Aperture 1.5: pinch me

I'm hallucinating. This has to be some kind of sick joke. How could Apple have fixed everything that was broken in Aperture 1.0 and offer it up free to long suffering 1.0 users?

AppleInsider | Apple premiers Aperture 1.5 at Photokina

... Presenting at the Photokina trade show in Cologne, Germany on Monday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company showed off several new features of the software, including a powerful new open library, iLife '06 and iWork '06 integration, XMP metadata support, new adjustment tools and an export API that makes it easy to extend the Aperture workflow to third party applications and services.

With a new open library system, managing RAW, JPEG and TIFF images in Aperture 1.5 has been made more flexible, allowing photographers to store image files wherever they want -- either within the Aperture library itself, or in other disk locations, including external hard drives, CDs or DVDs.

The new version of Aperture can also generate high-resolution previews of each image so that users can review, rate and organize images as well as perform slideshows -- even when the master images are offline. The previews, which can be generated at a range of size and quality levels, make it possible for photographers to keep their original images safely stored on a desktop system at home or in the studio, while still being able to take a compact version of their entire photographic library on the road using a MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Aperture 1.5 is now supported across Apple's full line of Macintosh computers, the company said, from the Mac mini to the Mac Pro, and offers new integration with the iLife '06 suite of digital lifestyle applications and iWork '06 productivity software. The tight integration means that photographers can build complete websites with iWeb, create self-contained slide presentations with Keynote, or produce DVD slideshows with iDVD, all using JPEG versions of photos directly from their Aperture library. Integration also includes syncing to iPod using iTunes 7 and the ability to access and copy Aperture photos from within iPhoto...

... Wih Aperture 1.5, Apple is also introducing a new export API plug-in architecture that allows third party developers to tap into the expanding Aperture user community with plug-ins that seamlessly connect Aperture's workflow to complementary applications and services. Plug-ins from industry leading companies, including Getty Images, iStockphoto, Pictage, Flickr, PhotoShelter, DigitalFusion, Soundslides and Connected Flow, are being previewed at this week's Photokina tradeshow -- demonstrating a range of printing, publishing and storage workflows that take advantage of the new architecture.

Pricing & Availability

Aperture 1.5 is available this week in English, French, German and Japanese as a free Software Update to current Aperture 1.0 customers.

I have never seen any update of any product that fixed so many broken things. Aperture 1.0 users must be singing in the streets. Me? Now I can buy my MacBook. Oh, and Aperture too. Please take my money Apple.

9/29/06: The Apple Discussion forum is full of posts saying users still can't edit image dates, and that all date oriented functions are still based on EXIF date headers. Some of the posts are replies to missing posts -- a sign that Apple is deleting negative comments ... I'll update with more news as it arrives ... They did so much that was good I'm holding out hope that this is merely a misunderstanding ...

9/30/06: Maybe I should retitle this post "bite me".