This was always going to wrong from the minute I read “we had a collection of demos ... and a hard deadline to launch a year later at a Photo exhibition”.
That isn’t a real deadline, it’s a management ambition. And a badly set ambition, based on some demos and the belief they could scream good code into existence.
Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
To make parents work weekends without their children for an entire 6-month period just to try and hit a management fantasy is a symptom of a toxic culture.
(And is also counter-productive. The slow and buggy v1 that resulted wasn’t good enough to capture the market — but it was enough to finally wake up Adobe, who dramatically accelerated efforts on Lightroom, which launched first on Mac and went on to dominate the market)
I was working on the Lightroom engineering team at the time and Adobe was heading towards killing the project in favor of a Bridge + Photoshop solution.
When Apple announced Aperture, it instantly galvanized the executive support in favor of Lightroom and Shantanu made the call for us to announce Lightroom and ship a public beta in 6 weeks.
Thankfully we ran the engineering team with an iterative and low technical debt threshold. We had been shipping iterations to a private beta group.
The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
> The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
Do you have any idea what happened? Aperture 1 was slow but it got better and since it was expensive to switch I never tried Lightroom until Apple cancelled Aperture. I was surprised to find that it was so much slower and eventually ended up getting a refund because even the Adobe support person eventually admitted that it wasn’t fair to suggest buying a new Mac just to be able to use the application.
It's amazing how much better free Google Photos is over $20 per month iCloud Photos (especially on macOS). The number of bugs and lack of features is appalling.
Even Lightroom arguably hasn't achieved the technical abilities of Aperture...it's slow.
Plus now there's a fork of Lightroom "classic" and a weird cloud-only version, and also Adobe's subscription pricing. There are a few other apps that have added digital asset management, but overall, there's really nothing that has taken its place.
Affinity might have something in the works, no official news that I can find but it’s been rumored for years and seems like an obvious product for them.
Luminar 4 has a DAM and upcoming solutions for migrating your existing <insert product> libraries. I haven’t tried it yet but the reviews look really good.
>Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
Is this the corporate version of PTSD? I'm sure the Maps debacle really had an affect on the overall decision process to the "release software prematurely, or delay it until it is working" question.
> Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
It's still mostly "we ship yearly, and everything has to be ready by September". That's how we got four or five iOS 13 updates within a month of release fixing glaring bugs and underdeveloped functionality.
That isn’t a real deadline, it’s a management ambition. And a badly set ambition, based on some demos and the belief they could scream good code into existence.
Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
To make parents work weekends without their children for an entire 6-month period just to try and hit a management fantasy is a symptom of a toxic culture.
(And is also counter-productive. The slow and buggy v1 that resulted wasn’t good enough to capture the market — but it was enough to finally wake up Adobe, who dramatically accelerated efforts on Lightroom, which launched first on Mac and went on to dominate the market)