Apple remains committed to Aperture

and i quote: "Adobe's Lightroom, currently in beta, has seen tremendous success with over 100,000 downloads and aims to take over the lucrative photography market."

dear macnn, 100,000 downloads of a BETA product shows some mild curiosity, not "tremendous success." and by the way, please show me a single make-their-living-with-their-camera photographer who is willingly allowing a BETA product manage their workflow. just show me ONE. you CAN'T, because there ARE NONE. no one serious about their software usage to make a living does anything more than tinker until it is a final release. so take your sensationalist BS about "aims to take over the lucrative photography market" and shove it.

For Apature to be really useful, it needs two things: not try to be everything, and incorporate some basic functionality into the program, specifically:

1. It should run as an optional plug-in to the Xserve. Our organization generates thousands of digital photos a year (last year was about 50,000, this year double that easily). Our staff needs to access these photos. The client should access the server.

2. File structure should be based on EXIF date, not some proprietary file structure wrapped in a "package".

3. Should be able to handle the management of ALL your photos. Apature, today, is largely restricted to one project.

I dislike rumor sites, which includes Thinksecret. Nonetheless, Macnn needs to do a bit a research, and stop making false statements like Apple's response "Debunk[ed] yet another report from Mac enthusiast site Think Secret ." This simply is false.

The precise statement on Thinksecret was:

"Apple recently asked the engineering team behind its Aperture photo editing and management software to leave"

From there Thinksecret offered several possible reasons as to why Apple took this action, one of which could be that it is abandoning Aperature. Thinksecret, however, specifically said it did not know the reasons behind the action, and speculated that Apple could just be replacing the team. Other websites turned the mere possiblity offered by Thinksecret's into a false rumor.

Recap: The only thing Thinksecret actually asserted as fact was that Apple asked the original Aperature development team to leave. It made no claims as to why that would be the case, but only offered only several possible reasons as to why that could be the case, such as Apple was abandoing the application. Thinksecret never even concluded that was likely.

Apple failed to respond to the Thinksecret rumor, Not suprizing, as Apple rarely ever responds to rumors. Instead, Apple responded to the original possibility offered by Thinksecret to explain Apple's alledged action of asking the Aperature team to leave.

Specifically, Apple stated, "“The reports of Apple reducing their commitment to Aperture are totally false. . . In fact, we’ve got more people working on Aperture right now than ever before."

Notice that the above Apple's statement and Thinksecret's "report" are not irreconcilable. Apple failed to deny that it asked its Aperature team to leave, which was all that Thinksecret claimed to be fact. Apple merely denied the speculation that Apple was abandoning the application, and offered the information that the Aperature team is now bigger. Again read the Thinksecret report, it never claims Apple is abandoning Aperature.

The original thinksecret report can be found at:

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0604aperture.html

I suggest the editors ar Macnn actually do a bit of fact checking before making inaccurate factual claims. Again, I am not a fan of Thinksecret just good journalism.

Let me also point out, that Macnn did not give Thinksecret credit for correctly claiming the 17" MacBook Pro would ship within days.

For the record, I would prefer Macnn not to give Thinksecret any credit, as I dislike rumors, but if you are going to report on one's credibility at least be fair and back your statements up.

Think Secret. Terrin, nice work of the defence of Think Secret, I think you're spot on. As to rumours sites, Think Secret is a rumours site, but it's not a "wild speculation" site like many of the rumours sites out there, and in the way that "rumours" has been distorted to mean "fanciful notions".

Think Secret at least tries to verify any information in receives - and while its articles don't always quite play out as expected, I think it's right a lot more often than it is wrong.

dear macnn, 100,000 downloads of a BETA product shows some mild curiosity, not "tremendous success." and by the way, please show me a single make-their-living-with-their-camera photographer who is willingly allowing a BETA product manage their workflow. just show me ONE. you CAN'T, because there ARE NONE. no one serious about their software usage to make a living does anything more than tinker until it is a final release. so take your sensationalist BS about "aims to take over the lucrative photography market" and shove it.

Well, if you want to say that, you can say the same about Aperture, because no one who knows anything about Apple would dare trust their workflow on a version one product from Apple. And Aperture lived up to that. Just because it doesn't say its Beta doesn't mean people will or won't use it.

But, then again, considering that Apple just dropped the price a couple hundred bucks, maybe no one's using Aperture either.

And, BTW, some photographers most likely use or used lightroom, in order to see how it works and fits into their workflow.

But Apple doesn't have the market that Lightroom is trying to grab. Apple's trying to do it to, except they released their Beta app as 'final', while Adobe is actually saying theirs is a beta.

Oh, and as for stuff Aperture needs to do, the initial reports on the program says that it uses RAW filters from OS X to convert images, and, as such, these filters will improve over time. That might be great and all, but if someone's already manipulated a photo based on a specific filter, updates to that filter better not change any existing content, just new stuff.

Thanks. Like I said I am not a fan of rumor sites. I beleive they tend to hurt Apple because they get people all pumped up about what Apple will release. Then when it does not deliver, people are wrongly bumped out. Worse, my stock takes a hit.

With that said, I think Thinksecret tries to actually publish rumors that are based on sources that it thinks are reliable. That is far more then can be said about most such sites. In fact, most of the other sites seem to "borrow" from Thinksecret (notice that does not say all).

For the record, Thinksecret was hammered because it said Apple was not going to release a video iPod, then Apple released an iPod with video capabilites. Thinksecret stuck to its guns and said that is not the "true" video iPod. Based on pure instinct, I think Thinksecret was correct. I think three things are preventing Apple from releasing such a device. First, the Burst lawsuit. Second, no deal with the movie studios. Third, I believe Apple probably did have problems with their latest iPod design. That explains the long delay between updates.