TaoSpace

Aperture Impact

The photography world has now had some time to come to grips with Apple's Aperture announcement.
Sure, very few people have actually used it and even fewer have had a chance to see its actual output quality. What is more, a lot of photographer tend to be conservative about the technology they use, so they won't switch en-masse overnight.

Still, Aperture is already having a major impact on the photography scene. If you read some of the public forums, especially the company related ones for things like iView Multimedia and others, you can see the change of mood. Most of these companies have announced some form of product update during the Photo Plus show, where Aperture was launched. Yet instead of cheering these announcements, a growing number of responses seem to say "Apple has created what we wanted product X to be for years, but never got!". Some of the features they talk about have been requested by users years ago, but nothing has happened.

Aperture versus...

Surprisingly a lot of people around the web do not seem to "get" Aperture. Just read the comments here. People keep comparing it to Photoshop and in some cases to Extensis Portfolio. Although most then agree it is complementary to Photoshop, they don't seem to understand that this is targetted at RAW converters like Capture One and RAW Shooter. So far I haven't seen those names come up much, although a few of the later comments hint at it.

Is this because so few people actually shoot in RAW? Or if they do, are they just using Photoshop? I know RAW is still a relatively "new" thing (it really isn't, but OK) to most people, but I would have expected a bit more knowledge about it on the net.

Of course this is just one site and it is early days. But it shows that beyond Photoshop, many people don't know much about stand-alone RAW converters and the way they improve your workflow. Also the organization and archiving capabilities of Aperture seem to go unnoticed, even though this is crucial stuff (Vaults! Flexible hierarchies! Etc!). Aperture may do a lot of things in new and interesting ways and may add a bunch of features not seen before, but at its heart it is still RAW workflow application like all the others. It is the only comparison that makes sense.

Aperture!

Yes, Apple did what I thought they would do and release a pro photo package called Aperture. It has all the feature I predicted it would have, but what nobody predicted was the sheer magnitude of this package. From what I can see on the site, it blows away every other package in term of user interface and functionality. This looks like photo-workflow taken to the extreme!

If the quality of the output is as good as Capture One, this package will poach users from all other packages easily!

If you are in to photography in any way, go and check this baby out NOW.

And again...

MacRumors has the story about the next "special Apple event", which will be held this wednesday. Both the article and the copious amount of comments focus on hardware updates for the PowerMac and PowerBook lines.
I'm not sure whether this will happen or not, but I really don't care.

After last weeks iMac update and the upcoming Intel based Mac, it is unlikely that the hardware updates will be all that spectacular anyway. I mean, Apple would be better off debuting things like HD screens and built-in iSights together with the first Intel PowerBook, in order to make maximum impact. The first Intel Powerbook will need to redefine laptops completely, because why buy a Powerbook that looks the same and has the same features, only with an Intel chip? Sure it might be faster, after no-doubt sluggish sales in this pre-Intel period, Apple needs to pull a rabbit out of hat when the time comes.

Google's plans

The web has been rife with speculation of a supposed deal between Sun and Google.
They seem to have a deal on StarOffice, or if you believe most of the commentators deal on Google offering StarOffice as a service. The speculation continues, eventhough it has been denied by Google already. The deal that was actually announced (Googlebar being bundled with Java) is supposed to just be window-dressing, or a taster of things to come. Sure.

The truth is that StarOffice/OpenOffice is a large and relatively monolithic piece of software, that is not be adaptable for use "on the web" (whatever that is supposed to mean!). There will be no browsing to "office.google.com" and being presented with StarOffice in your browser. Technically it is unfeasible and next to this, what would be in it for Google? Also, Google has always been about simplicity and StarOffice isn't simple. Far from it.

What then? Well, what I find way more likely is that Google is building a document storage/management/sharing facility, similar to GMail. Call it GStore. Store up to 2Gb of documents for free, get sharing, review and distribution options for free, all using common web-based protocols. Either a web-upload or WebDAV will do. Google will insert its contextual ads in the UI and Sun will add a "Save to GStore" and "Open from GStore" buttons to StarOffice. Google will "work with Sun" to add the OpenDocument format that StarOffice and OOo use to its list of supported document formats.

And presto. The combo will corner the market for low volume document management and kill off things like YouSendIt in the process. Let's have it!

vTunes...

Josh over at Dreamhost blogs about vTunes. Basically an Airport Express unit that decodes video streams sent to it and sends them on to your TV.

I've been thinking about this for a while now and I think it makes a lot of sense, because while you might play audio on your computer (while you are working for instance), video is still something you want to watch in your living room. Also connecting a computer to a TV is still non-trivial for most people, even besides the fact that your computer will have to be in relatively close proximity to the TV.
A vTunes like device would solve these issues.

Starting a video-store for iTunes right now however is not a smart bet. There are too many unknowns involved. Will people want it? Won't it take bloody ages to download a movie? Where's the instant gratification? But remember how iTunes started in life: a way to rip CDs to your HD and play them back. And drop them to your iPod of course. vTunes could simply start the same way: provide a secure way to rip DVDs (i.e. convert them to H.264, don't allow copying to other PCs somehow) and play them over vTunes. Add your own video into the mix. Add a playlist of music-videos (much more likely to appear widely on iTunes Music Store soon!). Browse pictures from iPhoto through the device too.

It will need a remote and some form of TV-based interface, but other then that...Forget about Tivos and other set-top boxes. Use your PC for all the big storage and request handling and all you need near your TV is a relatively small device that just does display stuff.

If that then takes off in a big way, Apple can think of starting to sell movies online!

Of course such things exist already in several forms from several companies. But Apple could make it small, easy to use, nice to look at and actually functional. No matter that they aren't the first. The iPod wasn't the first music player either...