FYI: Apple axes Aperture dev team

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burnsdavidj@yahoo.com - 27 Apr 2006 18:53 GMT

Article link and commentary on Slashdot:
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/27/1222250

Price drop from $499 to $299 (I'm assuming USD). There is some
speculation on how bad the code is, although this is the first I've
read of it.

As a Wintel user, anyone want to share their experiences with Aperture?
If the product is discontinued is it a great loss, or does is it not
really necessary? I suspect you have all the bases covered between
Photoshop and Breezebrowser...

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Jeremy Nixon - 27 Apr 2006 19:07 GMT

> As a Wintel user, anyone want to share their experiences with Aperture?
> If the product is discontinued is it a great loss, or does is it not
> really necessary?

It's a worthless piece of garbage. With a nice GUI.

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burnsdavidj@yahoo.com - 27 Apr 2006 20:06 GMT

Don't hold back -- tell me how you really feell! LOL.

Funny you mention the GUI...alot of users apparently were complaining
that the Ap. gui goes out of its way to break the Mac gui in terms of
customary function placement, layout etc.

I gather the beta for Lightroom performs and functions better than
Aperture 1.1, which is why i asked.

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Jeremy Nixon - 27 Apr 2006 20:22 GMT

> Don't hold back -- tell me how you really feell! LOL.

What I posted was actually the "cleaned up" version.

> Funny you mention the GUI...alot of users apparently were complaining
> that the Ap. gui goes out of its way to break the Mac gui in terms of
> customary function placement, layout etc.

Oh, it does. But the UI is really quite nice anyway. It has a few things
in there that are great ideas no one else seems to have thought of for
some reason. Like the zoom tool that goes from "fit to screen" to "100%"
and then back with a single click, since that's what you want to do when
zooming almost all the time anyway.

> I gather the beta for Lightroom performs and functions better than
> Aperture 1.1, which is why i asked.

Yes, Lightroom is kind of a "better Aperture". I haven't had much chance
to really dig into Lightroom, though, since unfortunately it doesn't
recognize adjustments made in Camera Raw, or vice-versa, despite using
the Camera Raw code for conversion. I'd really prefer Lightroom if I
could tell it "no, really, I don't want to do any adjustments or anything
here, just let me use it for organization and such" and let me just use
Camera Raw itself for all the adjustment work. The Lightroom UI for
image adjustment leaves a lot to be desired compared with Camera Raw.

But Aperture has the same problem, multiplied tenfold: it wants you to use
it for raw conversion, at which it really sucks. The 1.1 update seems to
be a bit better, though.

I have a dream that my children will live in a world where photography
software will work together with other photography software, rather than
insisting on putting up a Chinese wall between itself and anything else
you might care to use.

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Jeremy | jeremy@exit109.com

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John McWilliams - 28 Apr 2006 03:53 GMT

>> Don't hold back -- tell me how you really feell! LOL.
>
[quoted text clipped - 21 lines]
> Camera Raw itself for all the adjustment work. The Lightroom UI for
> image adjustment leaves a lot to be desired compared with Camera Raw.

That's my initial impression, but as I use it a bit more, I am wondering
if it won't be just fine for most of my work flow.

Is the conversion different from ACR? (Aside from the interface) In
other words, could one achieve the same results with adjustments if one
had a good command of both interfaces?

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John McWilliams

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Jeremy Nixon - 28 Apr 2006 04:42 GMT

> Is the conversion different from ACR? (Aside from the interface) In
> other words, could one achieve the same results with adjustments if one
> had a good command of both interfaces?

My understanding is that Lightroom uses Camera Raw for conversion (the code,
not by using the actual plug-in), so the results should be the same and there
should be no reason the settings won't translate back and forth as stored in
the XMP data in the Camera Raw namespace. Indeed, Adobe has said that not
recognizing the Camera Raw settings was a limitation of the initial beta and
considered a bug, but then the second release still won't do it, so I really
don't know what's going on.

It looks like a nice program, but if it can't see the Camera Raw settings in
my DNG files it's really of no use to me. And if Camera Raw can't see the
conversion settings from Lightroom, it's also of no use, since my scripts
to generate JPEGs and the like won't work with Lightroom conversions. Add
to that the fact that I find the Lightroom conversion UI to be not so good
(the controls are hard to work precisely, for example) and I just can't dig
in and really use the thing, even as a beta-test.

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John A. Stovall - 28 Apr 2006 00:09 GMT

>Don't hold back -- tell me how you really feell! LOL.
>
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>I gather the beta for Lightroom performs and functions better than
>Aperture 1.1, which is why i asked.

I've been using Ligthroom and like it but saw no advantage that
Aperture had over PhotoShop CS2.

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my testimony. The events I have recorded should
not be forgotten and must not be repeated."

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http://www.jamesnachtwey.com/

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Randy Howard - 27 Apr 2006 19:19 GMT

burnsdavidj@yahoo.com wrote
(in article
<1146160409.950641.231410@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>):

> Article link and commentary on Slashdot:
> http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/27/1222250
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> really necessary? I suspect you have all the bases covered between
> Photoshop and Breezebrowser...

Lightroom is a very nice upgrade from Aperture, so no worries.

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Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

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RichA - 27 Apr 2006 20:54 GMT

Toooo baaaaaaad. Nice to see Apple shoot itself in the foot.

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cjcampbell - 28 Apr 2006 06:15 GMT

I doubt it will be terribly missed, although I personally will continue
to use it at least until I get home and can change to something else.

The trouble with Aperture was it did not do any one thing better than
any other program was able to do. Its real competition was not with
Photoshop or other editors, but with other photo organization software,
Bibble, and the like. And Aperture was no competition for any of those.

On top of it, Aperture really was buggy, although most of those seem to
be fixed now. It is still too slow and there is no good reason for it
to be that slow.

Apple still might not kill the program. They could do like Microsoft
did with their lame spreadsheet program and simply give it a complet
re-write, releasing it with a new name. Or maybe Aperture is yet
another daring experiment that failed, like Microsoft's "Bob," IBM's
OS/2, or Apple's own Newton.

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