Not that this will come as any particular surprise to anyone who's been following the pod-person-like assimilation of ZDNet's David Coursey back into the Mac camp, but faithful viewer Campainger tipped us off to the man's penultimate installment in his "month with a Mac" series (extended to six weeks because of, ahem, "illness"). Guess what? It's positively dripping with kudos from the self-described Windows fan-- so be sure to read it over the sink, because we all know how tough it can be to get kudos stains out of the carpet.

Normally we'd play up the angle that Steve Jobs has a spaceborne Reality Distortion Concentrator Unit locked in geosynchronous orbit over Coursey's house (trust us-- he does), but seeing as this article is about iMovie, Steve could just as easily have left that puppy switched off and gotten the same exact results. A couple of hours alone with a DV camcorder and a Mac running iMovie would prompt anyone with two neurons to rub together to reach the same exact conclusion as Coursey did: "if you're buying a computer to make digital home movies, buy a Mac."

Coursey's epiphanic iMovie experience will sound all too familiar to you if you've read any of the zillion other iMovie reviews in which the author waxes poetic about producing a polished and professional-looking edited video clip from a mess of raw footage, often without ever needing to consult the online help. All the usual elements are there: the real-time camera control and importing of the footage; the easy-as-pie sequencing of the resulting clips (although Coursey admits to having consulted the tutorial at this point because he couldn't figure out how to trim unwanted footage); the simple addition of transitions and titles; the export to an emailable QuickTime file; even the burning of the movie in iDVD. Why, the review is almost Hollywoodesque in its formulaic structure. Hey, iMovie did make Coursey into a Spielberg in just one hour! Or at least into a Joel Schumacher.

Of course, gushing reviews of Apple products are one area in which formula makes us rejoice instead of cringe. And really, does anyone expect a lousy iMovie review from a longtime Windows user, given the state of Microsoft's alternative? Coursey briefly mentions Windows XP's "Windows Movie Maker" at the end of the article, merely to note that it "just doesn't do what iMovie does." We wish he had taken some time to elaborate; we fully admit that we haven't messed with Windows Movie Maker (what, do we look like masochists, so this is just hearsay at this point, but we've been told that it doesn't allow lossless editing, it makes the user jump through hoops just to add titles or transitions, and it won't even export the finished project back out to the camera-- it only saves in .wmv format. After using the alternative, iMovie must look like the Consumer Video Application of the Gods. Hey, we think we've just stumbled upon the title of Schumacher's next project!