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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."
Well, it looks like the RAW processing was both slow and gave unacceptably poor results, the program was buggy and at least one review called it 'unusable in its current form.'
There's a good list of bugs at ars's review of aperture
The one people complained about most is the thumbnails not matching the actual image (and there's reports of this happenning in iPhoto too).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Check out Ars Technica's Aperture 1.0 reviwe:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars
Not an Aperture user, but I was struck by the review in Popular Photography that made some apologies for the horsepower needed to run it. Yes, imaging is tough, but the program was apparently too slow to test unless it was installed on the absolutely most-tricked-out, highly-upgraded Power Mac G5 you can lay your hands on. Usually, the creampuff reviews from such magazines will give this sort of thing only the barest mention. The fact that the review actually talked about it for a few sentences told me that the program had problems.
I really hate having to read between the lines of reviews from mainstream outfits. That's why I love my online sources.
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/
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.
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."
I think before you put TOO much weight on the Ars review, you should take into consideration what jcr said above, because I think it's an important point.
Saying that Aperture's output isn't as pretty as Photoshop's is like complaining that your photos look shittier on slides than on prints, without taking into consideration that with the slide you're looking at your own (and the camera's) handiwork and nothing else, while with the print you're looking at something that's been optimized by someone else (the printer) to look good.
The speed problems are unacceptable though. I just thought the Aperture/Photoshop comparison wasn't a great one; although it's odd to say it, Photoshop has become a "mid grade" application, I think Aperture was going for an even 'more-pro' crowd than the average Photoshop user.
I think in retrospect Apple is realizing maybe that market is smaller than they originally thought.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
The flamefest at Ars Technica about that was actually quite informative. RAW really is a raw dump of Camera sensors and looks like nothing without being "prettyed-up". So's apparently it is incorrect to say that Apple wasn't manipulating the RAW, they just weren't doing it to the same level of other products.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
"I wouldn't be so quick to blame the developers of Apple's Windows applications. Remember, they're basically stuck working with the existing Windows APIs (Win32, MFC), and PowerPlant."
Good, this explains how Windows Media Player 10 is a lot faster, lighter and stable than Quick Time on Windows... Oh wait it doesn't.
Your argument was totally off. I'm primarily a Windows user. I don't complain that all Windows apps are inferior, I complain specifically of the QT/iTunes ports being inferior compared to other apps with their functionality.
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.
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.