thomas fitzgerald.net

I love Aperture. I really do. I much prefer it to the competition, mainly Lightroom. I think its interface is much better, especially for organizing images. I find lightroom’s UI just gets in your way, takes up to much of the screen and is big and clunky, especially on a smaller screen. (yes I know you can hide parts of it). So it is with great pain I write this post, because you see, as much as I like Aperture it has one fatal weakness. It’s as buggy as hell.

Aperture has always been a little flakey. When version 1 came out it was given the nomenclature “crapeture”. However things settled down with 1.5.1 and it was more than useable. Bugs were relegated mostly to speed issues. However with 2.0 they were back with a vengeance. First, thumbnails would turn red with a warning message that Aperture couldn’t read the format, even though it was fine only moments ago. Then there’s the dreaded image loading bug, where Aperture would just sit there with the “Loading” badge over the image. And of course the random quits which are annoying if you’ve changed your keywording button layouts because it looses them.

With 2.01 they addressed the red thumbnail bug, and stability improved a little, but with 2.1 it’s back to the good old days of random flakiness. I discovered a new one last night that drove me to quit the program and give up for the night. While making adjustments to a raw file the whole image would turn black. Seemingly at random. And the only way to get it back was to either remove all adjustments or quit and re-launch the program, which rapidly became a pain. I discovered afterwards that this seems to be limited to occurring while Aperture is processing previews in the background, but its still a major pain in the behind.

Like I said, I love Aperture, and I really don’t want to have to switch to using something else, but if they don’t get their act together soon I may get frustrated to the point of giving lightroom another serious look. And no that’s not one of those “I’ll never use an Apple product again unless Apple pays attention to me” idle threat that you read on Apple forums. It’s simply a statement of fact based on the usability of the software.

Interestingly enough, the only other piece of Apple software that was notoriously bug ridden to the point of being unusable was Motion. This is interesting because both make heavy use of the GPU to achieve their “speed” I have to wonder that, considering alternatives that use the CPU for processing (ie Lightroom) seem much faster, especially with modern processors, if the whole GPU thing is running out of steam. The whole problem is exacerbated by the differences in GPU’s among different manufacturers, so maybe Apple would be better off going back to using the CPU for their heavy lifting. Then again, i’ve yet to see anything that can do what motion can do in realtime.

I don’t for a second doubt Apple’s commitment to Aperture. I just doubt mine at this point.