The Aperture disaster: is it about buying Adobe?

Cringely has another explanation for the rumored termination of the Aperture team:

PBS | I, Cringely . April 27, 2006 - Killer Apps

.... There's only one way to make that happen for sure, and that's for Apple to buy Adobe.

Apple has the stock, they have the cash -- such a purchase would effectively cost Apple nothing, the market would like it so well. The Feds would allow it because this current bunch of Feds allows just about anything (just look at Oracle). Efficiencies would abound. For example, Adobe's Premiere editing program could go away in favor of Final Cut Pro. Apple's Aperture photo touch-up program could die so PhotoShop could reign supreme.

Hey, could that be why Apple is rumored to have this week just laid-off its entire Aperture development group?

Could be.

I like Cringely, thought lately I think he's getting a bit wilder. This seems plausible, except Aperture really is pretty good. It would make more sense to keep Aperture and extend it with Photoshop capabilities and the Photoshop plug-in architecture. They'd kill Lightroom though.

The Apple Aperture Disaster

This is very good news. I'd come to decide that Aperture's performance issues and bugginess reflected advanced decay at Apple and a cynical ploy to force customers to buy new machines quickly. I was shocked, for example, that Aperture 1.01 couldn't import iPhoto 6.02 data. The performance problems seemed fundamental.

This claim that the real cause is a disastrous engineering/management failure is encouraging. This also explains the recent price drop.

Think Secret - Aperture future in question as Apple axes bulk of team

Apple recently asked the engineering team behind its Aperture photo editing and management software to leave, Think Secret has learned. The move, which resulted in the departure of several engineers while others were transferred to different projects inside Apple, raises questions about the future of Aperture, Apple's most heavily criticized and bug-ridden software release in recent years.
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Sources familiar with Apple's professional software strategy said they were not surprised by the move, describing Aperture's development as a "mess" and the worst they had witnessed at Apple.

Aperture's problems stem not from any particular area that can be easily remedied but rather from the application's entire underlying architecture. In the run-up to Aperture's November release last year, for example, sources report that responsibility for the application's image processing pipeline was taken away from the Aperture team and given to the Shake and Motion team "to fix as best they can." Some of those enhancements emerged in the recently released Aperture 1.1 update, which saw its release delayed for about two weeks as a result of the extra work needed to bring it up to spec.

In tandem with the 1.1 update, Apple dropped Aperture's price tag from $499 to $299 and offered owners of version 1.0 a $200 coupon for the Apple Store. Industry watchers and users alike have viewed the price cut as a maneuver to stave off competition from Adobe's forthcoming LightRoom software, a beta of which is available for Mac OS X users, and see the Apple Store coupon as a concession for early adopters who collectively appear to have been expecting more from Apple.

Perhaps the greatest hope for Aperture's future is that the application's problems are said to be so extensive that any version 2.0 would require major portions of code to be entirely rewritten. With that in mind, the bell may not yet be tolling for Aperture; an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards.

Now that the news is out I hope Apple will make some kind of a statement. They ought to apologize to all the Apple Discussion posters who've had their complaints deleted ... Apple needs to set out a path of both incremental bug and performance fixes and architectural revisions.

Outlook Current View display bug: finally found a workaround

Maybe this will help someone, it's an exotic Outlook 2003 bug.

I make heavy use of Outlook's 'Views' to change how data is presented to me and I create my own custom views. This is particularly important for tasks. A couple of months ago Outlook stopped showing me the list of views -- I could only see a single view choice in the Advanced Toolbar Current View drop down list, or in the 'View:Arrange by:Current view" menu drop down. It always showed the current view. To change views I had to bring up the View edit menu and apply from there.

I thought this bug was related to our ancient corporate exchange server, but an upgrade to the latest version didn't fix it. It only happened with the Tasks stored on the exchange server, not archived tasks stored in my PST files.

The fix was, of course, to delete every custom view I ever created and reset every Outlook view to its defaults. Now the drop down works again. It's not that hard for me to recreate was was lost, so this is a big improvement.

gCal, iCal, iPod, Palm phone: Geek joy

It seems there are a few ways to have the OS X iCal app subscribe to items entered on Google calendar: HOWTO: Subscribe to a Google Calendar using iCal - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

The items on iCal sync to the iPod via iTunes, and to our Samsung Palm phones using MissingSync (and thus to my wife's future Treo p700). Assuming we do data entry via gCal (google calendar -- since email carries much calendar info, users of gmail get rapid data entry to gCal) to our family calendar, this has some interesting options.

It appears one can do private sharing of a calendar:

What's a "Private Address"?

A "Private Address" lets you easily view a read-only version of your calendar from other applications. Using this address, you can access your calendar from various applications, such as a feed reader (like Google Reader) or a product that supports the iCal format (like iCal for Mac).

To obtain your calendar's private address, just click on the "XML" or "ICAL" icon. A pop-up window with your calendar's private URL will appear.

Additionally, you can export your calendar information by clicking on the "ICAL" button and clicking on the displayed URL.

Note: The private address was designed for your use only, so be sure not to share this address with others. If you want to let others view your calendar, you can share your calendar's public address (or "Calendar Address") with them. If you accidentally share your calendar's private address, click on the "Reset Private URLs" link to regenerate your calendar's private addres

My geek radar is tingling. Look at how Google is managing creating merged views of calendars, the notification functions including notify to cell phone, the variety of subscription options, the search and private integration .... This could be the best webapp thingie since ... Gmail. It almost makes me forgive Google for their Blogger atrocity.

If Palm had half a brain they'd jump on this like berserkers, but of course that company zombied a long time ago. This must be painful for Apple to watch, they almost had it with .Mac (dotMac) but they lost focus and got greedy.

Macintouch reports: slide and tape digitization

These MacInTouchreports are always excellent. Great community:

We have a great report today about Digitizing Slides collected as part of a family project and another report with lots of advice about Digitizing VHS Tapes and converting them to DVD.

I scanned the slide digitizing report. Walmart was cheapest for digitizing slides and one guy found the most efficient approach was to photograph the slide projection (I'd never have thought of that one). This is a market problem that will eventually have a better solution. I'm amazed we still don't have bulk solutions for print imaging -- a much easier problem. Maybe later this year or next year ...

Ars Technica reviews: iPod speaker systems

High-end iPod speaker systems

The Apple iPod Hi-Fi did surprisingly well. If compactness is important I'd say it's the winner, but the Klipsch outpointed it. Nice review. I'm tempted ...

GMail's been eating comment notifications!

Gordon's Notes: Missed comments: Gmail eating them!

Very annoying. Sorry!