Posts tagged: APPLE

One of the first things that won me over to OS X was the near-instantaneousness with which you could wake a machine up from sleep. For a longtime PowerBook user who had always found Sleep to be a killer feature – even back when waking up took 30 seconds or more – this was a great bonus.

Sleep is known as “Standby” in the Windows world, but for some reason a lot of people prefer “Hibernate,” perhaps because it predates Standby or perhaps because it’s safer – all data is saved to disk, so you’re covered even if you completely lose power.

Seeing a QuickTime upgrade show up in Software Update today reminded me that I’d been meaning to briefly rant about the split between Quicktime and QuickTime Pro and what a silly anachronism it is. John Siracusa said it best in his Ars Technica review of OS X 10.4:

Mac OS X ships with a complete integrated development environment that supports C, C++, Objective-C, Java, and all of the APIs in Mac OS X (not to mention distributed compiling, a GUI design and layout tool, and a suite of performance monitoring applications). Tiger includes a free web browser, e-mail client, address book, dictionary, thesaurus, font manager, and AIM/Jabber instant message client. When you buy an iMac you get all of the above plus iLife: iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, and iDVD.

John Nack of Adobe posted yesterday about Aperture :

As Apple is the first to say, Aperture is not designed to be a Photoshop competitor… if you’re looking to do something as simple as make a selection and sharpen someone’s eyes, you’re out of luck.

…however, I’d be blowing smoke not to acknowledge that Aperture does compete with Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. The capabilities of Photoshop (of which Bridge and ACR are a part) are vast, so there’s bound to be some overlap, and Aperture joins a long list of products (Capture One, RawShooter Essentials, Nikon Capture, Canon Digital Photo Pro, etc.) that also offer raw browsing and editing. Bridge and ACR aim to provide the best possible workflow in conjunction with Photoshop, but you’re free to mix and match.

Today Apple announced their new imaging application, Aperture.

This is clearly intended to be a high-end app, and Apple wants to make sure you get that. “Aperture: Designed for Professional Photographers.” A retail price of $499 ($249 educational). A website that reads: “Whether you’re a fashion, wedding, sports, portrait, fine art, commercial, or editorial photographer…” And the recommended minimum hardware: dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac with 2GB of RAM.

It’s more of an image processing application than an image editing application – pixel-level editing tools are scarce in Aperture. Browsing the gallery of screenshots I see no pencils, brushes, dodge and burn tools, clone tools, erasers, etc. Except for a handful of iPhoto-style fixit things like “dust, spot, blemish, red-eye, and patch tools,” Aperture seems to be almost exclusively focused on whole-image adjustments. It’s iPhoto on steroids/speed/Red Bull.

It’s been a sore point among Macintosh users that almost all of Google’s desktop software is currently Windows only. A couple days ago I learned that Google had started a search for Macintosh developers. As of today, listings for Senior Macintosh Developer (8+ years experience) and Macintosh Developer (3+ years experience) are on Google Jobs.

Only Google can say what they’re up to, but note that Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, and Google Talk are all mentioned in the ads.