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Apple Dumps Most of Aperture Dev. Team
SuperMog2002 writes "An article over at Think Secret is reporting that Apple has fired much of the Aperture development team. The Shake and Motion team was assigned to work on Aperture's image processing pipeline for version 1.1. Apple has also dropped the price of Aperture from $499 to $299, and is offering those who purchased the program at $499 a $200 Apple store coupon." From the article: "Perhaps the greatest hope for Aperture's future is that the application's problems are said to be so extensive that any version 2.0 would require major portions of code to be entirely rewritten. With that in mind, the bell may not yet be tolling for Aperture; an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards."
Any Aperture users out there know what the problems were or perhaps have a link to a list of the problems?
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Apple had a "bug-ridden" program, due to the (bad) "architecture", where the development process was a "mess" - so they fired the (whole) team responsible. Just a thought.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards.
For a reference, the "Apple's usual standards for software" are "the best application in the Universe" (tm), that's tought to achieve.
They might as well fire all of their Windows ports division as well, QuickTime/iTunes on Windows is a piece of cr*p.
I heard they're bringing Woz back to fix it all up nice and purty...
This guy's the limit!
Before posting conspiracy theories and such, you may want to read what others have to say.
Perhaps the greatest hope for Aperture's future is that the application's problems are said to be so extensive that any version 2.0 would require major portions of code to be entirely rewritten. With that in mind, the bell may not yet be tolling for Aperture; an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards.
ThinkSecret normally doesn't have such inane punditry... We're saying here that a good strategy for a piece of softwares survival is to make it so bad that someone will be compelled to rewrite it? Only if you have politicians on your development team!
The guys from the Shake and Motion teams have jobs already--working on important software that has an installed userbase. I don't think Apple is going to relocate them to a new Copeland and hire a bunch of new engineers to fuck up currently functional products.
Aperture, Apple's most heavily criticized and bug-ridden software release in recent years.
... If I programmed like that at my job (a bank) ... I'd be out the door quicker than they were!
Honest
www.apple.com/aperture - I opened it on my OS X (10.4.5) workstation in Firefox (1.5) and Safari (no idea, whatever was on this box).
Site is broken in both of them. In firefox the floating movie ad breaks, leaves junk image pieces all over the screen and in general misbehaves. In safari the movie ad just does not work and the page looks extremely broken with huge empty part taking up most of it (guess that's where the ad would have been).
It works a lot better on my Windows workstation in IE. Now I understand that this is a Quicktime and its integration - but shouldn't it be better when working in conjunction with other Apple products?
I don't know about that famed Apple quality - perhaps they should fire the Quicktime team too?
... isn't it? Although I use a Mac Mini most of the time, my work PC with Windows 2000 makes some beautiful music with the latest version of iTunes. What's so bad about it? Seems to function precisely as it does in Mac OSX, my iPod syncs beautifully, etc ... what makes it so awful?
I remember installing QuickTime and some of the preferences are a wee bit clunky, but no more so than **chuckle** Windows Media Player **shudder**.
I have to say I respect Apple for their actions in this Aperture case. Clearly the dev team didn't do the job well, and apple was fair to the consumers and current owners of the Aperture product. They fired the team and are going to make sure the next version lives up to the hype.
I don't think anyone's saying that Aperture 1.0 had some bugs and problems (as a 1.0 release of a MAJOR product), and the recently released major update, Aperture 1.1, addresses many of these (not to mention making the application Universal for PowerPC and Intel).
Apple may feel that Aperture's architecture needs to be completely retooled, but it's not going to kill one of its pro software products that has been out for mere months, especially one that was desired as much as Aperture. Apple just needs to figure out internally which teams are going to be responsible for ongoing development and/or retooling.
Yes, Aperture has had mixed reviews, but many people already love it and are basing their entire workflows on it. It's not like it's the incapable piece of utter shit Think Secret makes it out to be. (Gotta love Think Secret's sensationalism lately...must be bitter about becoming progressively more and more wrong about almost all of their pre-event predictions.)
"I've never used Apeture, but wasn't it supposed to compete directly with Adobe Photoshop?"
Short answer: no.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
No, its for batch processing large numbers of RAW pictures. There is a freee plugin for Photoshop to do that same sort of thing, but you cant compare the two in terms of feature sets. One is hack to add some basic RAW processing features to Photoshop. With some issues worked out, Aperture would be a god-send to photographers that work with RAW format pics. Adobe has since released a beta of a piece of software to compete with aperture, but i forget its name.
Apple is rebating for software already sold, because it isn't good enough for their standards? My god, what would happen if Microsoft had to live by these standards?
Guess their partners weren't strategic enough.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
... Apple decided to implement the app in hardware. Maybe Apple is thinking about going old school and actually shipping apps in carts. However, they will add an innovative "twist", old cartridge apps were still easy to pirate by dumping the roms and running from (sometimes read only) ram. However, the new iApp's (to be renamed MacApps) carts will actually contain logic that the main Macintosh will not be able to execute without the cart being present.
Now in that scenario, it makes sense to bring the Woz back.
That or they want to extend the range of their new remote.
Aiming for a +5 "insightful"?
Just an observation: Apple's website's frontpage ad for the new 17" MacBookPro has Aperture on it's screen. If Aperture was so crap and dead as some are suggesting Apple woundn't use it in their advertising for their latest flagship product.
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lightroom: http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/
and the beta is better than the aperture release version
no windows beta at this point, sorry
Adobe/Macromedia does have a direct competitor, It's called Lightroom and is also in beta. http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/lightroom/
If that is the case, then Aperture must really be an utter piece of shit, because the Lightroom beta I tried was horrible, the interface especially.
Last time I checked, you don't get 'dumped' because your code was amazing.
Well, at Microsoft apparently you don't get dumped because your code sucked. That's the difference.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
'nuff said, end of story. where are the STATS that back up your wilde claims? qt works for me on my trust old dell.
Considering the ongoing litigation "Apple vs. Does" and the fact that "Nick de Plume" of Think Secret fame may be involved, I wouldn't believe ANY information coming out of Think Secret.
From what I've seen, Aperture is a great application that stumbled out of the blocks with some performance issues and fairly poor handling of many devices' RAW formats. The 1.1 update has resolved the bulk of these issues.
If Aperture has any problem, it's that it is a solution in search of a problem. Most amateur photographers' needs are met with iPhoto. Most professional digital photographers are slow to adopt new technologies, because they directly impact the bottom line. It takes time to learn new applications and new methods of working; time that could be better spent working with clients and making money.
Aperture also has direct competition in the form of Adobe Lightroom.
In any case, I find it highly unlikely that Apple has dissolved the development team for an application that just released a 1.1 update and a universal binary to positive reviews. And with the recent price drop, Apple clearly wants to get this application in the hands of the users.
Think Secret is wrong on this one. Perhaps they are wrong on purpose. Could they be intentionally smearing the application in the press? Were they paid off to do so by Adobe?
Hmmm.
Back aperture now, or it will close forever ..
Wow... that hit the nail on the head. Thanks for the link, Pixel. Mod parent up
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Remember when the first story about Aperture appeared, any criticism was silenced by apple fanboys with "It's the first version, so it's ok that it doesn't really work!"? Well, now looks like it was so fucked up that they'll have to rewrite a large part of the code.
Bibble is better, and was started by one guy in his garage that wanted some decent SW for the raw files coming off of his digital camera. At least four developers have touched it over the years...i.e. small, smart and agile development team. I think they're pretty cool. The principal developer/entrepreneur Eric Hyman gladly does the support, and he's a very nice guy besides. The SW is QT based and they do extensive testing on Mac (their professional customer base), Linux (where they get many helpful comments) and Windows. They have a freeware version. The whole series of changes you make to an image are stored as an .XML file, which lets you edit it and script a systematic image-processing stream to apply to whole shoots once you pointy-clicky on a representative image to see what works. Reputed to have the best white-balance algorithm in the business. They're usually the first to decode a new obfuscated raw file format for new cameras, too.
Well, there's something to be said for Apple's decision here. Not many companies (that I have had dealings with) would offer a $200 rebate to everyone who bought a product just because the product was not up to par. Firing the team responsible, plus this rebate, is the kind of mea culpa companies, especially computer-related companies, hardly ever provide. (Granted, the rebate as an Apple coupon is a little unfortunate, but I wouldn't complain about that too much.)
It's hard not to compare this to MS (M$ if you prefer), considering how many times there have been calls for the heads of various decision-makers/teams/ec., and how unrepentant Microsoft has been when their products suck. Not to say they always suck, by any means, but they are the biggest target out their, and a juicy one on this topic.
"Last time I checked, you don't get 'dumped' because your code was amazing."
Of course, no one here is praising the team that got dumped. They are praising the way Apple handled this problem, and bashing MS because many think (rightly, it seems to me) that Microsoft would not have responded at all like this.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
I've always found that particular phrasing ("asked to leave") sorta funny - what if they said no?
Schnapple
Aperture pegs both processors on an MBP but then so does Lightroom.... as to bugs there are about 13,000 posts on the Apple discussion site http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa and there are probably about the same number in the Lightroom forums.... while I like most Apple apps I've been using Lightroom (so far) but it has its own "features".... both apps still seem like betas to me, both Apple and Adobe are going with interfaces unlike those in their other apps and each approach has some pluses and minuses.......... with millions of dslrs out there and more being bought every day there is a real market for this type of app and $299 is a lot less than the price of a lens (at least I get edu prices on apps if not lenses)
For years now there's been competition between the two companies in one spot or another. Adobe's CEO, Bruce Chizen, made some rather cutting remarks a few years back about the Mac OS generally, and last April described the relationship as "like a marriage where you're in it for the kids." Adobe generally has grown in Windows markets more than with the Mac -- with products like Acrobat -- and has made a point of saying so.
Quark, meanwhile, took so long to be OS X compatible that they caused the entire world of graphic designers to be incredibly wary of upgrading anything at all now.
"Strategic" decisions aren't immutable. Notice the chips Apple is shipping in its latest machines.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
That is entirely incorrect.
Photoshop is an image manipulation tool. Aperture is a tool for professional photographers and photo editors (I don't mean people who manipulate photos, I mean people in editorial positions who select photos to be used for a purpose -- think "the photo editor at the New York Times" type of position) that has its strengths in managing RAW image files as if they were JPEGs like iPhoto can. It has phenomenal capabilities around metadata and managing a large library, and offers the basic correction tools that photographers would need (exposure, color correction, saturation, contrast, sharpening, etc.).
There is little to no overlap with Photoshop, nor is there any evidence that Aperture has been "killed."
I happen to be a photographer, and have the problems that Aperture solved. At an event, I might easily shoot over 800 exposures. Before Aperture it would take me at least a day or two to sort through them and make my selects. At an event a week ago, I was able to sort through 762 exposures and pull out about 120 selects in under two hours. It has more than paid for itself many times over in productivity savings.
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
When I read the article on ThinkSecret, which is entirely a rumor, I thought to myself "I wonder how long it will take for this unfounded rumor to spread as if it were fact through the Internet like wildfire." Well, obviously the answer to that is not very long.
It's also obvious that whoever wrote the ThinkSecret article hasn't actually used Aperture. While Aperture is not perfect it does many thing much better than anyone else and some things that no else does. It's multi-monitor support is better than any other application on the market. And its photo organization and rating features are among the best. In my opinion Aperture was designed very well. Sure there are bugs, but it's only at 1.1 right now which is a good improvement over 1.0.
I don't think that Aperture will be going away any time soon.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
I know two of the engineers who wrote Aperture. They have both moved to other groups, one to Application Frameworks, and one to CoreImage. In each case, their new job is a higher-profile position. If there had been a round of firings of the Aperture developers, I would have heard about it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Don't forget, this is Think Secret, who hasn't been right about anything for nine months now. Where is our touchscreen video iPod, our Mac mini PVR, our "iPhone," etc.?
It's weird how in tech journalism, you can get away with being wrong about nearly everything for almost a year and still get your stories read.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
Most of the team was not fired, they simply found new positions in Apple once 1.0 was completed because the project management was too shoddy. For instance I am now back working on Mac OS X. Most of the management however has been fired.
Aperture is not being abandoned but is just being reorganised.
Many of the problems in Aperture were caused, not fixed, by the Shake and Motion teams contributions. Originally the rendering pipeline, based on Core Image, was working fine but it was decided to speed it up so over a period of 4 months it was rewritten. It has never worked correctly since then.
RAW. There's nothing like IrfanView on Mac, something that will just browse a directory for pix.
iPhoto totally sucks for casual browsing, although it has incredibly effective tools for color correction and sharpening, and its compression is the best.
I think they tried to name it "Apicture" but their legal dept said no.
DirectShow?! Jesusalmighty. Why not just yank the power cord out of the pc - BOOM! QuickTime is just fine, the plugin architecture works just fine and extends it's use nicely. Not sure what you're smokin', gimme some!
I've been on quite a few software project ranging from small to big over the last few years.
Most of the time, if the entire thing requires a complete re-write, its not because the individual programmers are bad, its because of a lack of organization and planning at the beginning stages. Could be the fault of a team leader or lead architect (or whatever terms you choose to use).
It's easy to program, its hard to design software in a well organized, modular, scalable way. And it requires good leadership... Apple is more immature than I thought.
It mostly has to do with integrity. If the dev team didn't perform, they are let go and their work is redone to a higher standard. Microsoft (and my current employer) refuses to address any problem like this.
I think they suck in different ways. Aperture has a really good UI, but a significant portion of the Files that are being processed get fucked up. Adobe already had the RAW processing part done, as it was already implemented in the Photoshop plugins, but their UI is shitty. So with lightroom, you can get stuff done, but its a huge pain in the ass. With Aperture, your files might get fucked up, but its a pleasant and intuitive process of getting there.
How can you fire programmers for a group failure? Normally a sacking that
quick only results from gross misconduct. How can any individual coder
be accused of gross misconduct for a bad product arising from a TEAM effort?
Unless management went through the code module by module and tallied up the
bugs in each and fired anyones who tally when over some limit. Even so, I
feel some lawsuits gestating if this really is true (and not simply journo
hype).
As a website business, we could easily invade the domains of neighboring graphics businesses (and, in fact, very few of them have even been any good for our business). But, we still opt to avoid because:
1. It's not our marketspace.
It's my feeling that with something like PS's dominance, there is no point making a half-hearted attempt to invade that marketspace. I would have to be incredibly convinced I had The Killer Imaging App before I'd joke about it.2. They will trash your name.
3. Sometimes it suits just to be a good neighbor.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Actually, it is pretty bad.
That's just a small smatterng of the problems I've found with 1.1...
Please help metamoderate.
The rumour/inside dope I got was, an untouchable star was put in charge of Aperture. He could do no wrong because of a reputation gained from another project, but the rep was built off the backs of others who had covered for his serious coding and management deficiencies.
He was given free reign with Aperture, and since it was built from scratch, the projects structural flaws were built in from the beginning, without anyone having the clout to say "Hey, somethings wrong!". Nobody in the company knew nothing until around the first public demonstration, when it looked awfully pretty, but was nowhere near ready to be handed off to market. With a clear picture of what a mess the project was (and the star floating above the fray, unsullied of course), upper management gutted every other project to get SOMETHING shipped in time. So Aperture shipped, who knows if the star's status will be re-evaluated, and NAB gets less of an Apple splash because of all the talent diverted to clean up a mess,
The major problem, of course is that Aperture originated within Apple. Name a great piece of Apple software (OS X, FCP, Shake, iTunes). It was brought in from elswhere and given a pretty face. Stuff that was created from scratch--ignore until version 3.0
Don't worry. Adobe will screw it up when they do the windows version. What makes Lightroom great is the combination of a great Cocoa app and Adobe's Camera Raw code. If they abandon the Cocoa part of it to appease the C++/windows nazis in the company, then Lightroom will end up like the POS Bridge.
Why does Photoshop take 27 seconds to launch on a dual 2.7 GHz G5, Adobe? Why does it take 30 seconds for Illustrator to quit? A little less "cross-platform" and a little more "great Mac app/great Windows app" would do you well. Get with it.
My wife uses Aperture all the time for her professional photography business, and though she said it was a little buggy, it hasn't caused her any serious problems. Overall she really loves it. She feels it's about as stable as most any 1.0 app. If they can get an even better team working on it, that's cool, but is it really considered such a failure?
Cheers.
The headline says that Apple is dumping the dev team, not the program itself.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I should have been more clear. The problems with the thumbnails are definitely quite valid. As are the performance and reliability issues. But in the Ars review he knocks the quality of Aperture quite a bit, and says it's RAW stuff looks worse than Photoshop, when PS is (I think) doing some preprocessing in the name of 'looking good' versus accuracy.
It was kind of an indirect response, I was more criticizing the Ars review a little, not anything you said. I just wanted to encourage people to take some of the points in the review with a bit of a grain of salt, although many of its points are valid.
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
DVD Studio 1.5 was a steaming pile of **** and at $999 was a poorly layed-out, extremely confusing and unfinished application, basically it was little better than the raw app Apple picked up from Macromedia.
Half a version number and $500 less you have DVD Studio Pro 2, a complete rewrite that is easy to use, very well organized and works as advertised. The later versions get even better.
Apple seems to know when to throw away a dead end project and start again (Copland ring a bell?), and although I personally don't think Apperture is all that bad, I did think that it was too expensive at the original $499 price. I expect great things from Apperture 2.0
I have a studio, I shoot professionally every day. I run aperture on a Quad G5 with 8gigs of RAM it has been the best peice of image management software to date. The workflow is increadable. Yes the raw quality isn't as good as adobe's Camera Raw but adobe's wasn't as great in its first version either. The quality is 95% there. Yes there were some bugs and with any new software a learning curve (which scares most people) but honestly everything runs fine for me and it has cut my post production time and image management time 75% Also when i bring clients in i can whip photos around on two apple Cinema Displays with ease make selects in 15min normally, and there's the wow factor of images flying around (clients like blinking lights and razzle dazzle). What apple "Did" with their team is what apple does. Makes the best software availible bar none. This isn't for this article but lets face it they make the best desktop system bar none. They don't settle for 95% they settle for 110% (10% being the extra things they invented that you need but didn't know you needed untill they showed them to you). I personally think fireing it had a lot to do with the level of hardware needed to run it lets be honest how many times have you programed something and it chokes on your parents 5 yo comp but runs perfectly on yours. At anyrate if you buy a new $5k~20k camera every 2~3 years you can pony up for a Quad G5 to get the job done.
Three points. 1. Think Secret and other Rumor sites have gone stale in the last couple months. Back in the day, Think Secret could be counted on for acurate specs before a product launch, now, they scream that they know the G5 Powerbook is being launched "any day now" for a month. If you don't believe me, look at their recap of Macworld where they pretty much say they got everything wrong. The Ap dev team was mostly promoted because they did great jobs, the main issue with Ap is that it was tweaked by the Motion folk. 2. The only people who should be reviewing Aperture are professional photographers... when ars technica reviewed Ap, they panned it because Ap isn't designed for the common man. Aperture is a very niche product that isn't just a bigger iPhoto or a better photoshop. Aperture allows you to take a look at the 500+ images you shot of the model this afternoon, and quickly select your favorite ones to send to your editor. If you are not a professional photographer, you will never use this. Aperture was based on workflow comments from professionals and having geeks that have no professional photo experience review a new OS.
I use Aperture daily, along with photoshop and the other programs you'd expect a professional photographer to use heavily. Since the release of the 1.1 update several weeks ago, I can honestly say that Aperture is one of the nicer apps I use on a regular basis. But prior to that, Aperture was already saving me more time (read: $$) than any other tool I have.
Aperture is designed to let me import hundreds of photos from a shoot, in RAW, jpeg, whatever, QUICKLY add metadata, rate, sort, color correct for white balance, exposure etc.. This gets me to the point where I can now proof the images to my clients. The photos haven't been retouched, they are just in the form that lets a client see my skill as a photographer, and what images they have to choose from.
No matter who the client is, commercial, fashion, wedding, headshot... the faster I can let them see the proofs the better. From the 500 images in an average session... the client will only choose a few, which are then retouched in photoshop. I think this is what is hard for non-photographers to grasp; the sheer number of images NOT used. The workflow is designed to select only a few choice images, and then begin your post production processing of those selected images.
In many cases, especially with studio sessions, nothing really needs retouching after the image has been "tuned" in Aperture. Many times I'm sending the image versions directly from aperture to my lab printer. It is wonderful to use the Soft Proofing built-in to Aperture. It works great.
An important, but often overlooked core feature of Aperture is its top notch asset management system with versioning. Sure Subversion and CVS do version management better, but many of my colleagues have trouble with the concepts behind webmail, so Apertures simplicity in this area is admirable. I expect many new features will be added to the versioning and Vault system (like multiple library support), but much of what it does already is a major time saver. There are certainly alternatives, like lightroom, and bibble, which are each excellent in their own ways, but Aperture is more complete, and meets my needs better for now. Your mileage mat vary.
Lastly, I'm running Aperture on a G4 Powerbook. It runs fine. My RAW files are between 15Mb and 20Mb in size, and Aperture handles the hundreds of images per session fine. Could it be faster? Sure, what couldn't. But its not the nightmare that some report.
Shoot, that reminds me of a certain political leader, but I can't remember which one....
I keep seeing references to the "non-pro" "clown over at Ars Technica" who reviewed Aperture, but you know what, I thought the Ars review was quite solid, not only because his reasons for his opinions were legitimate, but also because his conclusions were corroborated by many other reviewers who have more "cred." I HAVE worked with RAW files, and after reading his review I concluded that the Ars review was fine.
jcr also reveals his own lack of knowledge about RAW by claiming that "The RAW importer in Aperture 1.0 showed what was really there, without the prettying-up..." That is flat-out wrong. RAW files have no intrinsic appearance. They are a single-channel grayscale file that is interpreted into three-channel RGB. There is no such thing as an "unaltered" RAW file because every RAW file must be interpreted using a set of assumptions. Every RAW converter is coded with its own set of assumptions as to what a "good" image looks like. It is much like printing from color negative film (as opposed to color positive film).
You need to understand that in order to understand the next point. Because there can be no "reference image," there really is no 100% right or wrong interpretation. So how could Aperture make an image that looks "right" with respect to user expectations? For that you have to understand what user expectations are based on. User expectations are based on the conversion performed by each camera maker's own RAW converter. Those are the individual targets Apple tried to hit.
The Adobe converter engineers, on the other hand, believe that most camera software makes images that have too much contrast and clipping and lack shadow detail. In other words, Adobe believes most camera defaults are aimed at making nice snapshots. The Adobe converter's interpretation is based on this philosophy. A certain number of users believe the Adobe conversions look better. Those who believe (rightly or wrongly) that the camera maker's interpretation are gospel tend to think the Adobe conversions look worse and Aperture looks better.
Every default raw conversion will involve a certain amount of image processing, sharpening, etc. that was not present in the original RAW data, and it is for that reason and the reasons in the previous paragraphs that jcr's statement is incorrect.
A strikingly apt summary. GJ!
Of course, MS has done other nice things.
For example, major feature adds to XP over the years, all of them free. XP and OS X have been out for similar lengths of time, and there have been zero paid upgrades compared to Apple's 4.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Except that that's not Aperture, that's Final Cut Studio.
At the demos of Aperature that were given at this year MacWorld, they continually even showed how far they could take it, and showcased its ability to work with Photoshop for the more detailed image editting tasks. I got the impression it was supposed to be like iPhoto for a professional photographer: something to manage your photos and create nice layouts.
College Humor at it's best
A company like Apple would never fire a dev team because a project turned out badly. Of course bad programmers pop up, but they can be fired at any time. If a whole project goes bad the odds are its a project management failing. Apple would never let good developers go because a project had been mismanaged.
I love the comments like, I love the workflow and look, its just buggy. Well, thats the result of two different teams. The engineers did not design the UI, or the workflow. That was a triumph of designers and UE teams, probably with alot of user testing and interviewing. The bugs are the result of the programming. So as long as the designers and UE team are intact you can look for Aperture to keep pushing the envelope. Just hopefully with a better implementation...
1. Doesn't remember where I was in the playlist when I shut it down. That's fine if you always randomize, but I have hundreds of tracks in my collection and most of them are meant to be played in sequence (ambient, classical, etc.).
2. Ogg support sucks. I had to install a 3rd-party plugin, and there's noticable pauses at the beginnings of ogg tracks.
3. Has a system tray icon, but still appears in the taskbar.
4. Doesn't use global HID-device keys. For example, winamp pauses when i hit the pause key, no matter what application is in the foreground. iTunes doesn't.
5. Slow startup. Can be up to a minute. I found forum posts that suggested that this could be "worked around" by not having the cd burner device start up. Come on.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I'd also like to point out that the Lightroom Beta is *Mac* only at this time. It appears to be a beta Macromedia application that was acquired by Adobe in the buyout. Lightroom is great by the way, I'm using for my stuff already.
Then what marketspace is Apple gunning for?
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
BTW, hell has started to freeze when a Mac user switches to WinTel for a Graphics/Photo app.
damaged by dogma
The look-and-feel *is* a Mac UI. It's the ProKit UI that tries to maximise the space available, because, well, you've got a limited screen space and a lot of media to show. Every Pro-App uses this look and feel.
The 'fast+easy' is supposition on your part, and the system is IMHO anyway not meant to be a backup, it's meant to be snapshot-in-time of what you wanted to save. If you want to back stuff up in a more-permanent way, there is always the (free download) Apple Backup application.
Well, yes, I can see that happening pretty easily. With only 1G of RAM and doing RAW conversion to an in-memory form (which is completely uncompressed), I could easily see it taking more than 1G, therefore swapping out other programs to disk, and incurring a wait as they are swapped back in when you want to do something. I can't see any way around that for the application...
Are you trying to say that you want 700 folders ? If you want to separate masters, create a 'smart album' (which is an album consisting of the results of a search) and specify the search to limit the album to the image you want. Admittedly this will get tedious for 700 items, but I can't really see the advantage of 700 separate folders anyway.
Perhaps an Applescript could be written for your situation, so Aperture could be told to create smart-searches based on a criteria (eg: pathname-to-original-directory) for all distinct instances of that criteria. That oughtn't be too hard - then you just get one project and your 700 smart-folders inside.
Agreed. This is a pain.
To be fair, that would be rather hard unless it was 'have applied *any* rotation/crop/etc.', and I'm not sure how useful that
... I encountered test-driving it were:
a) (lack of) speed when processing bigger (12MP) files
b) mem usage.
I don't count the RAW being displayed "raw" as a fault or problem as this is exactly what I prefer to have but if I continuously get the beachball (busy pointer) on a quad-core G5 (the fastest machine Apple ever produced) with 5.5GiB of RAM being eaten on the start - then there's something seriously wrong. I tested it and dumped as unusable for those very reasons, even if the ideas behind that app are excellent.
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
Look, I'm not familiar with Aperture (iPhoto is enough for me), but your criticism actually looks constructive (for once on Slashdot). It's a shame Apple doesn't get to read it. So may I suggest that you copy your entire post (as is) on their Aperture Feedback page.
I used to submit a lot of feedback in the Mac OS X Beta days... I still can't believe of how much of the interface oddities I pointed at had been repaired in the release version (I was probably not the only one to point the problems out, but if enough people do it, they DO fix it).
Cheers,
El Ganzo Loco
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
I'm incredibly interested in Aperture but the system requirements are amazingly high.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I'm serious. And meta-mod whoever modded the GP as "troll" with a hammer. A really painful hammer.
Like every other "Pro" application, Apple seems to throw the entire Mac UI out the window. All the UI elements get tiny, and start behaving strangely. Dialog boxes you can't escape out of look like Windoids- and in one case, I hit "delete" while a text field wasn't selected in the Windoid, and Aperture trapped the delete in the main window instead, and deleted a photo! What the?
The reason non-modal dialogues are used heavily in Pro apps is because they are more flexible, and offer a much faster workflow rather than having to cancel dialogues, do something, and re-open the same dialogue. Also Aperture makes use of a number of floating windows (HUD's) to maximize use of screen space since they can be quickly brought up or dispelled.
The Apple pro interface has been refined over some time in other apps like Final Cut, it too comes from a base of practical use just like the Apple Guidelines but is intended for a more experienced user with more complex needs.
The backup system sucks- you can't archive anything conveniently (you have to export projects by hand, remember where you put them, etc). That flies in the face of how almost every pro photographer works. Aperture instead only allows you to basically rsync the Aperture folder (oops, I mean, Library) to another disk, aka "Vault", and if you delete a "master", on the next sync, it deletes it from the "Vault" as well. There is no way to reconcile specific differences from Vaults; it's an all-or-nothing system to make it as fast+easy to implement as possible.
It's meant to point out to users who might not be backing up as often as they should the importance of backup by making it a first-class citizen. And yes it removes something from the vault if you've removed it from the library, why wouldn't it? It does store everything removed in a "deleted" folder on the Vault drive in case you made a mistake. Also, As the Aperture instructions point out you are supposed to be making multiple Vault copies and keeping some offsite.
I don't think it's fair to slap Aperture for trying to promote good backup practices when few other apps do anything at all to even help you with backups.
You create a project. You have 700 photos. You've already sorted them, or they are different days, etc. Anyway- you want to logically seperate them out and only have ONE master in ONE folder. Nope, sorry, can't do that- masters reside in the Project all together. If you import a folder with 6 subfolders, the main folder is created as a folder, and the subfolders are created as "albums". The wonderful joy with albums is that a "version" can be in multiple albums.
What does it matter if all the pictures are in a project, as you noted you want to logically seperate them - which you can do with albums.
The main idea is to have folder structures with projects at the leaf nodes. If you're putting everything in one project you're using the product in a way it was not meant to be used.
What's wrong with having versions in multiple albums? I WANT versions to be able to be in multiple albums. You can of course just have it in one if you like. I fail to see why you want to limit flexibility of the product in this way.
You can't use != in any of the smart folder/album/whatevers. Let's say I want to find all images in my project that I haven't tagged with "adjusted" (more on why this is necessary below); I can't.
IPTC keyword search, "does not contain".
Aperture lets you assign plenty of metadata, but can't make smart folders based on steps in a workflow. I import an image, rank it, then adjust it, fix rotation, crop, etc. I want to be able to set up smart folders based on those steps to show me only what is left to do in any particular category. Nope! I have to create custom metadata buttons/tags to do it.
That would be a good idea, what other applications today help you in that regard?
Stack multiple adjustments, and Aperture turns into a total pig loading the photo. Some ad
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The white balance tool is not "completely broken". The automatic white balance dropper is "somewhat broken" (it works for me still in some cases). The ability to actually set white balance to a particular temperature and tint still works just as it did.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only reason that XP has been out for four OS X upgrades is because it's years late. "Blackcomb" was supposed to appear a year or so after XP, but got pushed back several years, and "Longhorn" (now Vista) was slotted in as an interim release, slated for mid-to-end 2002. Vista will be over four years late if it launches in 2007, while Blackcomb is now projected for 2012, a full decade behind schedule.
Note also that what MS have released for XP are called "service packs" and "patches", which Apple also supply free of charge because in both cases, they fix bugs and security holes _in an existing OS_ (and yes, Apple's ones add features!). Note also that what Vista adds to XP is pretty much the same stuff that Mac OS 10.4 added to 10.3 with the exception of the new GUI capabilities, which OS X has had since 10.0. And MS are planning on charging rather more than Apple do for an OS X upgrade, epsecially if you want a version that is comparable in features (i.e. not "Home" or "Home Premium").
NB: I am not an Apple apologist. OS X was IMO a pretty poor OS performance and stability-wise until 10.2, and didn't become really good until 10.3. However, in the interests of fairness, it is I think unfair to penalise Apple for managing to release new versions more or less on schedule while effectively praising MS for not being able to do so.
Oh, and if you really want to praise MS for doing something nice, you could cite the free Express versions of their Visual Studio range.
Shake isn't yet available in a Universal binary (version that runs on both Intel and PowerPC). Rightly or not (impossible for three pregnant women to deliver a baby in three months, and so on), it wouldn't surprise me if they had transferred a lot of people there simply for extra engineering resources.
Let's also not forget that Aperture is just a few months old at this point. It always takes a significant amount of people around each point release, and especially before the veryfirst. Following 1.0, they've been putting out bug fixes and working on the most common pitfalls (read: most of the minuses in Ars Technica's review) for 1.1, and now Apple can afford to let a few people go. I'm willing to bet a large amount of money that there's still a very real Aperture team, if not as large as it was two months ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started hiring or transferring more people there when they ramp up to 2.0.
And of course, Aperture is not dying. Apple just put out 1.1, it's featured as the sole app on the big new 17" MacBook Pro on apple.com, and because of popular demand or wildly inebriated marketers last time around, it's now at $299, $200 less than when it was released and aimed at pro photographers. Apple want *more* people to use it, not less.
Shoot, that reminds me of a certain political leader, but I can't remember which one....
All of them, perhaps?
Personally I think that your reply makes perfect sense, and I'll add that if the camera manufacturers were so sure of themselves they would not think there would be any point in producing RAW files out of their cameras (TIFF would be adequate).
On the contrary, new methods and algorithms to produce better output out of the Bayer-like mosaic of most sensors are published if not every week at least at each new major Image Processing conference. The whole point of RAW is to allow future such algorithms to be used on older images.
Almost every problem listed was resolved in Aperture 1.1, so there's almost no review left in that review. Check out the forums for that 1.1 review to see some ofthe glaring errors it makes that were never corrected.
I guess that's what happends when instead of writing a real review you just enumerate what you perceive to be flaws.
That review was the point when I suddenly realized Ars Technica had ceased being techncical, and is now simply "Ars".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Obviously with Lightroom out already in beta, Apple is now in a competition that they probably won't win because of the huge advantages Adobe has in leveraging Photoshop and cross-platform flow.
All that Lightroom can really borrow though is the conversion engine (ACR) whcih they already have - as far as the other features Aperture has there's really not much Lightroom can borrow from Photoshop, because it's a fundamnetally different kind of applciation not built for working on pixels.
I would say Lightroom is at least a year behind having something that comes close to being as useful, just based on progress in the betas so far. And some things they have no plans to add at all right now, like the book designer in Aperture.
Don't forget also that Lightroom has to worry about dual platform support which always slows you down.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's good for Aperture to offer the unprocessed or "faithful" version of each RAW file, but ultimately they will need to incorporate a sense of "style" into the profile for each camera so that it does the same "cleanup" that the other RAW converters do, and offer that method of processing as well.
They already did some of that before, but in Aperture 1.1 (and OS X 10.4.6) they improved the noise profiles for various cameras, and also in 1.1 offer a "RAW Fine Tune Tool" that lets you select a specific level of noise reduction and sharpening you want applied during the RAW decode process - you can make that the camera default for all other RAW decodes (or you can change it per image of course).
Also the part I think is key and most people gloss over is 1.1 includes the ability to choose which version of a RAW decode you want to use. So if another version of Aperture or an OS upgrade came along that you thought did not offer as good a decode as the old one, you could keep using the old version. I don't think any other products do that today, when you get a product upgrade you are using the new decode no matter what.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1. Doesn't remember where I was in the playlist when I shut it down. That's fine if you always randomize, but I have hundreds of tracks in my collection and most of them are meant to be played in sequence (ambient, classical, etc.).
That is one of the most ridiculous complaints I've heard. First, I'm wondering why you need to remember your place if you're shutting down iTunes and coming back--shouldn't you start the sequence over again, if the tracks are meant to be played in sequence? Second, iTunes lets you sort tracks by 27 different categories, including playcount, date added, last date played, album, genre, track number, etc. Admittedly, the "Show," "Season," and "Episode" categories are pretty useless for music tracks, but that leaves another 24 or so categories including "Comment," which can be anything you want. So basically, iTunes not only remembers where you were in the playlist, it remembers your entire history of playing EVERY track. The view options are playlist-specific, so you can view the "last played" category in the general Library, or just in playlists where the sequence matters. You do have some playlists for those hundreds of tracks, right?
2. Ogg support sucks. I had to install a 3rd-party plugin, and there's noticable pauses at the beginnings of ogg tracks.
Valid point. Moving on . . .
3. Has a system tray icon, but still appears in the taskbar.
You are again indicating your ignorance. There is an option to "minimize to tray" so itunes won't show in the taskbar unless the window is . . . unminimized. Restored. Whatever. I use Windows at work and a Mac at home, so I'm familiar with both versions of itunes, and what I really miss when using the Windows version is Expose, which isn't an itunes function at all, but an OS feature. I don't love the Mac OS X Dock, but the Dock + Expose work a hell of a lot better than the taskbar and tray. What I'm saying is that the obvious deficiencies of the Windows GUI overshadow this particular iTunes quirk for me.
4. Doesn't use global HID-device keys. For example, winamp pauses when i hit the pause key, no matter what application is in the foreground. iTunes doesn't.
Not sure what "global" keys you're talking about. Do you mean those extra keys on non-standard keyboards? I guess that's a legitimate complaint, although a bit whiny since you can just as easily right-click the tray icon and pause itunes. But then again, you seem to think having a tray icon and appearing on the taskbar are redundant, so are you sure you WANT the HID key to pause itunes when itunes already has a tray icon?
5. Slow startup. Can be up to a minute. I found forum posts that suggested that this could be "worked around" by not having the cd burner device start up. Come on.
Another completely valid complaint. I will not debate that the windows version is slow to start, takes up huge amounts of memory because of all the overhead code. Apple certainly could have made itunes a more native port by using more windows libraries, I suppose, but I can't blame them for wanting to write the important code themselves. Your RAM pays the price, though.
I am certainly a bit annoyed by your mostly ignorant complaints, but I hope in the future you try to take advantage of the nifty itunes features, and you install the updates. I've seen several bugs disappear after an itunes update, although I'm betting most of the updates are to fix the DRM every time it gets cracked. (Blech. I never said Apple was perfect.)
Actually core image is used quite heavily by Aperture, so it lends credence to your not knowing anything about Aperture but lends doubt to you being the original poster.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bzzzzzt. According to this:
d lightroom-development-story/
http://photoshopnews.com/2006/01/09/the-shadowlan
Lightroom has been in development at Adobe for a long time.
"Many of the problems in Aperture were caused, not fixed, by the Shake and Motion teams contributions."
Umm, yeah, that's really believable, considering how Shake has set the standards in high-end image quality for almost a decade and the Motion team is a veteran group of programmers who previously created Combustion.
You're obviously full of shit, just like the app.
Why is it that applefanfags are allowed to bash Microsoft over and over...NEVER getting troll or flamebait yet almost every single apple bash or even harsh criticism of the precious fruit produces a -1 troll or flamebait? The moderation has gotten so bad..its just about time to change the system guys..
QuickTime on OS X works well as a multimedia architecture, and lots and lots of software uses it for handling video, audio or images. The QuickTime Player blows, and always has ever since Apple introduced that "Pro" bullshit and mauled the UI.
The old MoviePlayer 2.5 (the player that came with QuickTime 2.5) was a great player and it even had some pretty good and intuitive editing functions, and I kept using it even with QuickTime 4, ditching the dumbed-down QuickTime Player. The player just provides the interface, anyway: the meat of the code is in the QT libraries.
On OS X, you can use alternative QT players such as Cellulo (again, these are just applications that provide a different interface to the QT architecture), and avoid the stupid limitations of QuickTime Player (the "Pro" limitations are implemented by the player: the libraries are identical in the free version, so if you just use a third-party application based on them, you can get access to the full playback/conversion/editing features without paying for Pro).
That is one of the most ridiculous complaints I've heard. First, I'm wondering why you need to remember your place if you're shutting down iTunes and coming back--shouldn't you start the sequence over again, if the tracks are meant to be played in sequence?
I have hundreds of hours of tracks. If I start the sequence over every time iTunes started, I'd never hear the tracks at the end, and I'd be listening to the tracks at the beginning until I went insane and beat a slashdot poster to death with my laptop. All your nonsense about sorting and playlists does not solve this problem.
You are again indicating your ignorance. There is an option to "minimize to tray"
I know about the fucking minimize to tray option. It doesn't do what I want. I want itunes' window in the foreground so I can see what track is playing and see the controls. I don't want the *taskbar* tray when I do this. So minimizing it is not what I want. Winamp gets this right.
so are you sure you WANT the HID key to pause itunes when itunes already has a tray icon?
This doesn't really deserve a response, but I'll respond anyway just so I can flame you some more. Yes, I'm sure I want the HID key to pause itunes. That's the way I've been using my music player for years. What the fuck does that have to do with the tray icon? You are an idiot. If you weren't an idiot, you would have pointed out the multi plugin that the previous poster pointed out, which actually does solve that problem.
But the other three are still too serious for me to switch from itunes. After using it for a week, I switched back to winamp.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
You're talking complete madness.
There can never be something wrong with an apple product.
Its obvious those people over at Ars are just anti-apple!!!!!!11!!1
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.