Change, is good.
One of the reasons I left my previous job was to focus all my time and energy on Cocoa and Mac OS X. Well, a little over 6 months has passed, and I’m ready to solidify my Mac OS efforts a bit: Starting this Monday, I will be joining the Aperture team at Apple.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about the change except that I’m incredibly excited. (And hopefully this puts the recent rumors to rest.) I plan to continue posting here whenever I can – but I know those are famous last words for people starting new jobs! I can’t guarantee that postings will be frequent, but I definitely don’t plan to drop it. And the same goes for Mugshot. I would like to update all of its components in the same way that I updated MUPhotoView – clean the code, document it, etc. I’ve already started that effort in a few areas. However, like the blog, I have no idea when or how often I’ll be able to publish updates. I will continue to work on it whenever I have time.
So, here’s to starting new projects, joining new teams, and contributing to a kick-ass product!
Congratulation, Blake!
Congratulations from me too. I’m very envious. Well done!
Nice job Blake and good luck! May Aperture fare better as a result!
Hi Blake,
Good luck… The timing of your annoucement is, errr, interesting given what Think Secret is reporting about the Aperture team.
http://thinksecret.com/news/0604aperture.html
I hope you are part of a new crew and not showing up on Monday to find out that your hiring manager is gone!
-jm
Congrats! We do lunch sometime once you start!
Congratulations! Well done. As a professional photographer I have already been impressed by Aperture (even in its nascent form) and how much value it has added to my workflow. I wish you the very best of luck in this new endeavor and cannot wait to see what new innovations come from your work.
Congratulations Blake. I’m sure your contributions will give us a worthwhile Aperture 2.0. Your joining the team should send a clear message to professional photographers, photo editors and serious hobbyists that Apple has not abandoned them or Aperture.
Keeping in mind here that aside from the niche pro audio and video apps, Aperture is (currently…) the only professional grade application left in Apple’s software portfolio.
All the best of luck to you!
/Joakim
Good luck, and might I reccomend reading through the Aperture forums from now going back about a month or so and taking some of the better ideas you find there to your new team.
I envy you the chance to make this product grow!
I don’t know if the forums will help that much.
It seems the largest problem with Aperture was managing all the bad PR propagated by people who read the Ars Technica article.
Just my opinion.
I’m a CSC student in a University in the South (haha). I absolutely love programming in Cocoa, but there really aren’t any Cocoa programming jobs around here – what are the Cocoa employment prospects like in California?
Cool. I am invested in Aperture and hope to see it get better. Specifically I hope to see certain features catch up to iPhoto which has surpassed it in certain areas (RAW export to photoshop, in certain aspects of the full screen mode, and in the ability to store files anywhere)… Good luck. Looking forward to 1.5!
Joshua-
There are jobs Cocoa jobs around. There’s quite a bit of contract work if you keep your eyes peeled for it. Apple is obviously one of the biggest Cocoa/Mac employers and they’re in the Bay Area, so, yeah, there are jobs here. But, there’s also Yahoo, Google, Pixar, and quite a few others – all of those companies have hired Mac developers recently.
Terry – I definitely agree. The Ars review caused a lot of bad press – it certainly soured me to Aperture. But then I tried it myself. Yes, there are some problem parts of the app, but it also does quite a bit right, and in an innovative way – I’ve been using it for all my photo management for a while and I love it.
Be careful posting on here after you start man. As a former employee I can tell you that the surest way to a firing is to post on privateblogs…..
Drew – yep, I’m well aware of the privacy and secrecy. Everything in this post is public knowledge and probably only seems like some sort of revelation because of ThinkSecret’s lame “Death of Aperture” article.
Congratulations, Blake! Very cool. Best wishes on the new job! Sounds awesome.
Welcome! You are going t have a lot of fun.
Funny — one person is hired and suddenly it is “Apple is hiring a new time”. “Journalists” amuse the hell out of me. Idiots.
i know. I used to have about 100 readers of this blog – so I considered this post as an announcement along the lines of “I’m telling a few friends that I’ve got a new job”. But, between ThinkSecret’s “news” story and people interpreting this post as “See?! There’s a whole new team!!1!!1!”, it’s turned into something a little different than I intended!
Good Luck @ Apple.
How about Aperture support for Panasonic Lumix FZ30
Please!!!
John
Aperture is brilliant, and can only get better, looking forward to Aperture updates after you having recieved so much feedback. All the best of wishes,
Rupert
Blake,
Awesome news! Congratulations. I’m sure you’ll be a huge asset to the team.
Good luck! Aperture is the application I love to hate. It has both made parts of my life better and parts of my life much worse. I think the real issue is that Aperture (and itunes and the other iapps) don’t/or can’t trust the finder to both manage the files and metadata. Because of this all these programs have weird psuedo folders that have no bearing on where the actual files are stored. And with the exception of itunes all the metadata is not stored within the file itself, so if you export the files you lose all the categories you’ve so meticulously added to the images. When Aperture/Apple deal with this problem all of apple’s iapps will get much better. & ditto on lisa’s issues I find it incredible/distressing that iPhoto has many features that seem more advanced than Aperture which cost me much more.
Congrats on the gig.
Just for the benefit of whoever else followed the digg.com link here, I’ll point out that ThinkSecret’s account of a bloodbath of the Aperture team is utter nonsense. I know two of the original Aperture developers personally, and they both moved to higher-profile jobs in other groups (CoreImage and AppKit). It’s not at all unusual for a team that’s just shipped a 1.0 to have a lot of turnover, as people decide to transfer to other groups.
-jcr
Blake,
The best place for you to get feedback for Aperture is on the Digital Wedding Forum. Joseph S is a member (he just sent me a copy of the tutorial DVD). I’d love to see 2.0 be the kick-a$$ reason for me switch back to the Mac. By the time Photoshop is available for the Intel platform, you guys should have a serious desktop box… though hopefully 2.0 won’t require a quad proc box to function.
Blake,
Please, please, please have the Aperture team get feedback from PROFESSIONAL photographers. Our requirements and expectations for precision, security, efficiency, capacity are quite a bit more demanding than I believe the Aperture team originally understood.
Until you guys bring in real-time feedback from the folks who will be pushing this app the hardest you will be groping in the dark.
Best wishes.
fp
Blake,
I’m very pleased to hear that the Think Secret rumor’s of Aperture’s demise is greatly exagerrated! Being a HUGE believer in Aperture since day 1, I’m very excited to see how the development team extends it and hope to see you open it up for some (supported) extensions by developers via ADC or some sort.
I know that Apple has worked with pro photographers on this product, but I agree with Frank on the need for a wider-reaching discussion with more pros.
Congratulations Blake!
I hope it works out great for you. I love Aperture and hope Apple develops it into the kick a** photo solution it deserves to be.
I’ve been using it professionally nearly full time for over three month now and have posted some of my thoughts about it on SportsShooter.com as well as the Apple forum. I will soon be using Apple’s/Apeture’s “Provide Aperture Feedback” feature to list what simple things Aperture needs in order to be accepted in the photojournalism field.
If you ever have any questions or need another beta tester, let me know.
Good luck and thanks in advance for your hard work.
Steven Georges
Chief Photographer
Press-Telegram
Long Beach CA
http://www.homepage.mac.com/daddysteve
Steven.Georges@PressTelegram.com
daddysteve@mac.com
It’s a little late- but congrats! Aperture is a cool program, I’m sure you’ll have tons of fun working on it.
Just try to help to make a better program than adobe’s lightroom. thats the solution.
Congrats, what an exciting opportunity that must be! Since others are taking the opportunity to post feature requests…
Here’s an idea for your team: Aperture for video. There is no dominant player in the video workflow space, and only a few integrate with FCP. Aperture’s workflow-oriented UI is badly needed in the video production world!
Have fun and good luck!
Please please make aperture at least usable with 12″ powerbook, we need mobility while photographing on field… please please i beg you=)
Aditya-
My 15″ PB G4 with 128 MB VRAM runs Aperture adequately. Since the GPU is key to running Aperture and Apple seems to be putting good GPUs in new MacIntel laptops I believe when the small form MacIntel laptops are out you will find they will run Aperture. If there is a GPU option be sure to buy the upgrade.
Note that a 12″ form is unlikely because new wide format requires a longer diagonal to achieve the same screen real estate as the previous 12 inch. New small size will probably be 13.3″ or so.
For me the issue with small PBs is lack of Firewire 800, since pro image management needs an external scratch disk for Photoshop and an external Library for images. I probably will be buying a 17″ even though I much prefer the 15″ form factor I have now.
————————-
Blake-
Aperture is a great product in an important emerging/growing market space. Congratulations and good luck!
Screw ArsTechnica. Photoshop is a great image editing tool, but its appeal is entirely based on its ability to perform really powerful granular operations. But it’s practically worthless for performing a large number of color corrections, contrast tweaks, noise reductions &tc and the types of operations it performs I only want to do on my BEST photos. I need a tool that can take a roll of 200 shots, let me perform a few basic functions on ALL of them, and allow me to pick out my best shots quickly.
Aperture, for all its bugs, slowness, and inscruitable and constricting storage system (come on, even iPhoto let me burn a god damned DVD backup and export a whole mess of libraries if I wanted to. I’d rather not have to buy a new hard drive every month when optical media, or rewrite all my web generator code to operate in Aperture) does this better than any program out there, including the Lightroom beta. There’s a lot of good there.
I wish you success. Aperture’s a noble, world changing piece of software that is good now but will take YEARS to perfect.
Allan: huh? FCP is, if not becoming, the defacto desktop editing suite for video workflow, gaining more ground than ever before.
Blake, while I am delighted for you in joining Apple. I advise you keep it to yourself. Apple is very particular about it’s secret products. So watch out your job might be very short term
That’s bogus Wasper, and I know about you and the CIA!
I’ve got DCJ watching my back…
Hey, I just discovered the perfect editing supplement to Aperture:
Lightzone!
Ya’ll seen this? It’s in Apple’s own store. I like the $99 Retouch version.
Check it out. Perfect alternative to Photoshop for simple smart tools for masking and tweaking specific areas that neither Aperture nor Lightroom can do.
http://www.lightcrafts.com/