When Aperture 1.0 was released, I jumped on it with full gusto. I'd been using a RAW workflow for years and knew that there was a better way of doing things than the existing tools allowed. Aperture was the first software tool out of the door that really took a deep look at what working photographers needed when working with digital cameras and tried to provide a solution that made sense for them. Something beyond just a one-shot-at-a-time philosophy that had dominated everyone's thinking because that was all that was needed when you were picking slides to scan into Photoshop. The Aperture team got a lot of things right. But they also got some things wrong. The database structure wasn't as efficient as it could be and there was a philosophical purity to the display of images that, while technically correct, slowed things down drastically. Several releases followed in fairly quick succession and by the start of 2007, Aperture had addressed several of its issues. But others remained. Speed was always a concern.

When Lightroom came out in January 2007, it didn't try to address as broad a scope as Aperture did. Its organizational tools weren't as robust. It didn't have the ability to put together books. It didn't have a light table. But, it had a few things that really mattered. The first was a very capable set of develop tools that provided a very nice set of image adjustments. The second was speed. When I test drove Lightroom on an event shoot in February or March, it let me get things done much faster. How much faster? Enough that I was able to go to bed noticeably sooner the night after a full conference day. Hours sooner. Given the kind of workflow that I have to use in my work, that was the big ticket feature for me. Speed. So, I switched out. I went to using Lightroom almost full time and left Aperture to gather dust. As part of that process, I moved from blogging on the Inside Aperture blog to the Inside Lightroom blog. After all, it is kind of hard to blog about a tool that you aren't using for most of your work.

In making the switch, I thought that it was important to let people know why I was making the jump. In retrospect, making my reasons for moving in a public way was a bit like being a bull in a china shop. A few shelves got bumped over. But, as a result, or perhaps despite the fact, I was given a rare invitation to go to Cupertino and talk with the Aperture team about my workflow, what I needed from my workflow tools, and why I had made the jump to Lightroom. The timing was right, as I was just wrapping up a conference in San Jose. So, Pınar and I made the trip to Cupertino and found ourselves in a conference room with several members of the Aperture team, including several of the developers on the team.

It was a bit intimidating, really, to meet with the team. I've spent more than a decade creating software, so I know the lingo and had a really good idea of what the technical issues in building a tool like Aperture are. On the other hand, I know what it is like working on a product and putting your heart and soul into it. You establish a way of looking at the world when you are trying to solve people's problems. And the last thing I wanted to do was to have any of the Aperture team members think I thought that their work wasn't appreciated. Just the opposite. I knew what a big task this kind of development is. So, I knew that I needed to make my points as clearly and as succinctly as possible.

I'm not going to go into specifics about what we talked about. Our conversation that day wasn't under NDA and I wasn't provided with any future plans or thoughts for Aperture. But the fine-grained details of what we talked about aren't really important. What is important is that we had a conversation about my work, my current pain points with Aperture, and what I needed to do my work more effectively. Joe Schorr was really effective at asking some incredibly detailed questions that focused our discussion. And, after all was said and done, the biggest pain point that I had with Aperture in 2007 was speed.

The one detail I will share is that, at one point, I'm pretty sure I said something along the lines of "I don't really care how it is implemented under the covers, but what I need is to be able to zip through several hundred photos quickly and rank them. Boom. Boom. Boom. And while I'm doing that, I don't want to be waiting on the system to render up the images. Those little delays add up. Even if what I see on the display is slightly different because it is a cached JPG file instead of from the RAW data, it is good enough most of the time." To be sure, there were other areas that needed speed improvements, but just moving from one image to another needed to be smoother for my workflow.

After spending a few hours talking, both Pınar and I walked away that day with a much deeper appreciation of what we needed out of the tools that I use. And, I watched both Joe and many of the team members take notes throughout the session. Of course, not being under NDA, I have no idea what they did take away from that meeting, but I hoped that my input could help focus their efforts in some way. And, I hoped that they were talking with other photographers with other serious needs so that they could find the common threads of pain that they could address.

It has been a while since that meeting. In fact, it seems like almost forever. During the rest of 2007 and up through the present, I kept on using Lightroom. After all, it was the tool that worked well given my particular circumstances. But, for many reasons, I was hoping that we'd see a strong Aperture 2.0 release. The primary reason is a selfish one: I want great tools to use in my own work. But, I also want to see healthy and strong competition between Adobe and Apple; the kind of competition that spurs both of them to continue to improve in major steps.

In early 2008, I started hearing mutterings that Aperture 2.0 was imminent. Nothing concrete, but it seemed like the consensus was building. Along with everyone else that uses a RAW workflow and these tools, I watched closely for a release at PMA. And of course, it didn't happen. But, in time it came. Of course, Aperture 2.0 showed up right when I was working a conference and traveling, so I've only had a limited amount of time to play with it so far. But in the week or so since its release, I've managed to kick the tires enough to know one thing: They listened.

As I said, I have no idea what was written down on Joe's notepad at the end of my meeting with the Aperture team. I've had no further contact with them. I have no idea how many other people they've talked with, except for the ones that are now publicly known as the Aperture Advisory Board including such notables as Bill Frakes, Vincent Laforet, and Mike Colon. Next to them, I'm small potatoes. But, my feedback must have been echoed by others because, as best as I can remember, most if not all of the pain points I raised in the meeting were addressed in one way or another. And every time I use the Quick Preview mode, I think of the moment in that room where I was talking about needing to move from image to image quickly while ranking. That particular feature feels like it was custom built for me, even as I know that many other people have raised the same concerns and needs.

At this point, about a week after its release, I'm only just really getting deep into Aperture 2 and I have no idea if or how it is going to change my workflow. As I've mentioned to many people over the last year, I will always use the best tool for the job at hand and I will evaluate as many tools as I can squeeze into my time. But, I'm really happy to see this new release of Aperture come out. It s a strong release. And, even though Apple is famous for their secrecy and it is more than fair game to take them to task for not communicating with their professional users and leaving them in the dark at PMA, I want to give the Aperture team major kudos. They listened and then they went and did what good software engineers do: They came up with solutions for the problems they heard. Over the next few weeks, we'll find out if those solutions are good ones or not, and we'll likely find the next set things that we'd like to see in Aperture 3.0. And of course, the differences between Aperture and Lightroom will be further analyzed and compared. But given that the Aperture team did indeed listen well to what needed to be improved this last time around, I'm very optimistic about the prospects for future versions.

The images in this blog post are some of the first ones that I've processed with Aperture 2. I'm sure I'll have more to say about the workings of Aperture over the next few weeks.