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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."
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.
Before posting conspiracy theories and such, you may want to read what others have to say.
... 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 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.)
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?
No, we're saying that if your software is so bad that you actually have to apologize to people who bought it with cash than it might be a good survival strategy to rewrite it.
KFG
Guess their partners weren't strategic enough.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
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.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
...perhaps they should fire the Quicktime team too?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES, YES PLEASE!
Quicktime is such an utter piece of shit. This coming both from the perspective of a user and a developer.
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.
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.
The fact is, RAW data doesn't look very good, but Apple showed it with as little alteration as possible, because customers had said that's what they wanted. The RAW importer in Aperture 1.0 showed what was really there, without the prettying-up that the cameras do when they convert to JPEG, or that Photoshop does when it coverts RAW to TIFF.
Several reviewers, including the clown at ARS technica who is admittedly not a pro photographer, and had probably never seen RAW data in his life, complained that it didn't look like images that had been through Adobe's converter.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
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."
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.
Several reviewers, including the clown at ARS technica who is admittedly not a pro photographer, and had probably never seen RAW data in his life
... namecalling, now that's a compelling argument. Have you seen pure RAW data? It's not like what Aperture shows at all. Look for 16-bit linear output from a RAW converter for minimal processing of the data (white balance) - and you'll get a darkish picture that has to be gamma/levels/etc adjusted.
really
Insightful indeed.
"customers had said that's what they wanted." That's something as a software engineer I learned years ago. Customers don't really know what they want. What you have to do is work with the and get to know them well enough that you get to know what they need. Aperture was not a total failure. It does most of what isneeded but Version 1.0 was not at all ready to be realeased. Aple should have done what Adobe did with Lightroom. They called the first release "Beta" and made it a free download. Adobe gets comments from real customers and no one is upset with Adobe because they didn't pay anything. But Adobe gets free feedback from real users The other thing in Apple's favor is that no one knows what one of these kinds of programs should do. Spreadsheets are mature, we know what one should do but these "raw workflow programs"? What are they? Apple was breaking new ground and taking a risk. Get them credit for that.
Actually, it is pretty bad.
That's just a small smatterng of the problems I've found with 1.1...
Please help metamoderate.
Remember that even the camera itself does quite a bit of processing to clean each image before saving it as a JPEG, so it could be argued applying those same algorithms to the RAW version of the image would be a different version of "faithful". Sometimes a computer can truly make an image look better without sacrificing detail and without being unfaithful to the original image.
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 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.