A Lament for Aperture, the App We’ll Never Get Over Losing ⇥ ikennd.ac
If you’re not familiar with Aperture, it’s an app for organising, managing, editing, and exporting images. If you’re familiar with Apple’s Photos app, it’s that. But for professionals! Aperture is a complex app — its PDF user manual is over 900 pages long — so to keep this manageable I’ll focus on one particular aspect of it via two short excerpts from said manual.
Two excerpts that hide an astonishing amount of engineering effort.
If you had asked me from 2007 why I saved a huge amount of money to buy a MacBook Pro, one explanation I would have given you would have been about Aperture. When I bought another Mac in 2012, I would have again cited Aperture as a motivating factor. It was a far better reason to keep buying stuff from Apple than the kind of mandated stickiness of a paid iCloud account.
The 2015 discontinuation of Aperture continues to break my heart for two reasons: the loss of support for a tremendous piece of software, of course, and also for what it represents. It was, for reasons Kennett writes about and plenty more, a pinnacle of software design and engineering. It felt like it was built by people who took two crafts — software and photography — very seriously. Times change, though, and it seems like Apple has lost the soul of what made Aperture excellent. It should really figure out what that is. Questionable user interfaces, mediocre icon design, tolerance for lagginess and bugs — these are all bad things, but they are symptoms of a greater loss.