Having worked in the pro apps group at Apple, I am probably more shocked than most by this article in Macworld where Apple officially responds to the recent negative rumors about Aperture. In case you missed it, it has been reported on Think Secret and Daring Fireball that the Aperture engineering team had been gutted, possibly threatening the product’s future.
This is the first time I can think of where Apple has responded so directly and swiftly to a rumor without using their lawyers. I know a lot of Aperture’s early adopters were very concerned about what these rumors meant to their investment. Kudos to Kirk Paulson and his team (especially Joe Schorr) for putting the customer first. I’m sure it involved some interesting meetings at Apple to get approval for such non-standard external communications.*
Aperture Update Released
Also today Apple released Aperture version 1.1.1, to address some nastiness that happened with the 1.1 release. It looks like they brought in the ‘A’ team to work in this one…in spite of being only a ‘.0.1′ release, it delivers noticeable speed and quality improvements along with the bugs fixes.
I’m very happy to say that this update finally tips the scale on Aperture (at least for me) from being useless to being somewhat useful. I can hardly wait to see what they’ll do for version 1.5.
*One of these days I’ll have to write a chapter about a couple acquisitions I was involved with that posed some similar ‘interesting’ customer communcations challenges.
Yes. I’d love to hear the stories that you were a part of. I have to guess that was one of the more interesting chapters of Apple history and still is given how poorly Final Cut Suite is intergrated.
I too applaud them for coming out with the statement so fast, however they did not address what Daring Fireball wrote about the team not actually having been fired, that’s what I found most interesting as I never imagined they would drop such a great (and expensive) idea.
Oh yeah, Aperture 1.1.1 is definately rocking
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It is faster IMHO, on my 2×2,7GHz G5 with 9650 Graphics.
Apple really got it done *cheer*.