I like what I'm seeing here ...
Well, this looks like a really good update. I'll be getting this on my iMac when our bonus check comes in.
On the highlights:
Brushes
Yeah, that's why I was contemplating moving to LR altogether. Selective brushing in a non-destructive tool (and without having to "freeze" previous non-destructive edits as we would in a plugin approach) is a killer feature for me. I expected Aperture to come up with some response here, and looking at the promo materials they really hit it out of the park. I'll reserve final judgement until I actually use it, but it's a really good implementation from the looks of it.
Slideshows
I do a lot of slideshows. Anything that makes good slideshows easier is an absolute boon to me. If I can skip the export from Aperture / import in iMovie / etc rigamarole, that's good. I'm not entirely convinced that Aperture slideshows will be able to do what I'd done in Final Cut for years and am finally just able to do in iMovie, but it's looking quite promising. The tap-transition gesture is what I've been begging Apple to put into one of their slideshow apps for years (Final Cut comes close in that you can tap out the beats of a song as markers and then snap photos to those transitions). I expect the same thing will appear in iMovie '10. We'll see if Aperture becomes my slideshow tool.
GPS Support
We do a lot of hiking and exploring, and I always have my GPS tracker going along for the ride so we can show where we've been on Google Earth when we get back home. Right now getting this into Aperture involves several external tools and a good bit of voodoo.
Adjustment Presets
I've got one project in my library that has nothing but multiple versions of a single picture with different adjustments applied to it. I go to the version with the adjustments I want, lift all the adjustments, and stamp them onto the image I want to apply those adjustments to. Here, instead, I would save those adjustment collections as a preset, and apply them via a more natural drop-down. This is a nice improvement, eliminating the need for a clumsy workaround. Obviously I'll be using it. It will save me lots of time.
Full Screen Browser
Getting all the "cruft" out of the way is a great goal. I find myself constantly hitting the key to show/hide the projects panel so I can move between them, and there's never enough room on my screen (although the 27" iMac will improve that, especially since my old screen will still be running right next to it as a secondary monitor). A very nice improvement, and, again, one that I will use constantly and which will save me immeasurable time.
Faces
Okay, people don't like Faces. For me, it's great. I keep all our kids, team players, family members, etc, as keywords in Aperture, so I can quickly pull up the 3-star pictures of our eldest in the past year, or all the pictures of the youngest with her grandma, etc. I see Faces not so much as a replacement for that than as a helper for it: open a project and have Faces identify everywhere it sees Person X; select those (perhaps skip a few) and add the Person X keyword. Repeat. Eventually I might learn to trust Faces for this, but for now I'm sticking with my keywords. Faces is a helper.
Reordering of Projects
Yeah, this should have been in Aperture 1.1. It's a shame they have taken so long to get such a basic feature implemented.
Merge Libraries
That will save a LOT of time. Current workaround is to export each project on my laptop, copy them over, then import each project into Aperture on my main computer. That's painful, every single time. Plus, every once in a while I'll find that I end up doing some additional modifications on the MacBook library that I then need to get over to the desktop, and have to cross my fingers and hope I didn't make any other significant changes to the project on the desktop as I wipe it out and replace it with the laptop export. The smarter merge (keeping the most recent changes) would help a lot in peace-of-mind here.
Project-Level Info
Woohoo! We can now put "metadata" on the project itself! Again, something I've been asking Apple for for years finally makes it in!
Curves
Another nice tool to learn. Seems more flexible than the levels adjustments, although so far as I can tell they do the same thing (the levels adjustments were limited to 5 sample points, though).
Movie Support
I don't do much with them new-fangled moving pictures, but occasionally we'll have one we want to associate with a project in Aperture. Right now I have a separate folder structure in Finder which replicates the date-based Aperture Project structure, where all those movies go. And you just kinda have to know they're there. It'll be nice to have them back together with the pictures taken by the same camera / on the same trip.
Printing Options
When printing out for photo frames etc, I tend to export the images as JPEG then drop them into Pages for page-level layout. We'll see if Aperture's enhanced print layout tools can let me avoid the extra steps, at least some of the time.
