Aperture team fired!

[lilbandit]

Thinksecret claims team has been fired or moved to different departments. I own Aperture but can't get over the hardware demands. A DP 2Ghz G5 5GB ram and an X800 graphics card: Aperture is still a little sluggish!

[Thank The Cheese]

Full article

hmm, that's interesting. Apple are very image concious and don't like to be embarrassed, so it doesn't surpise me they are making changes to the team to get it up to their standards. I didn't know about the $200 cash back -- that's pretty decent of them.

I've never used the app, but from what I hear it's a good application, but like you said, the requirements are too high.

[Captain Code]

That is if you can believe the story. It is from think secret after all. There is at least one post on slashdot claiming to be from an Apple employee who worked on Aperture and he said that the people were sent to work on other things within the company and not fired.

[Thank The Cheese]

true, but whether they have been relocated or fired altogether, it's still interesting that Apple has, in a way, acknowledged that Aperture has major problems and is at risk of being a total flop.

Who here uses Aperture? Is it really as bad as people are saying? I mean, take away the system demand issues, was it worth the (original) price tag?

Perhaps this has made Apple realise just how many professionals use non-professional Macs. I think the Aperture development team made the mistake of assuming that, because this is pro software, the users would have pro macs (PowerMacs/Books). This just isn't the case, and I for one know many graphic design studios, universities, and photographers who use iMacs and iBooks.

[fryke]

Even *if* you have a Pro Mac, like I do, it's very sluggish indeed. See: A "professional" Mac user certainly thinks that a two-year-old PowerBook should still be considered a professional machine. After all: It *does* work fine with Adobe CS 2, and Photoshop was always considered the heavy-dog which makes computers want to run faster. Aperture - at least when they introduced it - probably brought 80% of professionally used Macs to their knees. After the update it's better, but I'd still advise users to have a dual-processor or dual-core setup with a G5 or an intel Core Duo for it. And that can be a heavy upgrade price for 300 USD of software...

While I think it's great that Apple pushes things forward and actually makes _use_ of the technologies available, they should not completely forget about the pro-users who have pro-hardware and want to upgrade at the end of 2006 or sometime in 2007... I.e.: Software should have fall-back capability. The interface of Aperture looks gorgeous, but one button should be available to turn everything unnecessary off.

I certainly hope that Adobe's Lightroom will give Apple lots to think about. The interface feels so much cleaner and is so much faster... Of course there's also problems with _that_, and it's in beta so far, so we don't even know where it's going and what it'll cost... (although I guess it'll be competitive with Aperture.)

[Lt Major Burns]

pro users use pro machines. but different areas of the industry need it for different reasons. video and motion graphics need the fastest computers at the moment, it makes the most difference (encoding video seems to be the biggest benchmark now).

for a good photographer, you shouldn't need much in the post production area, your photos are that good anyway, and need little in terms of touching up.

photoshop runs fine on my 700mhz g3 ibook, i was able to do everything i needed it for, it was slow, but i got the results i wanted. if i was a photographer, i needed a camera and a computer, i'd propbably spend a grand of my budget on a better camera, not a better computer.

[lilbandit]

I use Aperture to manage my images. I'm a keen amateur (nothing spectacular) who wanted to move to a RAW workflow purely for increased tweaking and image correction options. Aperture is a great concept but the requirements are lunacy. I own a Canon 350D and it's RAW files average around 8MB each. The 350D isn't a pro camera and it's 8 MP cropped sensor produces files that are tiny compared to a full frame professional slr like the 1DsMkII (50MB RAWs) I can only imagine what Aperture must be like with these file. I wish it was faster because it is easily the best way to deal with RAWs and large image libraries. There was an issue with noise but the 1.1 update did address this along with the metadata (EXIF) bugs when exporting and sharing with an external image editor such as Photoshop. Like most people I take Thinksecret with a grain of salt but I would hate to think that I have invested in a system that might very well turn out to be a lemon! If the team have been fired does that mean that a total rewrite is necessary? Rumour has it that development is a mess. Any software engineers please chime in!!

[Captain Code]

I highly doubt a total rewrite is required. Performance testing can be done to see what parts of the program are slowing the whole thing down, and they should be able to find ways of making those parts faster.