Category: Photography

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Aperture 3

I’ve just finished my first real session with Aperture 3. It’s running as a 64-Bit app on the 64-Bit Snow Leopard kernel.

What can I say? Aperture 3 is buggy like hell, and it even caused a kernel panic while I was browsing RAW images.

Browsing is something that Aperture 2 could do much better than Aperture 3 – it only paused for a fracture of a second when it needed to organize the system’s memory, but then just went on. Aperture 3 shows something that I would call hiccups. It needs to manage its memory, but when you press a cursor button during the pause, it gets into trouble with the queued events and shows a wild picture slide show.

The crop tool used to work in Aperture 2. In Aperture 3, it has become a buggy piece of crap — it always loses the pre-set aspect ratios when you move one of the marker’s boxes. This should only happen when I do not want to use a predefined aspect ratio. But Aperture 3 seems to randomly make that decision for me. I find that extraordinarily annoying.

And then, while I was browsing through RAWs, it fired a kernel panic.

I don’t know what it is with Apple and Aperture. It appears as if Aperture does not receive any QA testing at all. Aperture 2 was buggy when it was released, and Aperture 1 probably was the slowest application available for the Mac back in the day. Apple usually addressed all those issues with a series of updates, but it always took them months to make the software really usable.

As an Aperture user since version 1.0, I am used to this, but I cannot say that I like getting “banana software” from Cuptertino.

Aperture should receive more love from Apple. And better testing.

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“It just works!” Except for when it doesn’t.

Take a fresh installation of Snow Leopard, Aperture 2, Logic Studio 9 and everything else that you have. Download and install all available updates. Then try to import around 10,000 RAW photos into Aperture. And experience crash after crash after crash.

Basically, that’s what I did and every time Aperture reaches the 1,100 picture counter, it aborts with a long epic failure message. I cannot import my photos, and it doesn’t matter if I try the “import folders as projects” option or the other import option.

Aperture plain and simple crashes every time.

I cannot import my photographs and basically Aperture is now a useless waste of space on my disk drive. And with it, the entire fucking Mac is a waste of space, because Aperture is the #1 reason why there is a Mac Pro beneath my desk in the first place.

I’m beyond being just pissed. I paid a five digit sum for this whole Apple crap. It’s the most expensive computer system that I ever owned – and it also is the most unreliable and unsatisfying one that I ever used. The Mac Pro is loud, Apple has already artificially made it obsolete (no 64-bit OS X kernel, no official 64-Bit Boot Camp support), Snow Leopard is a compatibility disaster and now even Aperture refuses to work.

I don’t want to pay all that money to get a Lightroom license for Windows and to get my existing Adobe for OS X licenses transferred. And I will certainly not give Apple any more of my money: Maybe I wouldn’t have that problem with Aperture 3. But why should I care? I no longer fuel Steve Jobs’ money engine. I also don’t really want to fuel Bill Gates’ engine, but in all honesty and with all the experiences that I had to made, I must come to the conclusion that I have always made a living in Windows land, and that since NT 4, Windows has become a reliable platform for all purposes.

Well, haven’t I been there before? Yes, but it’s hard to dump something that has cost you so much financially. And I do not like to admit defeat and failure or that I have been making some wrong decisions over a couple of years, even if they had only something to do with unimportant (but costly) computer crap.

Anyway. This is it. I’ll put as much as possible of that shit on eBay now.