Way to go Ars!
For those not following any of the recent negative buzz surrounding Apple’s Aperture 1.0, you should start by scouring the web for most of the reviews that have labeled it as phenomenal and a ‘must-have’, then read the initial review at Ars Technica. The latter, while having been demonized as an Aperture bash-fest or propoganda spewed by a newly discovered MS gopher, is actually a VERY GOOD review of Aperture and brings to light some highly overlooked yet nearly showstopping issues with the software.
I’d rather you read the original review and then the followup review which addresses some user questions, than blockquote salient parts of it here. The point of my post here is to give kudos to Dave Girard for sticking to his guns on the issue. I adore Apple as much as the next Mac-head but the very discernible difference between the RAW Importer of Adobe Photoshop and Aperture should be showstopping for anyone who takes their digital photography professionally or as serious as such. I would think that the three photographers mentioned on the Aperture minisite in the Profiles section would rethink their head-first commitment to Aperture having learned of this serious flaw.
Having vented all that, I still love Aperture and I want to love it more. I’m confident that Apple would address this issue, just like they dealt with the fact that iPhoto 1 couldn’t handle more than 25 images before slowing to a crawl. I’m not looking to bash Apple, but I’m certainly looking to praise Ars Technica which has had a number of really well-executed reviews in the past (too many to link to). This is the kind of inspection that I have come to expect hope from MacWorld magazine but have been seriously disappointed from a predominant percentage of write-ups. Many, feel like fluff pieces that are little more than regurgiations of press releases and little more. The saving grace are usually the well-done hardware reviews, Game-Room articles, and the David Pogue banter (Breen is in there too).
I’m not off to bash MacWorld, but it hasn’t merited it’s dollar-value as much recently. This may have been spurred by the lack of a good hard drive reviews, but then again, my recent experience of data-loss and recovery has greatly scewed my opinion that ultimately the prime criteria for hard drive reviews should be reliability. There will always be echos of people who don’t do enough backups, but the problem of backups breaking is more commonplace than one would think and it comes down to how well a drive will work when you really need it to.
Having vented all that now, I’ve some Filemaker stuff to write about, off to that!
