Apple Dumps Most of Aperture Dev. Team 305
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."
Re:What were the problems? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What were the problems? (Score:5, Informative)
The one people complained about most is the thumbnails not matching the actual image (and there's reports of this happenning in iPhoto too).
Re:What were the problems? (Score:5, Informative)
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars [arstechnica.com]
Re:Standards? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What were the problems? (Score:4, Informative)
I really hate having to read between the lines of reviews from mainstream outfits. That's why I love my online sources.
Re:This doesn't surprise me.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Standards? (Score:1, Informative)
Notice that the reverse is also true. Microsoft's products for OS X are often far better than the Windows equivalents. This held true for Internet Explorer, and even today with their Office port. While
Re:This doesn't surprise me.... (Score:3, Informative)
and the beta is better than the aperture release version
no windows beta at this point, sorry
Re:This doesn't surprise me.... (Score:3, Informative)
The Bibble Alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Bibble [bibblelabs.com] is better, and was started by one guy in his garage that wanted some decent SW for the raw files coming off of his digital camera. At least four developers have touched it over the years...i.e. small, smart and agile development team. I think they're pretty cool. The principal developer/entrepreneur Eric Hyman gladly does the support, and he's a very nice guy besides. The SW is QT based and they do extensive testing on Mac (their professional customer base), Linux (where they get many helpful comments) and Windows. They have a freeware version. The whole series of changes you make to an image are stored as an .XML file, which lets you edit it and script a systematic image-processing stream to apply to whole shoots once you pointy-clicky on a representative image to see what works. Reputed to have the best white-balance algorithm in the business. They're usually the first to decode a new obfuscated raw file format for new cameras, too.
aperture performance (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What were the problems? (Score:5, Informative)
Saying that Aperture's output isn't as pretty as Photoshop's is like complaining that your photos look shittier on slides than on prints, without taking into consideration that with the slide you're looking at your own (and the camera's) handiwork and nothing else, while with the print you're looking at something that's been optimized by someone else (the printer) to look good.
The speed problems are unacceptable though. I just thought the Aperture/Photoshop comparison wasn't a great one; although it's odd to say it, Photoshop has become a "mid grade" application, I think Aperture was going for an even 'more-pro' crowd than the average Photoshop user.
I think in retrospect Apple is realizing maybe that market is smaller than they originally thought.
I was on the team... (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the team was not fired, they simply found new positions in Apple once 1.0 was completed because the project management was too shoddy. For instance I am now back working on Mac OS X. Most of the management however has been fired.
Aperture is not being abandoned but is just being reorganised.
Many of the problems in Aperture were caused, not fixed, by the Shake and Motion teams contributions. Originally the rendering pipeline, based on Core Image, was working fine but it was decided to speed it up so over a period of 4 months it was rewritten. It has never worked correctly since then.
Re:iTunes is a nicely implemented on Windows .... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm one of them. My laptop can play divx full screen no problems, but if you try to view quicktime at even 2x (which should be an easy scale), it just falls apart. Struggles to play 1x at times as well.
Now a happy user of QuickTime Alternative [free-codecs.com]
Re:What were the problems? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Standards? (Score:4, Informative)
Good, this explains how Windows Media Player 10 is a lot faster, lighter and stable than Quick Time on Windows... Oh wait it doesn't.
Your argument was totally off. I'm primarily a Windows user. I don't complain that all Windows apps are inferior, I complain specifically of the QT/iTunes ports being inferior compared to other apps with their functionality.
Re:What were the problems? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd guess that the low end G5 (Dual-core 2.0 GHz) with an NVIDIA 7800 GT would probably outperform a Quad 2.5 GHz G5 with the stock NVIDIA 6600 graphics card. Not to say that the NVIDIA 6600 performs badly in Aperture, it doesn't, but the 7800 should perform much better, even in a slower machine. Also, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro which was the default GPU in many of the earlier G5s doesn't perform very well in Aperture. For people with this card you don't need a new/better/faster G5 so much as you just need a better GPU.
When you do have a good graphics card Aperture performs very, very well.
Aperture Is still the Best work Flow (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Note to Bill Gates (Score:3, Informative)
Excessive (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Politely? (Score:3, Informative)
No. The reverse psychology works in this case and counteracts the effect. :-) The moderation system is real easy to manipulate, if one so desires. Saying "go on, mod me down" usually takes you up a level or two.
Mind you, having posted this, all bets are off now.
Oh, it's a list you want? (Score:3, Informative)
2. Ogg support sucks. I had to install a 3rd-party plugin, and there's noticable pauses at the beginnings of ogg tracks.
3. Has a system tray icon, but still appears in the taskbar.
4. Doesn't use global HID-device keys. For example, winamp pauses when i hit the pause key, no matter what application is in the foreground. iTunes doesn't.
5. Slow startup. Can be up to a minute. I found forum posts that suggested that this could be "worked around" by not having the cd burner device start up. Come on.
So, to address these one at a time (Score:2, Informative)
The look-and-feel *is* a Mac UI. It's the ProKit UI that tries to maximise the space available, because, well, you've got a limited screen space and a lot of media to show. Every Pro-App uses this look and feel.
The 'fast+easy' is supposition on your part, and the system is IMHO anyway not meant to be a backup, it's meant to be snapshot-in-time of what you wanted to save. If you want to back stuff up in a more-permanent way, there is always the (free download [mac.com]) Apple Backup application.
Well, yes, I can see that happening pretty easily. With only 1G of RAM and doing RAW conversion to an in-memory form (which is completely uncompressed), I could easily see it taking more than 1G, therefore swapping out other programs to disk, and incurring a wait as they are swapped back in when you want to do something. I can't see any way around that for the application...
Are you trying to say that you want 700 folders ? If you want to separate masters, create a 'smart album' (which is an album consisting of the results of a search) and specify the search to limit the album to the image you want. Admittedly this will get tedious for 700 items, but I can't really see the advantage of 700 separate folders anyway.
Perhaps an Applescript could be written for your situation, so Aperture could be told to create smart-searches based on a criteria (eg: pathname-to-original-directory) for all distinct instances of that criteria. That oughtn't be too hard - then you just get one project and your 700 smart-folders inside.
Agreed. This is a pain.
To be fair, that would be rather hard unless it was 'have applied *any* rotation/crop/etc.', and I'm not sure how useful that
Re:Standards? (Score:2, Informative)
Funny also how VLC [videolan.org] and even WinAMP [winamp.com] manage to not be complete shite at playing videos (and can even do fullscreen omg).
One might conclude that, in fact, Apple just can't handle coding in Windows, or something equally preposterous - because we all know that, unlike M$, Apple's never sued bloggers or screwed over customers or released broken hardware or... oh... wait...
I dared question the illusion that Apple <3's us all, so this is probably going to be modded flamebait - but whatever.
MY MOM KNOWS I'M INSIGHTFUL AND INFORMATIVE LIKE ALL THE OTHER BOYS.
Correcting some problems in your response (Score:3, Informative)
The reason non-modal dialogues are used heavily in Pro apps is because they are more flexible, and offer a much faster workflow rather than having to cancel dialogues, do something, and re-open the same dialogue. Also Aperture makes use of a number of floating windows (HUD's) to maximize use of screen space since they can be quickly brought up or dispelled.
The Apple pro interface has been refined over some time in other apps like Final Cut, it too comes from a base of practical use just like the Apple Guidelines but is intended for a more experienced user with more complex needs.
The backup system sucks- you can't archive anything conveniently (you have to export projects by hand, remember where you put them, etc). That flies in the face of how almost every pro photographer works. Aperture instead only allows you to basically rsync the Aperture folder (oops, I mean, Library) to another disk, aka "Vault", and if you delete a "master", on the next sync, it deletes it from the "Vault" as well. There is no way to reconcile specific differences from Vaults; it's an all-or-nothing system to make it as fast+easy to implement as possible.
It's meant to point out to users who might not be backing up as often as they should the importance of backup by making it a first-class citizen. And yes it removes something from the vault if you've removed it from the library, why wouldn't it? It does store everything removed in a "deleted" folder on the Vault drive in case you made a mistake. Also, As the Aperture instructions point out you are supposed to be making multiple Vault copies and keeping some offsite.
I don't think it's fair to slap Aperture for trying to promote good backup practices when few other apps do anything at all to even help you with backups.
You create a project. You have 700 photos. You've already sorted them, or they are different days, etc. Anyway- you want to logically seperate them out and only have ONE master in ONE folder. Nope, sorry, can't do that- masters reside in the Project all together. If you import a folder with 6 subfolders, the main folder is created as a folder, and the subfolders are created as "albums". The wonderful joy with albums is that a "version" can be in multiple albums.
What does it matter if all the pictures are in a project, as you noted you want to logically seperate them - which you can do with albums.
The main idea is to have folder structures with projects at the leaf nodes. If you're putting everything in one project you're using the product in a way it was not meant to be used.
What's wrong with having versions in multiple albums? I WANT versions to be able to be in multiple albums. You can of course just have it in one if you like. I fail to see why you want to limit flexibility of the product in this way.
You can't use != in any of the smart folder/album/whatevers. Let's say I want to find all images in my project that I haven't tagged with "adjusted" (more on why this is necessary below); I can't.
IPTC keyword search, "does not contain".
Aperture lets you assign plenty of metadata, but can't make smart folders based on steps in a workflow. I import an image, rank it, then adjust it, fix rotation, crop, etc. I want to be able to set up smart folders based on those steps to show me only what is left to do in any particular category. Nope! I have to create custom metadata buttons/tags to do it.
That would be a good idea, what other applications today help you in that regard?
Stack multiple adjustments, and Aperture turns into a total pig loading the photo. Some ad
Re: Not really fair (Score:3, Informative)
On the contrary, new methods and algorithms to produce better output out of the Bayer-like mosaic of most sensors are published if not every week at least at each new major Image Processing conference. The whole point of RAW is to allow future such algorithms to be used on older images.
Lightroom a year behind (Score:3, Informative)
All that Lightroom can really borrow though is the conversion engine (ACR) whcih they already have - as far as the other features Aperture has there's really not much Lightroom can borrow from Photoshop, because it's a fundamnetally different kind of applciation not built for working on pixels.
I would say Lightroom is at least a year behind having something that comes close to being as useful, just based on progress in the betas so far. And some things they have no plans to add at all right now, like the book designer in Aperture.
Don't forget also that Lightroom has to worry about dual platform support which always slows you down.
QuickTime != QuickTime Player (Score:1, Informative)
The old MoviePlayer 2.5 (the player that came with QuickTime 2.5) was a great player and it even had some pretty good and intuitive editing functions, and I kept using it even with QuickTime 4, ditching the dumbed-down QuickTime Player. The player just provides the interface, anyway: the meat of the code is in the QT libraries.
On OS X, you can use alternative QT players such as Cellulo (again, these are just applications that provide a different interface to the QT architecture), and avoid the stupid limitations of QuickTime Player (the "Pro" limitations are implemented by the player: the libraries are identical in the free version, so if you just use a third-party application based on them, you can get access to the full playback/conversion/editing features without paying for Pro).