechnews chat on Facebook Live, we discussed the prognosis for Clips with Dave Basulto, who runs iOgrapher, a company that sells accessories for the iPhone and iPad to make videos, and Alex Kruglov, the co-founder of the Smiletime social network.

Both agreed that Apple has a challenge on its hands. Weaning folks away from apps like Snapchat and Facebook to illustrate their day won't be easy.

If Apple makes the app simple enough, it will be a “go-to” app, says Basulto. However, apps are "not their business anymore," he adds.

“Apple has turned into a massive hardware company. They let people do their own things and create great apps.”

Kruglov doesn’t believe Clips will be a success at first. However, the features in the app will be appreciated by another app developer, who “will create an app with similar features that will become a hit.”