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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.
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.)
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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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.
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/
"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.
Maybe because it's not journalism, but rather a rumor site?
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
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.