-snippage-

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have corrected that problem.

Well, considering I've been using Aperture since it first came out and
have been very happy with each and every upgrade they've done to it,
and many of the things that the Apple promos state have been added are
exactly the things I've had on my wish list, I'm probably not going to
try to dissuade you from it.  :^)

Truth be told, I've got a buddy who's a dedicated Nikon film-using guy
(28 years as a pro) who's considering switching to digital just to be
able to use Aperture after having watched me whip through stuff in it.
Yeah, he could do hires scans of his current stuff and load them in,
but he's leaning heavily towards just chucking the film and going with
the newest high-end Nikon digital.  I've got a surprise for him next
outing - I'm renting him a Nikon body to play with just to sway him a
little more.

One thing I did discover immediately - you HAVE to have enough space on
the volume you are going to be converting your library onto - it
apparently doesn't convert it in place, it appears to rewrite the whole
thing, then discard the old.  Mine's a little over 80gb (yeah, I keep
everything except out-of-focus stuff, but I relegate most of it to the
"rejected" classification so it never shows up unless I want it to for
soome reason).  I screwed up and thought it would just be doing
in-place converting, so I didn't allow for enough space on my volume (I
could have tolld it to convert to another volume, asd I have over a
terabyte and a half of storage on various drives).  What happened was
that it converted the first couple of projects, then ran out of space,
annd said "Well, here's your converted library.  Have fun.  Seems a bit
smaller, though."   Oops.    Not a problem for you, if you're just
starting with Aperture.

Well, thank goodness I'm a firm believer in my own preachings with
respect to backups - I have automatic nightly backups of everything I
do on DVD [thank you, Retrospect!], so I was able to fall back on last
night's library to restore and redo the whole process.  This is one
thing that they should do better in the conversion process - either
refuse to convert if there's not enough space, or make it more clear
that you need to convert to another drive with enough room.  There
weren't enough warnings in that respect.

As for the actual asset management, it seems as seamless now than it
did before - even with the ability to store things anywhere, and the
hires previews allowing you to do anything you want with the exception
of actual editing/adjustments even while the image source is offliine
(thus, you could work on an airplane (if they don't take your computer
away from you (along with your shoes, toothpaste, and anything else
that they can get away with claiming might be a 'homeland security
issue') because it just might be a bomb) even though your pictures are
sitting on a hard disk thousands of miles away.

It also has a vastly increased ability to do batch processes on
metadata, naming, and some other elements.  Renaming files from within
Aperture either right at import or later (something that wasn't capable
of being done previously AFAIK) is very easy now.

I've already used the lift & stamp of cropping and straightening data
(which was not possible before) to apply precisely the same straighten
and crop values to a series of variously exposed identical pictures
which were then outputted to Photoshop for use in the HDR process to
create a single High Dynamic Range picture - this saved me 10 minutes
right there before outputting them, and probably 5 minutes in PS to
eliminate the [now unnecessary] step of "automatically align images"
which I always had to use before to make sure that they were perfectly
lined up.

I've also used the drag-and-drop feature already to update some
pictures in a separate portfolio - before, you had to export the
pictures somewhere in jpeg format, import them into the other program,
and then discard the pictures you exported.  Now, a simple flick of the
wrist drags them over to the other program.  That's really going to
save me some time, too.

Now, I just hope to God that they come out with the update to recognize
the XTi's format.  Why it doesn't, I have no clue - they're supposedly
the same .CR2 files that Canon has always used for it's RAW files.

That's all I've had time to play with so far.  I'll report more later,
I've only had it two hours at this point.  Sorry to sound like an
Aperture commmercial, but I really like this program, and have since
the beginning.  If you've been waffling, waffle no longer.  It was good
enough before, now it appears to be even better.  No, it's not a PS
replacement - it's not SUPPOSED to be a PS replacement.  It IS a
wonderful digital asset management system.