Aperture's Iris Closing?

[jmeyoung]

yeah sales must be down. i guess nobody wanted a great photo program. shucks.

Typically sales being down is a sign that the program is not great.

 

[jelloshotsrule]

yes, bretm.

i expect that aperture will remain, and hopefully get some much needed changes. to me, it'd seem to be smarter to get the core of an app right from the start, and then work on its flow/appearance... instead, apple seems to be doing the opposite. guess we'll all wait and see how it works out in the end.

 

[kingtj]

No, no ... I beg to differ...

First of all, Microsoft very *rarely* comes out with a new software product on their own that "drives competitors into the dust". Rather, they look around at what's available and they buy out the "best of breed" they can get ahold of at the time, rebranding it as "Microsoft". I'd even argue that when they *do* sell their own product rather than buying one out, they usually lose! (EG. Microsoft Money vs. Quicken - which, incidentially, they ended up trying to buy out a few years ago, but got blocked by the fed. govt.)

Even inside Windows itself, Microsoft bundled up a bunch of 3rd. party products and incorporated them. (EG. The Pinball game that came with Windows was made by Maxis. Their Hyperterminal is originally from Hilgraeve Software. The disk defragmenter in Win '98 was licensed from Symantec.) Sometimes, you even find this inside their own applications. (EG. Outlook's fax support is licensed from Symantec... basically a component of "WinFax Pro".)

The interesting thing with Apple is that they *do* regularly develop their own software products from scratch. This puts them at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to getting other commercial software developers to agree to write software for their machines -- but it also means they're pretty limited in how many projects they can tackle at a given time. It's pretty clear to me that Apple's focus has been on "rich media publication". If it has to do with editing video, photos, or sound - there's a good chance Apple wants a part of it. Adobe has always been in this same general market-space, except doing it cross-platform. When Final Cut Express and Pro proved themselves superior, Adobe dropped support of Premiere for the Mac. That didn't mean they soured on writing anything for the Mac, though. I think they're well aware that they're in "Apple's waters" when it comes to software product focus. They're simply going to keep taking stabs at offering their products to Mac users until/unless sales drop off because Apple beats them at one of them. They still make plenty of sales off the Windows users, either way.

If Adobe is coming out with a competitor, still more a, so far, well received competitor, then it most certainly is in Apple's best interests to "drop" Aperture. Dropping it aids Adobe and aids the third party product that has a chance of being cross platform.

By aiding Adobe, it also strengthens the confidence of third party developers who support Apple. They know that unless they screw up, Apple isn't always going to sweep in and steal their lunch money. This is probably the most serious problem with Windows at the moment, Microsoft has, time and time again, driven third parties into the dust.

There's no point in Apple competing with Adobe if it doesn't result in a significantly better product aimed at the same market. It's a waste of Apple's resources. It drives home the message that Apple doesn't care about third party support. It doesn't add anything to the Macintosh platform. It undermines cross platform compatibility.

Aperture has done the job it was intended to do. It has proven the credibility of CoreGraphics, and it's proven the value of a particular type of tool enough that other people want to create those tools. Let's not get disappointed by a decision from Apple that clearly doesn't harm the platform at all, and will give more confidence to developers to develop great things for the platform. There's more cause, in my view, to mourn the passing of AppleWorks than Aperture.

 

[Gasu E.]

I completely disagree.

If Apple has decided to abandon the project, which will be a PR nightmare, they would want to be selling as few copies NOW as possible.

Correct. I work in the software division of a large computing company and you ALWAYS want to minimize total unit sales of a dud. Because the cost of supporting a large customer base will KILL you if you have no product revenues coming in.

 

[JGowan]

This is not like Jobs at all. Steve Jobs just does not accept defeat that easily.

With the lawsuit in play, I think Think Secret wants to hurt Apple with bogus stuff, but I just don't know...

 

[weitzner]

I was under the impression that most everyone liked aperture, but agreed that it was still a developing product. I thought it was great, hopefully the shake and motion teams just needed to borrow some of the aperture guys.

 

[suntzu]

I read an article in Outdoor Photography that talked about how a lot of photographers (both pro and amateur) are so photoshop-centric that it becomes something of a crutch. Instead of trying to obtain quality photos, they thought "No problem. I can fix that up in photoshop." Thus photography becomes less about using a camera correctly and more about experience & skill in Photoshop. I'm starting to see this in my own work and it's worrying me.

I think Aperture tries to take a different approach to digital photography. I've talked with a few friends who are film-centric and they're really interested in getting into digital photography because of Aperture. They said it's more "organic" and that programs like Photoshop confuse the hell out of them.

I'm curious as to how many people here "grew up" with the digital medium and how many people were dedicated film users until recently.

 

[scottlinux]

sometimes you have to kill a team that's not done the job required of them. This does not mean you kill the product.

Right. Aperture is NOT going anywhere. The programming team is being let go. The ONLY big bug with the program is the way it handled RAW from cameras.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/aperture.ars/5

Which was fixed in 1.1 (?)

Also the other problem is that Aperture runs through Core Image and requires a heafty video card to run, therefore won't run on mac minis, iBooks, early iMac G5s, etc.

Lightroom will run fine on a minimal G4, b/c it doesn't utilize Core Image. It flies on my iBook G4 1Ghz.

This all smells like a total rewrite of Aperture for v.2.

 

[halse]

Aperture pegs both processors on an MBP but then so does Lightroom.... as to bugs there are about 13,000 posts on the Apple discussion site http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa [apple.com] and there are probably about the same number in the Lightroom forums.... while I like most Apple apps I've been using Lightroom (so far) but it has its own "features".... both apps still seem like betas to me, both Apple and Adobe are going with interfaces unlike those in their other apps and each approach has some pluses and minuses.......... with millions of dslrs out there and more being bought every day there is a real market for this type of app and $299 is a lot less than the price of a lens (at least I get edu prices on apps if not lenses)

 

[mi5moav]

If true this is good news. A reawakening for Jobs. Hopefully, he'll realize that he isn't GOD and even the almighty screws up royally once or twice. But the point being sometimes you need to go outside of the chicken coupe to pick some better eggs. Maybe they won't be so tight with there money I understand that we have an oil crisis going on but just start riding your bicycles over there and start spendind your money on some good stuff... There are some great things out there to be had. You waited a bit to long, you thought you were gonna get some bargains in the market and now the market has caught up and your cash is getting a little stale... Come on lets start spending already. We got some great little companies that are starting to catch back on fire that might be fit into a certain segment... like Kodak or Adobe and others who have some great name recognition and some great great patents and products to be had. Spend wisely my son but spend and spend soon.

 

[SalsaShark]

Thought I'd quote apple ...

"Unlike the duplicate files you need to create in other applications, image “versions” take up virtually no storage space, so you don’t pay an overhead penalty. And Aperture automatically keeps track of all your image versions for you, sequentially numbering them on the fly and connecting them to the “master” image as part of a Stack. How helpful is that?"

Have you even used the thing? Maybe instead of quoting stuff you find on the web, you actually endeavor to understand what you're talking about. What a novel concept.

I copy files off my card onto my laptop. That's one copy. I import those into Aperture. It makes a copy in its library file. That's two copies. Any changes you make from there are incremental, but it makes a full copy of the file in its library. And if you have ever tried pulling the original RAW file out of that library mess, you'll understand why I'd prefer to keep my original RAW files completely separate from Aperture. I have no intention of keeping every photo I'll ever shoot in my laptop's Aperture library.

 

[jholzner]

Well that's his screen name, jholzner.

LOL...I stand corrected!! I didn't even realize that! I thought you were just being a jerk

 

[iGary]

I've had time to digest this, and I really hope it isn't true.

I just blasted through a 600-image shoot I did on the water last night and got it all paired down to selects in about an hour - in full screen. Photoshop doesn't even come close, and Portfolio is a joke in this regard.

The image editing portion of Aperture is pretty unimpressive, unfortunately. There are better plugins for noise and sharpness in Photoshop, so for the images I plan on selling for print or display, I do find myself exporting to Photoshop quite a bit.

If Apple can get the image editing part of the program they'll do gangbusters because the organizational and database aspect of the program is really kick ass.

 

[suntzu]

Have you even used the thing? Maybe instead of quoting stuff you find on the web, you actually endeavor to understand what you're talking about. What a novel concept.

I copy files off my card onto my laptop. That's one copy. I import those into Aperture. It makes a copy in its library file. That's two copies. Any changes you make from there are incremental, but it makes a full copy of the file in its library. And if you have ever tried pulling the original RAW file out of that library mess, you'll understand why I'd prefer to keep my original RAW files completely separate from Aperture. I have no intention of keeping every photo I'll ever shoot in my laptop's Aperture library.

You need to calm down. There's nothing from your previous post that would indicate you do this. Not everyone has the same workflow as you so you can't assume the poster knew exactly what you're talking about.

My workflow is similar to yours and I have no problems. I copy the RAW files to CD/DVD and then I get my RAW's into Aperture. So I only have 1 copy on my MBP.

 

[~Shard~]

Perhaps they are disbanding the Aperture team to instead focus on Aperture Pro. The CS3 Photoshop won't be out for another year, maybe Aperture's sales are hurting because of that, who knows... And maybe Apple is going to try and release a more heavy duty version of Aperture as a result.

Nah, I'd say not, but hey, it's fun to throw random ideas out there...

 

[devman]

I know two of the engineers who wrote Aperture. They have both moved to other groups, one to Application Frameworks, and one to CoreImage. In each case, their new job is a higher-profile position. If there had been a round of firings of the Aperture developers, I would have heard about it.

-jcr

Taken from a slashdot post here http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184241&cid=15212201

Oh and jcr certainly is connected and would know. Anyone who's into Cocoa and been to WWDC or on the mailing lists would know him... http://slashdot.org/~jcr/journal/109763

 

[shawnce]

Taken from a slashdot post here http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184241&cid=15212201

Oh and jcr certainly is connected and would know. Anyone who's into Cocoa and been to WWDC or on the mailing lists would know him... http://slashdot.org/~jcr/journal/109763

I agree with jcr as well... some folks got moved around among teams but not close to what ThinkSecret is suggesting. ...and so far 1.1 release looks good.

 

[70355]

MacRumors is being hypocritical by expressing concern that they hoped Think Secret had confirmed the rumor, since the rumor could hurt Apple financially -- and then they go ahead and run the rumor anyway, without confirmation.

 

[wildmac]

For those of you who don't do proffesional graphics or photo work...

Let me explain the problems Aperture has...

It's a resource pig. Many photographers travel light, and they need this to work on a laptop well. Right now it's only suited for a power tower in the studio.

It's RAW processing sucks. This is a killer for proffesional use. This, above all, needs fixing. The home user might not mind, but the pro can't have the strange artifacts that Aperture introduces.

Lightroom WILL be bundled with the next Adobe suite. It's totally logical that Adobe will do this. This means that any graphics pro who upgrades their suite will also have Lightroom. Why would they then buy Aperture, unless Aperture is a far superior program?.. (And Aperture certainly is NOT that right now).

Aperture may be fine for those of you who what IPhoto on steroids, but for a working pro, Aperture is not their yet, and has some major competition now.

 

[fixyourthinking]

wow ... from the hand that feeds the horses mouth

this could negatively impact sales, so hopefully they double checked their sources on this story

arn

Rumors sites couldn't possibly hurt Apple's sales ... wow there's an admission I thought i would never see!

True too!

 

[manu chao]

I copy files off my card onto my laptop. That's one copy. I import those into Aperture. It makes a copy in its library file. That's two copies. Any changes you make from there are incremental, but it makes a full copy of the file in its library. And if you have ever tried pulling the original RAW file out of that library mess, you'll understand why I'd prefer to keep my original RAW files completely separate from Aperture. I have no intention of keeping every photo I'll ever shoot in my laptop's Aperture library.

I can very easily access every photo in Aperture, from there it just one command to export the original raw, e.g. to open it in PS.

If you do not trust Aperture, you can keep a back-up of the all raw files you imported. You need this back-up only in case Aperture corrupts its library, which to all we know will not happen every day. Therefore there is no need to keep the back-up on your computer.

If you want to organise your raw files within in Aperture and within your own folder structure then you need two copies. But then you also need to maintain two folder structures. I would not have thought anybody would be willing to do this.

 

[ChrisA]

The fact that they cut the price drastically and offered the 1.1 upgrade free and gave refunds to the people who bought 1.0 says to me that Aperture was not selling well.

The biggest problem I had with Aperture, that kept me from buying it was the raw conversion process. There are so many other raw converters on the market. For $500 Apterure would have to be far better then any of them. It wasn't and still is not. In the Nikon world "Nikon capture" still doees the best job, folowed maybe by Photoshop. Nikon is comming out soon with "NX" which will sell for $100. Apple will have to compete with that

Another problem for Apple is that the raw conversion is actually done by a component of Mac OSX. So iPhoto shares the converter with Aperture so at the low end Aperture was to compete with iPhoto. Lots of competitors and it didn't stand out above them where it really matters

But it was really not bad either. It just failed to be the best.

But Adobe got it right. They put Lightroom out as a free Beta version. It looks like their plan is to spend about a year listening to users. They will have a much better version 1.0 release. I think Apple knows this and may be in a bit of a panic to salvage Aperture.

 

[mazola]

But how will this effect iPod sales?

 

[ITR 81]

Something is Fishy

This story just "smells" wrong to me. I wonder whether this isn't a bogus leak from Apple, still attempting to shut down their Think Secret source.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Sounds abit like FUD.

Apple sent FUD and TS bit.

 

[jelloshotsrule]

MacRumors is being hypocritical by expressing concern that they hoped Think Secret had confirmed the rumor, since the rumor could hurt Apple financially -- and then they go ahead and run the rumor anyway, without confirmation.

that's fair enough, and i may join you in asking arn why he chose to post it if he considered its possible negative impact (whether or not true).