Trouble with Apple's Aperture

[Tim Gray]

according to: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0604aperture.html

[francois]

I'm not surprised!

[digitaldog]

There was a pretty lengthy series of posts about this on the Aperture Forum but I guess the moderators in Cupertino are up and at work. It was deleted! Or maybe they hired Rob Galbraith to moderate the forums there ;-)

[francois]

There was a pretty lengthy series of posts about this on the Aperture Forum but I guess the moderators in Cupertino are up and at work. It was deleted! Or maybe they hired Rob Galbraith to moderate the forums there ;-)
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The Apple forums have always been heavily "moderated" (read: censored)... Rob may well have found a new home there?

[DiaAzul]

This doesn't have to be a negative. It may well be that the early developers made enthusiastic developers rather than solid software engineers. Perhaps a new team will keep the bulk of what is good and give the software some solid underpinnings to make it perform better.

Better for Apple to bite the bullet now than wait until it becomes an impossible task to re-write what they have.

[61Dynamic]

It seems that the work "fired" is a load of bunk in typical ThinkSecret over-exaggerating form.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball confirms that the team is gone but not because they were fired.

The second is that the original Aperture development team — both management and engineering — has been dispersed. Note though that I chose the passive-tense verb dispersed very carefully. Think Secret’s headline claim that the “bulk of the team” was “axed” is not accurate. Katz’s much less sensational in-article description, “The move, which resulted in the departure of several engineers while others were transferred to different projects inside Apple,” is more or less the same thing my sources told me.

It’s up for debate how much of it was an outright disbanding, and how much was good engineers leaving the team (and in some cases, leaving Apple) in disgust. But given that the Aperture 1.0 development process went so poorly, it was pretty much inevitable that the team was going to be restructured.

[johnbeardy]

Just because someone says something nasty about Mary Poppins, there's no need to shoot the messenger with selective and misleading quotes:

...my sources at Apple confirmed the basic gist of Think Secret’s report. First, that even by the standards of 1.0 products, Aperture’s development did not go well. A little bit late is one thing; nine months late — which according to my sources is how late Aperture 1.0 was — is a disaster. The term “cluster fuck” is not generally used to describe minor hiccups.

The second is that the original Aperture development team — both management and engineering — has been dispersed....

In spite of that:

Word within Apple is that Steve Jobs himself is enormously enamored of Aperture. There’s no question what Apple is going to do with Aperture: they’re going to fix it. The questions are just how, who, and when. And with Adobe breathing down their necks with Lightroom, my guess to the last question is “as soon as possible”.

John

[rbmorse]

The always entertaining, if not particularly reliable Robert X. Cringley is starting a delicious new rumor that the reason the Aperture team was...ah..., er, reconfigured is because Apple is going to buy Adobe.

See here:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060427.html

(look at the last three paragraphs or so).