thomas fitzgerald.net

A few days ago someone spotted an upcoming book in Amazon’s database for an unreleased version of Aperture due out next year labelled “Aperture X”. This immediately began speculation that the next version of Aperture would be called “Aperture X” rather than the obvious “Aperture 3″. Then, today Hardmac.com had a story claiming that a source has confirmed to them that it will indeed be called Aperture X and that it is being named as such to bring it into “alignment” with OS X’s naming. They also suggest that the date on the Amazon listing is fake and that it will be changed once the product is released.

In my opinion all of this (apart from the actual book) is nonsense. First of all there’s the name. The use of the letter “x” is standard practice when you don’t know the number you want to use or you don’t want to reveal that number. I’ve spoken to a few writers and they all confirm that this is standard practice. Then there’s the claim that the name change is to bring Aperture into “alignment” with OS X. This also makes no sense what so ever. Aperture has never existed as an OS 9  programme, and OS X has used the X in its name since it’s first version years ago. There’s nothing to align? It doesn’t make any sense. People are seeing two and two and coming up with 10. (or X) Quicktime was called Quicktime X because Apple were jumping it to version 10.0. Somehow I doubt that Aperture is going to jump from version 2 to 10.