“It saddens me to say that Aperture’s innovations are only skin deep. If it could deliver on the promise of being both fast and produce flawless results, it would be the dream package. At this point it is an expensive and questionable alternative to Camera Raw, a free extension to Photoshop, and Adobe’s Bridge which can batch produce better quality images in arguably less time. For $500 [EUR 425] (Photoshop itself retails for $750 [EUR 636]), there is no excuse not to be aware of professional needs like a high-quality sharpen tool, DNG exporting or more basic things like curves, a sampler tool for RGB pixel readings, or retention of EXIF data on output.”
I do some light imaging – I am by no means a pro. I use photoshop (thank heavens for work providing me with a license to work with cause I cannot afford it!). I would love to try aperture.
From what I read, and from others that do imaging more often and more in depth than I, I hear that this product falls short. AFAIK Apple did not buy out another company’s product, thus they cannot just come out with a 1.0 that blows everything out of the water (Especially photoshop!) Think of iLife back in the day, or Front Row (announced a few months ago). They have or will have to go a long way before they can compete head to head with the de-facto heavy weights.
I look forward to the battle
While I’m sure the software has its flaws… shoot its a 1.0 release. What 1.0 software doesn’t have some flaws…. but am I the only one that read his review and thought that he entered the review process trying to find points ANY POINTS he could harp on?
Yes, I think you are the only one. If I’m spending 500 bucks on software, it better do breakfast too.
Actually, the software does all that and make the proverbial breakfast for you too.
The review tends to focus too much on relatively minor points that the reviewer didn’t care much for and that appears to have tained his review too far in one direction.
Sure, he’s entitled to his opinion, but the parent poster is right… the review does appear to be slanted.
$500 for such flawed product? No way! Not until they fix those bugs.
Edited 2005-12-05 22:47
The reviewer gave it a low score not for bugs but primarily for not adhearing to his interface ideals.
Edited 2005-12-05 23:40
“he entered the review process trying to find points ANY POINTS he could harp on”.
No. It was a fair and balanced review, though rather negative in its conclusion. This is meant to be a product for the professional market. It doesn’t do raw conversion to industry standards. It doesn’t export at archival level. It takes unmanageably long to change some kinds of data that people want to change. It doesn’t allow sufficiently fine grained adjustment curves. It doesn’t do RGB pixel sampling. The histograms it gives you mislead about what is going on. These are all check list boxes. If you do not do them, you have not delivered a product for this market. This is like a word processor with erratic search and replace. Its like a spreadsheet with lots of financial functions missing, or no drag and drop.
Its fine as a complement to iPhoto for people who don’t know any better, and I’m sure the casual user could be impressed by a demo, as he could be of a demo of almost any serious professional tool, regardless of quality. The problem with this is, it looks great but doesn’t deliver at a detailed level.
As a professional tool, which is what it was intended for, its dead. The best thing they could do, if this is what it does, is drop the price to $50 and bundle it in with iPhoto.
Seeing as I didn’t get to respond to the person who posted that exact same comment on Slashdot (http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170227&cid=14186478) I’ll respond to your copy of it here…
The fact of it is that plenty of 1.0 releases have problems, and its a disgrace. If you bought a house, and it had problems, would you be satisfied with the builder saying “Sure it’s brand new, these things happen. We’ll come back in a couple of months and do a bit of work with it”? No, of course not, and the same should be true of software.
When you charge a fee for a product, that product should work. Especially when that fee is $500. The review would have benefited from a page describing the workflow, but overall I think it was fair. Aperture is advertised as a professional level product, and it doesn’t meet professional standards.
The quality of the RAW import, the absence of curves and the histogram-smoothing were especially bad. They make it impossible to do any professional-quality work on the photos, making the stacking option redundant. If you read through the author’s guide to photo-retouching
(http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/mystery.ars and http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/mystery-2.ars) you’ll see that these things are essential.
I’m an Apple fan, and I think the review was just fine. This is a professional product, and to gain acceptance of photographers which of all people are usually most serious about small details, Apple needs to address these issues. Hopefully they listen to the man.
While I like Apple software like OS X the best, they still have lots of room to improve. I trust that they will.
If I disagree with how any software company designs its software, does that automatically make my grievances an issue to be dealt with?
I think the point here is that the issues the reviewer had were really miniscule. The fact that he gave the product such a low score because of these small issues shows that he just set out to write a bad review from the start.
While I’m sure the software can be improved, that does not mean that the existing product is somehow flawed. I’ve used the software a couple times, and it is a genuinely good product.
RAW converter is everything, if it can’t do it right than its just sucks, don’t care for other features.
hey its only 1.0, but adobe raw converter or everybody else dot it right at 1.0, only apple fans love to make excuse for their beloved company.
and why it need for dual G5 to do something that my lowly PIV1.6ghz could do with windows+PSCS+AdobeRAW and with better result.
its bloated.
Seriously I just saw Aperture in action very recently and was very impressed. Granted im not a pro photographer, but everything I threw at it Aperture handled pretty well and even ran smoothly on a PowerBook G4 1.25 Ghz w 1GB Ram.
The article is very in-depth and raises some areas improvement for Aperture, however it has one fatal flaw – a misunderstanding in what Aperture is. Oddly enough they seem to point out this problem yet continue anyway. From the article: “Aperture is not a competitor to Photoshop…Still, in this review I’ll be referring to similar tasks or tools in Photoshop.”
While Aperture does take advantage provide some image editing/enhancement capabilities by taking advantage of core-image. However that is not it’s purpose (at this point at least) and that is the focus of Photoshop. The core of Aperture is workflow and this is where Apple has really innovated, taking the user friendliness from iPhoto and applied that to a professional workflow. Aperture is about the storage, organization, and retrieval of professional digital photographs. Aperture makes the digital workflow easy and familiar for a professional photographer who is used to the non-digital of photography. While it does not have the same editing capabilities as Photoshop it still provides the most needed tools for a professional and integrates well with Photoshop for other needs. Aperture is well worth the $500 to a professional photographer alongside Photoshop – not as a replacement, simply by making their workflow easier and more natural.
Problem is, its a black hole. You get the stuff in, do your workflow, and then you can’t get it out again. Hopeless.
Through my using of the app, I come to completely different results. It seems this review is very opportunistic in the images it picks, and only does work on a very small subset of images. Had he chosen a much broader range of images (or even a different camera), he would notice a lot of the things he complains about simply aren’t reproducable.
I do admit that there are a lot of things missing, but the app is brand spanking new; it’s absolutely amazing for a 1.0. Applications like Adobe’s have nearly a decade and at least as many versions and patches on that.
My advice: get a new monitor, adjust your spectacles, get a different camera, take some pictures and re-review.
Who cares if it’s “brand spanking new” or if it’s “amazing for a 1.0” when it doesn’t work as supposed to? This application isn’t ready yet.
Huh?
It does work like its supposed to.
“doesn’t work as supposed to?” According to whom, besides the reviewer?
i’ve used it a little bit, and can definitely see it’s usefulness..
my biggest qualm is that the vault can’t live on a networked drive, we work with hundreds of thousands of raw files a year, which makes aperture impossible for us to use, as there is no way we could store that on a local disk, however, for individual users, assuming the interpretations for your raw format work well.. then it’s a very solid product.. still, i’d wait for a couple bug fixes before intergrating it into ones workflow
Funny to watch how people cant handle a bit of criticism about software. Aperture seems to me at least to be halfway between Picasa2 and Photoshop CS2. But for 500 bux I would rather be off upgrading my computer instead of spending it on Aperture. It looks impressive no doubt but not worth the 500.
Its not criticism that people are getting upset with… its inappropriate criticism.
> Funny to watch how people cant handle a bit of criticism about software.
It’s not that some people can’t handle criticism about software, it’s that some people can’t handle criticism about an Apple product. Seriously, if this was released by any other company, none would have bothered with the apologism. Who cares if it’s 1.0 or 10.0, they’re still charging 500 buck for it.
He mentions it in passing but he was comparing an Adobe product that has been out since the stone age and has been patched to death to a 1.0 first iteration product. Of course it isn’t going to be perfect. If you look at every major Apple software release, the 1.0 versions always have less features and are more buggy than later revisions. Apple will release a set of patches I am sure shortly and then if history tells us anything version 2.0 will come out sometime next year and be a major revision/upgrade that introduces a slew of new features and bug fixes. It will only get better from there. He has a point though in that this is not cheap software, but come on you got to compare Apples to Apples.
Reminds me when they compared InDesign 1.0 with Quark XPress…
Hmmm … rampant Apple fanaticism. It’s “only” a 1.0 release? I guess you’ll be happy to shell out $120 to the godlike Apple for the upgrade to fix what’s broken.
My husband had a look too (he is a serious prosumer photographer with Canon 5D and 10D among the rest of his 10+ cameras) and he concurs: Aperture just doesn’t do what it suppose to do for a *professional* photographer. It’s broken to the bone. It was released premature, and what is even more sad is that they seem to not have talked to any serious photographer for feedback. Either that, or the programmers/project-manager who created that application had no clue what they were doing.
No reason to delve into what’s missing or to what it’s doing wrong. Just read the linked review.
Eugenia,
its been very well established that your husband (and to some extent you) have a bone to pick with Apple. Many ex-employees hold resentment for Apple and its products because the company wouldn’t allow BeOS to run on Apple hardware.
With that point out of the way. I am a professional photographer and a recent Mac “switcher”. After Aperture was released, I gave it a shot. Up until then I used Photoshop for the majority of my work. After running the software though its paces I found it to be lacking in some areas as compared to Photoshop but excelling far ahead in others. Perhaps I should write a proper review for OS News about my experience with it. Without going on and on about my experience, to put it in a nutshell, I was very impressed. It functioned as advertised, and left me wanting to continue using the software in the long term.
Anyone that came away from using the software and saying that it is “broken to the bone” or that its developers had “no clue what they were doing” is obviously trolling.
Your response glares of an agenda as if you want so badly for people to hold this software in a low light.
I like this site, but its these subtle but glaring instances of hidden agenda that always cause me to keep a watchful eye on why a piece of news was posted. If thats not obvious enough, then the editor’s response in the sites forums offer reassurance of that agenda. Though you may not have selected this news item, your response seems to fit the site’s party line.
Eugenia,
its been very well established that your husband (and to some extent you) have a bone to pick with Apple. Many ex-employees hold resentment for Apple and its products because the company wouldn’t allow BeOS to run on Apple hardware.
With that point out of the way. I am a professional photographer and a recent Mac “switcher”. After Aperture was released, I gave it a shot. Up until then I used Photoshop for the majority of my work. After running the software though its paces I found it to be lacking in some areas as compared to Photoshop but excelling far ahead in others. Perhaps I should write a proper review for OS News about my experience with it. Without going on and on about my experience, to put it in a nutshell, I was very impressed. It functioned as advertised, and left me wanting to continue using the software in the long term.
Anyone that came away from using the software and saying that it is “broken to the bone” or that its developers had “no clue what they were doing” is obviously trolling.
Your response glares of an agenda as if you want so badly for people to hold this software in a low light.
I like this site, but its these subtle but glaring instances of hidden agenda that always cause me to keep a watchful eye on why a piece of news was posted. If thats not obvious enough, then the editor’s response in the sites forums offer reassurance of that agenda. Though you may not have selected this news item, your response seems to fit the site’s party line.
I do agree that the constant cries of ‘xyz sucks’ do not promote rational amicable discussion, and perhaps the editorial staff do need to reflect that what leaves the keyboard cool, sometimes arrives on the page rather hot.
However, that aside, anyone who thinks there is anti-Apple prejudice on OSNews – or in the media in general – is getting things completely out of proportion. There isn’t. If anything, the site gives too much space to the company and its doings. And the articles it links too are not biased or negative.
The fact is, there is a range of opinion about Apple the company and also about its products, and short of averting one’s eyes and never reading the media, you cannot avoid seeing the full range.
>With that point out of the way. I am a professional photographer and a recent Mac “switcher”.
Sure you are Kelly. Haha…
I think you should read more reviews on the application before rating this particular review (positively or negatively). From what I have read Aperture’s interface has shown many a pro user loads of usability features they never knew they were missing and from that aspect it has blown many competing products away (as another poster said, the work-flow is its key strength). The consensus seems to be that the other aspects of the software are nothing to write home about
I have been using it since it arrived. I have to say that there seems to be some odd remarks floating around.
Firstly, if you are talking about pro photogs then you will realize that they are not going to be getting a whole lot of under or over exposed images so intense curve manipulation is not going to be required. That is what PSCS is for.
Secondly, if you are going to compare Aperture to any Adobe product, compare it to Bridge.
I have used iView, Portfolio and a few others and none of them are as fast or as easy at importing, sorting and light color correction than Aperture.
In point of fact, using Aperture I have been able to completely re-organize a library of over 7K images in a few days. A task I was dreading with iView. I still have to reload my offlines and get those in shape but I am actually looking forward to it.
Aperture is not a black hole. It is fairly straight-forward to export from Aperture… if you really are that concerned and don’t weant to use the vault feature then do an archive of the original RAW files.
Not being a professional myself this may not hold a lot of water, but I think they key thing here is that this is a product for *professional* photographers – you know, the ones who don’t mess up, know how to expose a photo (and braket to make sure), who don’t need to shapen because they have those nice 2-13grand lenses and, more importantly, know how to use them, and don’t need an extensive list of filters because they know how to get the darn shot in the first place. They are not some guy who went out an bought a D70 and started snapping! Taken in that light, perhaps this is exactly what the doctor ordered. Profiles are *always* biased, but I don’t think you can get people to endorse your product if it is as limited as this review seems to point out – no matter how many 30″ screens you throw at ’em.
Its quite a nice software, which has MOST features needed.
HOWEVER, if compared on professional level some details are missing, and for a hefty sum of $500 they should better not miss.
They shouls spread that software for $300, not $500 and get the missing features working. When they achieve that, they could charge $600 for it.
This is OSnews not PSNews or ArtistNews, what does a photoshop plugin have to do with OS News? This isn’t /. here. To be fair you should start carrying announcements for Gimp and Krita if you’re going to bother showing news for Photoshop.
What do you guys want from the reviewer? Should he say, “Well, the software didn’t do what they claimed it would – despite the $500 price tag – but since it’s a 1.0 I’ll try to like it anyway. 10/10 because the product is immature.” No, it deserved the score it got and IF they improve 2.0 in the areas it’s deficient, which are significant, then it can get a higher score.
The point is he is comparing a 1.0 revision product to a product that has been out for years. It is not a fair comparison. Secondly he completely missed the purpose of Aperture in the first place which is to automate workflow not replace Photoshop. I am not saying it is a great product, but the review was biased.
The reviewer was not biased. When Eddie the Eagle entered the ski jump, and crashed out, the reporters who said he had crashed out were not biased. The reporter is simply reporting that this is a product, in its present release, which is unusable for the purpose for which it is sold. You may not like the fact, but there is nothing biased about reporting this.
As to whether it is ‘fair’ to compare a product which has been out for years to this, what’s unfair? Are we supposed to only compare products of the same age? Is it somehow unfair to compare car models which have different design lives? Should we not compare processor families unless they date from the same period? Any two products which compete in the same space, which perform the same functions, may be fairly compared. Indeed, very different products may fairly be compared, when one makes another obsolete because it does tasks so differently.
Be serious man. This is about fitness for the purpose for which the thing is sold, and its about value for money. We are not in the playground.
I agree with you. It’s childish to behave like that. And you can’t even mod them down because they are editors/gods. That’s the ugly side of OSNews.
I can tolerate stupid behavior from everyone else, but it’s just not acceptable an editor starts trolling. That said, it’s well known OSNews is a trolling site. I even sometimes enjoy reading all those trolls
A – for you, if that somehow counts.
Its funny how people have come to Apples defence; the fact is, this is a review, and regardless of the age of the application, it will be compared to eveything out in the market, regardless of how old the application maybe.
The issue, I think, will be is not necessarily whether or not the missing features are an issue, because quite frankly, even if you took away those who fail to purchase because of a lack of a feature, there will still be end users quite happy with the current feature set.
The issue will be whether Apple quickly release a massive update in the next 6months to promptly fix the bugs seen by the reviewer, and those features that are in Aperture, are bought up to standard – hopefully then, I would like to see a follow up review after the update as to see whether with the massive update, whether the purchasing pulling power has increased with those bugs addressed and improvements been made.
As for Aperture in general, I think it is rather tricky in that Apple is trying to play the game of the tight rope walker of providing enough features to make the price worth while for its end uses whilst at the same time ensuring that they don’t over extend themselves to the point that they start poaching Adobe Photoshop users.
At the end of the day, however, the reviewer does have a point and ultimtely, it isn’t up to the review to be nice, because if he or she was, he or she wouldn’t be doing his or her job – reviewing is about being the devils advocate, revealing the flaws and then leaving it up to the reader to decide for his or her self whether the flaws and features that are lacking are significant enough as to warrant not purchasing the product.
Its all about workflow people.
This from Apple website:
“Round-trip Photoshop support
Aperture lets you launch directly into Adobe Photoshop with a single-click. There, you can take advantage of Photoshop’s strong compositing and layer effects, and when you’re done making modifications, simply save the file. Your modified image will automatically be added to your Aperture library as a version of the original file, where you can manage it easily in a Project or Album.”
Apple never claimed that it is a replacement for Photoshop. In fact all Apple software products, from the essence of its OS behavior to that of its applications, is about doing your work in an intuitive manner. It has never been about feature sets.
My impression of the review: it is a good but subjective one. One has to try the product before concluding if it is worth the money Apple charges for it.
Many users of Apple products in fact are vociferous critics-their expectation of Apple is quite high. They can also make fun of Apple (e.g. http://www.crazyapplerumors.com). One should not lump all Apple users in one basket.
Cheers
Apple never claimed that it is a replacement for Photoshop. In fact all Apple software products, from the essence of its OS behavior to that of its applications, is about doing your work in an intuitive manner. It has never been about feature sets.
But the very first paragraph from the Aperture site http://www.apple.com/aperture/ reads:
“… Aperture provides everything you need for after the shoot, delivering the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers.”
Apple never claimed that it is a replacement for Photoshop. In fact all Apple software products, from the essence of its OS behavior to that of its applications, is about doing your work in an intuitive manner. It has never been about feature sets.
But the very first paragraph from the Aperture site http://www.apple.com/aperture/ reads:
“… Aperture provides everything you need for after the shoot, delivering the first all-in-one post-production tool for photographers.”
I would not stop after the very first sentence. I would try and figure out if the application did some things differently than the existing ones and if it would be useful for me.
On that same page Apple indicates that you can access PS with one click and make changes and save the file in PS which results in that file appearing automatically in Aperture. That seems quite nifty. Clearly Aperture is not a replacement for PS. Its image manipulation functions are likely to be limited (so as to not antagonize Adobe).
Regarding first sentence about Aperture : MS showed people flying around in their advertisements when they released XP (after iMovie was released) and showed a beautiful gal playing guitar soon after Garageband was released. That does not mean when you get XP you can fly or it will allow you to play or create music on XP without third party applications!
You really are not getting it. Or you don’t want to get it.
You have a tool that is supposed to manage workflow. You cannot import into it, because its raw conversion destroys quality.
Once you have swallowed hard and imported, you do not want to edit in photoshop from within it, because you will then be editing impaired pictures.
Still, you swallow hard, and do it anyway. Now you think, you’ll export. You find you cannot export without losing data and that industry standard formats are not supported. Or, you can export, but it means getting out of the workflow mode.
This is not usable as a workflow tool by professionals. It is really simple. It is not fit for the purpose for which it is being sold.
And it is not unfair to point this out. It is not comparing it to photoshop to point it out. It is not being anti-Apple to point it out. No, it is just pointing out facts. Whether this thing is 1.0 or 10.9, who cares? It doesn’t do what it needs to do for this market.
Of course, if you are an amateur, none of this matters to you. Go spend your 500. Just don’t tell the pros how wonderful this thing is. Or the rest of us how wonderful this would be for the pros if they were not too anti-Apple to realise it.
I am not defending Apple by any means. I am just pointing out the flaws in picking one sentence in the promotional material on the web site and construing that to mean that the application will do everything under the sun.
Aperture, apparently, leaves the original untouched. Its editing is supposedly nondestructive and saves the changes in an XML file.
Clearly, it does not meet your expectations. In contrast to your assertions, others have been quite happy with the quality of the output or the superiority of the workflow.
The discussion on this has been quite mean at arstechnica and we don’t want to rehash what was said there over here once again.
I think the dust will settle as more people evaluate it and then suggestions can be made to Apple to improve it. Right now we only have the arstechnica review which has dealt in depth with some aspects of the application. A second more careful review of its workflow abilities and comparison to say other programs that are used for this rather than PS will likely appear at either arstechnica or other digital photography websites.
Take it easy, its only an application and nobody is forcing anybody to use it.
Yes, it is indeed about workflow, and this is the problem.
Its deficiencies mean that you cannot in fact import photos and then work on them in Photoshop. At least, not to a professional standard. Nor, having imported them can you export them in raw form while remaining in workflow management mode. So this means that, for the target market, and for the purpose for which it is sold, it is useless.
The sociology of the Apple movement is another and very interesting topic, but the first thing to get straight in this discussion is what the product does, and whether it does what the target market needs.
After getting that straight, we can get into all the interesting feelings people have about each other, themselves, Apple, and everything else under the sun.
Many years ago I purchased a newly released program based mostly on what I’d read about its pre-release version. It was an extremely expensive piece of soft ware with a learning curve that was just unreal.
The program had many other flaws but it showed great promise and was truly original. I decided I wanted to learn this new program and teach it to my graphic arts students, which I did.
This program would would have been laughable in the face of Photoshop CS and never could have compeated against it. Still, I’m glad I bought it and forced it on to my students to learn it.
The program was called Photoshop version 2.
Ones that cost $500.
He finds faults with its raw image import tool, sounds like sort of a big deal to me: Why have a fast tool for image manipulation if it takes a quality loss (if you can afford a quality loss, a fast tool isn’t needed; you can just drop the quality).
I’d guess Apple rushed Aperture out the door.
At least it’s not a complete buggy mess!
He’s not comparing. I don’t see where the comparison comes into effect. He states repeatedly that it’s not, nor does it try to, replace photoshop. I think he’s showing comparisons to pieces of photoshop which it does, which is *very* fair.
The review isn’t biased, he wouldn’t have a $8,000 Mac if he didn’t like them…
a lot of people are bringing up great points. But as one person already pointed out the author is just trying to be in an unbiased way as is possible providing comparison with the industry benchmark (I think) that is PSCS2. That is all. The author attempted to and I think he did a great job to show that these are the features of Aperture. Great effort for the first time but these are the features missing. Honestly there is no bias but there surely cannot be a review without a few critques can there? I mean that is the whole point of the review to provide as much info to the end user/potential customer so they can make an informed decision. The author did exactly all that. If people take a step back and forget that this is an Apple product for a second then I guess what I am trying to say will come across as making sense. Aperture is a fine product and I for one would love to give it a try. But to me the price is nort worth it and some of those shortcomings are quite worrisome especially when Apple on their website it touting it quite highly. The user interface is a work of art and I love the stack feature…but besides eye candy I would like the RAW to be more capable. Yes I understand this is a 1.0 release but that is no excuse for releasing a poor RAW handler in this software. I hope Apple is not turning into other software companies where they just release the software for software’s sake and then release endless streams of patches and newer version upon newer version so that they can milk the public.
I was so happy when this was announced, but was unsure how the whole storage of files was going to work out, and in the end, that’s were apple tanked. They simply don’t learn. People don’t want their stuff trapped into some apple library deal. They want to be able to access and add and remove photos through the finder. Just because they use a app, doesn’t mean they should have to feed everything into it like a big black hole and only be able to access them through that app.
Its the same flaw as itunes and iphoto. They don’t have to do it they way they do, they choose to make it that way. They choose to make the product suck.
This is were peoples issues should be, in the storage of their files and the import, export. This is a fundamental to how the product is designed. Features that are lacking or missing are things apple will add or fix over time, one can be sure of that. But them fixing a fundamental flaw like locking stuff into a library is something that who knows if they will fix.
Apple has a perfectly good file system. Use it. And fix this on your other apps. Give itunes a library refresh button and people would be very thankful. This is the deal breaker for me. I’m fine with living with it while apple improves tools and such. But get the foundation of it right.
If the price was better, I would be a bit more forgiving. But no pro app should force people into a library like that. Might as well stick to iPhoto.
Also the system requirements are annoying. Blocking out cards that even fully support core image is frustrating, sure it will be slow, but let the customer live with that verses locking them out. People can’t even install Aperture on some brand new macs apple sells today. Also, if someone is paying 500 bucks for something, they don’t want to have to dump 200 bucks on the lowest end video card that will run it.
Remember, its a hardware company. Its trying to sell its own hardware, that’s what motivates it.
And remember also, it will lock in everything that it can. It always has. Remember the proprietary digital interfaces to screens, and before that the proprietary analogue ones. It will lock in the software to the extent that it can, also.
Why, given this, is anyone surprised by a proprietary storage method to promote lockin, and extreme hardware requirements to promote hardware sales?
I think it’s a theory in application design. I like it for a lot of things: media players (to some extent, you still need to be able to get the files), e-mail (has done this forever), photo albums, any program which organizes a type of data.
I think applying it to hq professional images is very interesting, but I think that it can be done in a way which lends itself to accessing it normally.
Surely they’ve got some way to access these images normally, like ~/.aperture/images or something?
You can access them, if you do a “reveal contents” on the mega library file.
not very convent, and by poking around in there you will surely break something. Also since it won’t let you make separate real versions (the whole “no save button” thing apple thinks is great) it means the only file you will see there, or really be able to get out of it is the original un-edited file.
Thats something that makes me not like it. If I take a file, edit it, then make a cropped version, a B&W version, a web sized version. I want to be able to just access it through the file system and use it, not have to open aperture and export it to the outside world.
Libraries have a place on some levels, but they should be optional. The way apple uses them is for very low level consumers. Basically people who without it would just have one giant file dump and no origination. Sorta like spotlight, it’s a pointless feature if your organized. And just plain scary glimpse at the future if apple decides people don’t need finder and should have to do searches for everything. Talk about hell.
Its always bothered me how MS and Apple try to make their ideas of how people will use their computers, especially when it comes to saving files. How many people actually use “my pictures” “my documents” and the apple equivalents? maybe a few percent of people. People want to set that aspect of the computer up how they want it.
Libraries make portability very hard for files. They also very much limit your exit plan, what happens with your stuff if you want to switch apps or OS? Sure you might be able to extract stuff, but it will be a pain, and you will certainly loose stuff. But if apps just stick the normal file system its a click and a drag and you are good to go.
Apps like iTunes have gotten livable, you can do what you want with the library, there is just no mechanism for itunes to refresh itself to change, it will tell you a song is no longer there, but for some reason it won’t remove it from the list of songs, go figure. Why apple won’t even give you a folder/tree view in itunes to be able do select and deselect folders of songs you want in there, I’ll never understand. I hate having to blow away the whole library file, and re-added directories anytime I move files around.
i cant believe people are still using the “spotlight is a pointless feature if you are organized” line.
If I want to get to my spreadsheet keeping track of my november 2005 budget, it is faster to hit apple-space, and type november 2005 budget, and open the document, that it is for me to open a finder window, go to the documents folder, open the finacial folder, then double click the document.
Maybe for you thats faster, but not for everyone.
Do I know the short cut to bring spot light up? no. Will I remember exactly what I called something to be able to place its name, probably not. Will I spell it correctly, maybe. Will spot light come back will a million possible things on my computer will be and drag my computer down for a few moments when it does this, YES.
How long does it take me to find any file, especially one I use a lot on my HD via finder, almost no time (and definitely faster then using spotlight). And on top of that at least I truly know where it is.
Things like Spotlight are like trying to turn your computer into the internet and finding stuff with google, thats a bad thing, the internet is a mess thus we need google. If it had some thought put into it, we wouldn’t need google. And if google does ever succeed in organizing everything, the search function of google will go away. The same way as there is no way in heck I’m going to type “cnn” into google, to get a link to cnn.com to then go to it when I know I can just type CNN.com into my browser (or better have a shortcut), I’m not going to do a search just to find something on my computer when I already know where it is.
Spotlight is a search tool, and search tools are based on the idea that stuff is unorganized. If you are organized their usefulness becomes very low since it takes longer and more mental effort to do the search then to just go to where something is. Searching is a back for when your organization fails, or something goes amiss. Like Safari saving something and not knowing where it sent it.
I would definitely like to see some stats on how many normal people A) ever started using spotlight. B) Kept using spotlight after a few weeks and continue to this day.
My guess is usage of it dropped quick after the “oh wow” factor went away.
if apple releases a .0.1 update, fixing the raw quality problem, this review will be worthless. Most of the issues (no curves, smoothing the histogram, smart sharpening, etc.) will be handled fine in photoshop, which is aperture’s companion app by design. Aperture’s real selling point is workflow, which is addressed in about 10% of the review (if that).
Apps like iTunes have gotten livable, you can do what you want with the library, there is just no mechanism for itunes to refresh itself to change, it will tell you a song is no longer there, but for some reason it won’t remove it from the list of songs, go figure. Why apple won’t even give you a folder/tree view in itunes to be able do select and deselect folders of songs you want in there, I’ll never understand. I hate having to blow away the whole library file, and re-added directories anytime I move files around.
This is the kind of comment that gets to me. iTunes has always be a great app, from version 1 [yes, do point out that it was bought by Apple from yada yada]. I cannot say that there is any feature that I don’t like about it. It just works fabulously and it has done so in every iteration.
But you have a point. Definitely. It is stupid to list songs that are no longer available and not give you the opportunity to just suppress these entries from the index.
So, you want one more feature that it indeed actually needs. That’s a valid point. But to say that it ‘has become liveable’ is just not right. Of all the apps I’ve ever worked with iTunes is perhaps the most stable and flaw-free. And it’s free to boot. If iTunes is barely liveable try using Windows Media Player 10 and come back to extoll on its virtues.
Now, I haven’t used Aperture so I won’t say whether it’s good or not. For $500 USD I want my app to be professional too. For a 1.0 version I will accept that not-everything-that-should-be-there-is-there but at the very least I want every functionality that they put in there to work as it was designed. That’s the least you can ask from a professional tool.
If Apple can provide us with something as astonishingly cool as iTunes for less money than it will cost the average Linux user to rip the intestines out of the kid brother’s remotely controlled car and mount Kunbuntu on it to run a late-fifties dishwasher, they should be able to make a truly spectacular app for $500 bucks. Not perfect from version 1.0 but with all the features working as advertised.
As an avid Apple user I count myself among its harshest critics specifically because I like the company and it’s products a great deal. Something is not above reproach simply because it comes out of the front door of 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, Ca. But I’m willing to give it a lot of leeway
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The only thing that really bothers me about Apple is not buying the stock in 2000, when I had quite a bit of cash to invest in them. Today that would have meant I would be a free man. That thought entertains my mind a lot more than whether a feature in a new app isn’t quite up to snuff yet.
Just to be clear, I use iTunes and like it, but that is a big annoyance of mine. I never used earlier versions but my understand was that in early versions it was simply a library and you had zero control over it, it was one way. Maybe this is incorrect.
I think apple does a good job with apps, but the seam to always go out of their way to throw in one dumb thing that didn’t need to be that way that really ruins an app.
Safari has a bunch of these, like why no “go” button so when I paste url I don’t have to go to the keyboard and hit enter. Why no “new tab” “new window” button in the windows next to the refresh and print buttons. And why can’t a Create a new folder when saving a bookmark. At least they took one step in the right direction and now let you right click and create a new windows when clicking on the dock icon. Maybe with the next release clicking the safari dock icon by default will launch a new window instead of pulling up a current window in the dock.
Its stuff like this that gets me about apple, to be so close on having things perfect, but then blow it on the simple stuff that everyone else gets right.
That and how they push things that seam to appeal to the few (like RSS, was the really worth a whole new version of safari?) or seam to be going down bad paths (Like saying Spotlight could someday replace finder *shudder*).
They are great at coming up with new stuff, I just wish some time they would make sure they got everything propped up with what it needs first and not move onto the next great thing without getting the current stuff fully there. Like lets fix the memory leak in webkit before adding Dashboard on top of it.