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.
Theories developed from your own work?
on
Ask Neal Stephenson
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Power appears as a broad theme in much your writing. You repeatedly show the deep impact on individuals (and groups, cultures, religions, etc.) from the direct use of influence, secrets, technology, ideology and capital.
Have you developed any theories or ethical guidelines that you believe make power effective or not effective; and has your perspective on real life has been influenced by your own research/work in this area?
If you're looking for the "latest" stuff going on in the client side Java world, a good place to start looking IMO is at some of the Java applications being written which are using JNLP as a means of distribution.
There is a list of JNLP enabled applications at the OpenJNLP site. Other JNLP related information can be found at VampHQ and at SUN.
JNLP is essentially a chunk of XML which describes the parts of an application, what security settings are requested by the app, who wrote it, a description, etc. Using this file, a program such as Sun's Java Web Start or OpenJNLP can be used to automatically download and launch the application. This is great for developers, because users can simply click on a link in a web page and launch an application, which is cached for the next time its needed, or until a newer version is needed. Just replace a jar on your server with a newer version, and your users will all automatically download and use it. Automatic upgrades! Once cached, JNLP applications can run standalone (meaning, no server) and without network access.
A good example of using JNLP is the texteditor JEXT which I run all the time on my laptop on plane trips.
I hope this is helpful when looking for modern client side java applications.
I just saw that my question finally got posted yesterday. Yes, you are correct, the link now points to a product that would've solved my problem, but back on December 06 2002 when I submitted this post, it did not. As I suspected back when I posted, the post holiday roundup of new firewire enclosures and drives support full ATA-6. I've since returned the drive, and purchased a WD200gb firewire drive with enclosure for less than I paid for the original drive. Thanks for your help!
"java is slow" Not really. Downloading an applet into possibly the worst JVM (Netscape's) is slow. Try using a network platform like Speiros (www.cyrusintersoft.com) to run your client side java. Your opinion will probably change. (and you'll probably be really pissed at netscape for ruining everyones perception of java) "Java is only good for Server side applications (servlets)" Again, I disagree. I've been working with hundreds of java applications (and applets) from many sources (commercial, GPL, private), and have found that in nearly all cases, slowness results from bad code, not "java" or the jvm. I don't mean that there are bad coders, simply that many java programmers have really never had any decent guidance how to code properly with JAVA. That is Sun's fault IMHO. "WORA is limited to servlets" Client side java is very alive and well, and despite many developers lack of multi-platform development experience, JAVA itself is the ultimate for great client side portability. For example I run the same editor (Jedit) on 3 platforms: Solaris, NT, Linux (RH6.1) using Speiros as the delivery vehicle. In addition to Jedit, I also have a spreadsheet, FTP, IRC, SSH, MAIL, and a handful of other useful tools. None of these applications suffer from the maladys that JAVA proportedly inflicts. Many of the problems that people find with JAVA are simply a result of Sun's mishandling of the platform. Why do people think that servlets are the only success with Java? Simple. That's how people are making money off Java today, including Sun. To see what else is possible check out: http://www.GJT.org http://www.cyrusintersoft.com
I've been reading some of the threads and thought it most appropriate to comment at this level.
1.) Yes, there are other Network attached storage solutions, however having spent significant time either using or studying them, my opinion is that NetApp is worth the premium.
2.) This is the part that people have trouble with : Network Storage (if implemented properly) is faster than server attached storage.
What many people don't realize is that in your kernel (admittedly I don't have time to waste on NT to be sure its true there also but it's true for most *NIX breeds) Network traffic gets precedence over SCSI traffic. Yes, this counts for FCAL as well. Your system will wait to even read the local system disk until it reads the network traffic.
If you consider that your biggest problem with a mail system is users **AHEM** er, the number of users making simultanius requests compounded with the number of routing messages; your solution should include optimizations to get network traffic handled as efficiently as possible. Taking advantage of the networks priority will yeild much better throughput than with server attached solutions, because a users request for data will be handled prior to the systems own needs. Bottom line... better throughput.
The stigma for network storage has always been the implemantation of NFS... consider that usually you are mounting a server attached disk over NFS. There is little you can do to significantly speed it up beyond the basics.
(SUN is always very quick to point out their own NFS numbers when anyone brings up Network Appliance. Their own numbers stink. They stink for a reason... money. SUN makes near 50% on disk sales and wants you to buy some of their crappy new A5000 disks, which need to be mirrored to be considerded Highly Available because they only come with one power cord- Duh.)
3.) WAFL is your best friend. I can back up a 1TB oracle database in 3min. how 'bout you? I do it 4 times a day, and could do incrementals every hour if I choose. Not too bad for a system that needs to be up 100% (it's the internet, baby).
4.) Gbit ethernet can have the same, and sometimes faster, throughput than FCAL. This depends greatly on the switches and GBICs you choose, so do your homework. Add in tweaks like optimizing your TCP packet's MTU size for your average read size and you're screamin. Lastly, put all your NFS traffic onto a private network, dual networks are preferable if you can afford it, and you've got a highly reliable, very scalable solution.
On price. Net app is expensive. I'v done comparisons and there are no two ways about it. I find the best justification is the total cost of ownership. Our Net App solutions always cost us less to run over the life of the system, and that is justification enough for me.
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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.
Power appears as a broad theme in much your writing. You repeatedly show the deep impact on individuals (and groups, cultures, religions, etc.) from the direct use of influence, secrets, technology, ideology and capital.
Have you developed any theories or ethical guidelines that you believe make power effective or not effective; and has your perspective on real life has been influenced by your own research/work in this area?
Okay, just so I'm clear on this... the presentation on GPL enforceability is done in PowerPoint? Do I have a license for that?
If you're looking for the "latest" stuff going on in the client side Java world, a good place to start looking IMO is at some of the Java applications being written which are using JNLP as a means of distribution.
There is a list of JNLP enabled applications at the OpenJNLP site. Other JNLP related information can be found at VampHQ and at SUN.
JNLP is essentially a chunk of XML which describes the parts of an application, what security settings are requested by the app, who wrote it, a description, etc. Using this file, a program such as Sun's Java Web Start or OpenJNLP can be used to automatically download and launch the application. This is great for developers, because users can simply click on a link in a web page and launch an application, which is cached for the next time its needed, or until a newer version is needed. Just replace a jar on your server with a newer version, and your users will all automatically download and use it. Automatic upgrades! Once cached, JNLP applications can run standalone (meaning, no server) and without network access.
A good example of using JNLP is the texteditor JEXT which I run all the time on my laptop on plane trips.
I hope this is helpful when looking for modern client side java applications.
I just saw that my question finally got posted yesterday. Yes, you are correct, the link now points to a product that would've solved my problem, but back on December 06 2002 when I submitted this post, it did not.
As I suspected back when I posted, the post holiday roundup of new firewire enclosures and drives support full ATA-6. I've since returned the drive, and purchased a WD200gb firewire drive with enclosure for less than I paid for the original drive.
Thanks for your help!
"java is slow" Not really. Downloading an applet into possibly the worst JVM (Netscape's) is slow. Try using a network platform like Speiros (www.cyrusintersoft.com) to run your client side java. Your opinion will probably change. (and you'll probably be really pissed at netscape for ruining everyones perception of java) "Java is only good for Server side applications (servlets)" Again, I disagree. I've been working with hundreds of java applications (and applets) from many sources (commercial, GPL, private), and have found that in nearly all cases, slowness results from bad code, not "java" or the jvm. I don't mean that there are bad coders, simply that many java programmers have really never had any decent guidance how to code properly with JAVA. That is Sun's fault IMHO. "WORA is limited to servlets" Client side java is very alive and well, and despite many developers lack of multi-platform development experience, JAVA itself is the ultimate for great client side portability. For example I run the same editor (Jedit) on 3 platforms: Solaris, NT, Linux (RH6.1) using Speiros as the delivery vehicle. In addition to Jedit, I also have a spreadsheet, FTP, IRC, SSH, MAIL, and a handful of other useful tools. None of these applications suffer from the maladys that JAVA proportedly inflicts. Many of the problems that people find with JAVA are simply a result of Sun's mishandling of the platform. Why do people think that servlets are the only success with Java? Simple. That's how people are making money off Java today, including Sun. To see what else is possible check out: http://www.GJT.org http://www.cyrusintersoft.com
I've been reading some of the threads and thought it most appropriate to comment at this level.
1.) Yes, there are other Network attached storage solutions, however having spent significant time either using or studying them, my opinion is that NetApp is worth the premium.
2.) This is the part that people have trouble with : Network Storage (if implemented properly) is faster than server attached storage.
What many people don't realize is that in your kernel (admittedly I don't have time to waste on NT to be sure its true there also but it's true for most *NIX breeds) Network traffic gets precedence over SCSI traffic. Yes, this counts for FCAL as well. Your system will wait to even read the local system disk until it reads the network traffic.
If you consider that your biggest problem with a mail system is users **AHEM** er, the number of users making simultanius requests compounded with the number of routing messages; your solution should include optimizations to get network traffic handled as efficiently as possible. Taking advantage of the networks priority will yeild much better throughput than with server attached solutions, because a users request for data will be handled prior to the systems own needs. Bottom line... better throughput.
The stigma for network storage has always been the implemantation of NFS... consider that usually you are mounting a server attached disk over NFS. There is little you can do to significantly speed it up beyond the basics.
(SUN is always very quick to point out their own NFS numbers when anyone brings up Network Appliance. Their own numbers stink. They stink for a reason... money. SUN makes near 50% on disk sales and wants you to buy some of their crappy new A5000 disks, which need to be mirrored to be considerded Highly Available because they only come with one power cord- Duh.)
3.) WAFL is your best friend. I can back up a 1TB oracle database in 3min. how 'bout you? I do it 4 times a day, and could do incrementals every hour if I choose. Not too bad for a system that needs to be up 100% (it's the internet, baby).
4.) Gbit ethernet can have the same, and sometimes faster, throughput than FCAL. This depends greatly on the switches and GBICs you choose, so do your homework. Add in tweaks like optimizing your TCP packet's MTU size for your average read size and you're screamin. Lastly, put all your NFS traffic onto a private network, dual networks are preferable if you can afford it, and you've got a highly reliable, very scalable solution.
On price. Net app is expensive. I'v done comparisons and there are no two ways about it. I find the best justification is the total cost of ownership. Our Net App solutions always cost us less to run over the life of the system, and that is justification enough for me.
These are my 2Cents.