I'm sick of Aperture already, I can't believe people are using it, its clunky, bulky, poorly designed, unergonomic junk.

Lightroom for the win.

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John, how about some examples to backup your rant?

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@John, not very useful of a comment, ey? :)

@all, I'd love to see a smugmug export plugin for Aperture and for iPhoto... (for the latter I am not talking about the exisiting smugmug uploader)...
I'd want to be able to create new galleries from within a tool without having to create them on the site first and then upload pics...

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I've used Aperture a little and find it as slow as a lot of the apps that came out of the department in Apple where I used to work. Apps like Pages, iWeb, GarageBand, like Aperture, are clunky, slow, memory intensive and poorly designed(in a usability context). It's obvious at Apple lately that the goal of a streamlined and fast, highly intuitive, small memory footprint app is a thing of the past for Apple... It's all about the bottom line now baby... How many computers can we sell? Well since there aren't that many mac user in the world- Apple just has to sell again to the same users, over and over again.
Apple wants you to upgrade, so they promote and sell apps that run slowly, launch slowly, and use up huge amounts of memory- now if we want to buy into the "Digital Lifestyle" apps that Apple provides we better do something. So we have to dump our G4 1.5 GHz or G5s with 1GB or more of RAM(that we bought for 2k a year ago) because were tired of waiting forever for the spinning rainbow beachball from hell to go away (thinking it's a hang sometimes), or not being able to do anything while the front app is processing. We're forced to upgrade to 2GB of RAM or better yet for Apple buy a brand new Intel Mac with more than enough computing power by ten times (with any well designed application). Of course this kind of ultra-capitalist, consumer manipulation has been going on for ages (Cars), but it seems to me Apple has totally committed itself to these, sad to say, "greedy, short term gains" sales mentalities just within the last 4 years or so. That's a big reason why I left, I don't agree at all with their recent product sales philosopies. I feel lucky because my livelyhood does not rely on keeping up with the fastest, latest greatest crap that comes out of Cupertino. Apple really needs to re-evaluate how it creates it's "award winning" software...in many cases the award is best descibed as the "best app to force you to upgrade" :-). Theve lost their mojo for me anyways.

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Regarding Lightroom vs. Aperture.

Aperture 1.5's ability to manage photo files nonintrusively makes it a whole lot more credible for a lot of people (myself included).

The strength I see in Aperture are its superior keywording interface, its better loupe, and its freeform "lightbox" features. I'm told it also handles dual displays far better than Lightroom, and I prefer some of its HUD-based interface paradigms.

I much prefer Lightroom's "photo development" controls. I played a little with the new "Vibrancy" control (inspired by Pixmantec's RawShooter, which Adobe acquired) in the new Lightroom beta4 and it's just wonderful. But even at beta1 Lightroom's histogram controls for were superior. Beta4 has a bunch of other really nice tone-curve control tweaks -- it just seems way ahead of the pack in that area. I'm not familiar with Aperture's print-making interface, but Lightroom's is excellent (and I've read here and there credible reports that it's more pleasant/productive than Aperture's).

I slightly prefer Lightroom's overall look, but that doesn't really make up for Aperture's better thought out UI in various places. (It's hard to describe the differences, because different levels of the UI see different product's strengths. E.g., I like the Apple HUD concept, but the fantastic Lightroom development controls are also UI.)

Often choice is good for the customer, but here I'm not so sure. Certainly, the choice for a Mac user today is not straightforward. Furthermore, if Apple competes Lightroom off the Mac (like what is happening with Photoshop Elements), we lose a cross-platform solution (another strength of Lightroom over Aperture), and perhaps important goodies in the future (like seemless Lightroom-Photoshop interaction, something Aperture can probably not fully achieve).

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héé ??

are there something new to say here ??

of course applications take huge memory

all the applications you name (as final cut) own to huge memory eater category. they always were.

final cut were always huge, whatever the mac at the time. now final cut can modify HD movie, complex codec and realtime effect. it need a lot of memory

the same with logic, or the most huge : SHAKE. it was big, it is big, it will be big.

aperture is the same : a complex software created to have a huge video card and a lot, a real lot of memory.

what is new ?

it was the same with SGI software (did you think the old sgi station was enough for the new maya software ? ) , it is the same with professional unix/linux software for scientific calculs . Searchers want to do more and more complex simulation, the software wants more and more memory

in my youth, 128 was ExpeEEEensive, and of course Real Computers (workstation, little mainframes) had gigabytes of ram. people was angry, professionals was doing work in the limits of the petty computers of the time.

--
people was always saying that about Microsoft. windows or office was juggernault software aiming to destroy your poor computer to force you to buy an other.

yes,; maybe, but years after years the software make more and more tasks.

as videogame, Origin, in 90s, was famous because the every new game needed to drop the computer and buy the all new, with the latest intel cpu. it was madness, people crying everywhere, but the games was so much beautiful
(but sometimes, not so pleasant.. so one day it stops)

so what ?

Apple is not here to Save the World.
no they will NOT change the industry
no they will NOT make magical software
yes they will do EVERYTHING to gain money. I want they gain money, to continue to create os X, macs and everything

why "award winning" software ?
because iLife is a success
because Final cut hd is one of the most used software to do video editing , you can go to Avid if you want to do more big work
because Shake is well known
because yes, logic pro is really used by many professionals
and os X is that good

but they are NOT magicals
they need memory to do their tricks

Aperture to be "real time" of course need the video card to do EVerything, and that, the video card need hundreds of memory, 1gB of vram would be nice in fact to be serious.
neither pci-express and whatever fast ram today can change that. (TOO SLOW)

and the big secret :

Apple was ALWAYS Greedy

Even before 84
do you want to see what was Lisa ?
do you want to remember what was Os 8 ?
do you forget quicktime pro ?

did you forget Appletalk et Ethertalk network device prices ??

slowdown the Drama. nothing has changed. beside from 6 or 8 eights years apple is making more exciting products

but greedy ? yeah, totally, as IBM or sun or nvidia. big big greedy. as in the ol'good day of yore.

of course I have a powermac quad G5 with 4.5gB of ram, and what the fuss ? the software I need for my work are perfect on it, it's OBVIOUS, the computer is THAT powerful (and it was expensive).
Aperture was even improved in 1.1.x version and some people reports 1.5 is better.
Os x 10.2 was a way faster than os x 10.1 on the SAME hardware
os x 10.3 was faster than 10.2
10.4 get spotlight and dashboard, of course they eat memory , so what ?

you got selective memory : iworks 06 was faster than 05. you could say : "it was easy", but it's reality.
Os X was improvement upon improvement, never they artificially told you to buy the new mac to got the improvement of os X.
Important compatibility improvement of Safari was offered.
aperture 1.5 is free upgrade and aperture is only 319 euro, they KNOW the market, they SEE when there are a problems. no need to be Dramatic and Angry.
The market's answer is enough for them to understand.

sometimes I think people need memory.

in 80s apple already did "huge" software

People DID you forget than EVERYONE complained the VERY FIRST Macintosh had not ENOUGH Memory ???
how can you forget that ?

NOW is NOT different from Yesterday !
and why to be so whiny ? it works. software are more and more powerful and easy and the industry is selling, and people are creating many things with theses TOOLS. but yeah, the novelty need hardware. yes.

---
as Microsoft old complaints, or unix old whining, nothing changed.

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OMG Michel, that was long! Life is too short for all that. Put it on your blog, bro! =)

Try running Aperture with two monitors - there is no other experience that comes close to that with any other program.

I also have no problem having to get new hardware to run new, groundbreaking software. If you don't want to buy new hardware, stick with the old software.

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Has anyone been successful at getting the SDK from Apple for it? i'd like to write some export plugins but they're not responding to the email I send on their page.

Thanks

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Mac Lover, what's a better alternative? Linux?

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Why is Picasa so fast zipping around images when Aperture is so slow?

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