“The recent abrupt discontinuation of Apple’s Shake professional compositing software has left fans of the company’s professional photography workflow tool, Aperture, nervous about the future of that product too. On many user forums people are discussing Aperture with an impending sense of doom. It’s been quite some time since Aperture was updated, and reports from the internet suggest that many users have left the software in favor of Adobe’s rival product, Lightroom,” Thomas Fitzgerald blogs. “So should Aperture users be worried?”
Fitzgerald writes, “In a word, no. There are some pretty big differences between the situation with Aperture and the situation with Shake. Shake was a very old piece of software that Apple had bought and continued to develop. However, development on it had pretty much stopped when Apple lowered the price of it a few years ago. Since then the product has been on life support. Recently all marketing efforts for Shake had been ceased and there hasn’t been a service upgrade for it in a long time. People were surprised primarily because rumor sites had suggested that Apple had been working on a replacement for Shake, but unfortunately this never materialized. With Aperture however Apple are still actively marketing the software.”
Fitzgerald writes, “What’s more, Aperture received a maintenance upgrade in March of this year, and Raw support has continued to be added through operating system upgrades and system patches… I highly doubt Aperture is going away. Despite it’s troubled birth I suspect that the software is still actively being developed as we speak. Unfortunately Apple’s lack of communication on any level is not helping.”
Read more in the full article here.
If you’re here you’re an Apple fan and as such likely to defend Aperture as a worthy alternative to Lightroom, which it most certainly is not.
In the real world Ap is utterly outclassed by Lr and is outsold 20-1.
You’d have to be a masochist to dump 1700 wedding images into Ap. I know because I did just that. After 3 hours it was still gagging for breath.
Lr was ready in 10 minutes.
I would love to be an Ap fan but I could bore you with 50 reasons why Lr eats it’s lunch. And to add insult to injury Apple treats its pro customers like consumers, with no product roadmap and slow updates.
But who knows, maybe v3 will be the killer app I know Apple can make.
When importing about 600 images directly from a CF card using a firewire card reader, it takes Aperture about 5 minutes on my machine (MacPro). If the photos are already on a hard drive, it takes about 30 seconds to import that number into the program. So, for the person who had it take over 3 hours for 1700 images, there was a problem with your set-up.
As I mentioned above, I tried both programs. Lightroom for about 6 months, including time giving feedback to Adobe on a special beta panel. When Aperture 1.5 came out I tried it and never looked back. I am sure Lightroom has improved, but so did Aperture with v2.0. I recently saw a demo online and the person was using Lightroom. After that I thought, “boy, I am sure glad I don’t have to deal with that!”. Aperture is just a more polished, well thought-out program.
Sorry this is off the topic of Aperture going away or not, but when people put down Aperture and I have not had the same experience, I have to say something.
Aperture will go directly to a Snow Leopard only update as well as the Shake follower. Final Cut 7 is only a interims version for a easer transistion to the next level, because most production environments cant move instantly to Snow Leopard. I expect the fully optimised Final Cut for Snow Leopard side by side and highly integrated with Shake sometime in H1/10.
From the article: “The recent abrupt discontinuation of Apple’s Shake professional compositing software …”
Abrupt? News of Shake’s demise was passed on long ago. Everyone knew a change was coming, especially as Motion gained traction and more robust capabilities. Apple announced it would end development in 2006 when the 4.1 UB version was released.
That’s hardly abrupt.
And it’s hard to see the parallels with Aperture.
Shake is being superseded by migration of its features into Final Cut and Motion. It’s not like Apple is just dropping those users.
-jcr
The fact that some might believe Aperture can be axed shows you the sorry state that it is in.
@iMacBerlin
Color needs integrating into the FCS suite alright – have you seen the interface of that program – 90’s … It’s embarrassing to fire it up alongside the other FCS programs.
As for Shake, most of its features will migrate into Motion (fingers crossed) …
I can’t see the rationale behind combining Shake, Motion and Color into the one program. Shake and Motion sure, but Color is a separate workflow – just integrate it better into FCS.
This article’s headline was meant to grab the attention of people, not to serve as any news item. When reading the actual article, Aperture will be around. So no, it is not in sad shape.
Aperture is the logical upgrade from iPhoto that people in the Mac boom just now have started to discover. Aperture is here to stay.
@iMacBerlin
This gathering is allredy forseen since 2005! But will it ever happen?
Shake contains a all lot of features wich are absolutely missing in actual FCP… So either Apple brings out a Supermotion or a way to get tones of dedicated plugins. Otherwise the professionals will have to turn to other providers. ;(
@Crabs
Thanks for your link. Yet, many people (like me) aren’t using english from birth… I have to handle with 5 different speaches… therefore, it’s quite difficult (for me) to be brilliant with all of them… Sorry…
“So no, it is not in sad shape.”
Tell that to Canon 5D MK II users who are STILL waiting for full Aperture compatibility with their sRAW files.
I did not mean to imply that Aperture is a bad Ap. It isn’t.
You’re on a Mac Pro and I only have a lowly iMac. But Adobe somehow figured out how to get Lr to fly on it, where Ap was hopelessly slow.
With respect Dan, there’s nothing wrong with my setup, what’s wrong is Apple misread the market and Adobe came in and cleaned up.
I blow my cash on expensive glass, so a loony-priced Mac Pro is out of the question. Maybe some day.
I would love to give Ap another shake. Let’s see what they do with v3. Trust me, I’ll be on the demo like white on rice.
Lr will be on v3 too, so we can have this debate all over again!
Geddy, just curious what version of Aperture you tried. Version 2.0 really helped Aperture run well on all recent machines.
And I too believe the competition between Aperture and Lightroom can only benefit us, the user!
i found Aperture 2 to be faster at importing images than LR.
This was on a recent 24inch iMac with 4GB of RAM.
I find the interface is a lot more elegant and well thought out generally in Aperture, and doesn’t force a user into a moduled workflow.
The best thing (and it is very good) in LR are the adjustment brushes, they are awesome. Hopefully Aperture gets these in Aperture 3