Apple’s Photoshop Killer and Standards
In a past life, I once had the idea of being a professional photographer. I worked in a darkroom (where I did it all, including color printing), and later in a professional photo studio in Switzerland. For a period of time I was fairly into large-format view cameeras, later a medium format Pentax, and only more recently back to 35mm film as I’ve grown less interested in the methodical precision of the larger formats, and more interested in street photography.
I’ve lost the passion I once had for photography, but I still occassionally take an image that rekindles the passion. While I have a Nikon scanner and Photoshop, however, I’ve yet to really jump into digital photography. It remains fairly primitive in comparison to analog. Cameras are improving really quickly, however, and printers are good enough these days to mostly best results one can get in a traditional darkroom.
One area that has yet to be really solved to my satisfaction is editing and workflow applications. I was once a user of Live Picture, which had one feature I consider essential: non-destructive editing. That application died under the weight of corporate mismanagement. The notions of editing files directly, of creating full copies for new versions, etc., will be seen as positively archaic when we look back on this in ten years.
Now, Apple has resurrected that basic principle, and dramatically raised the bar on what we can expect in professional editing application. Aperture looks to be a really stunning intervention in this market. And while Googling around makes clear that Apple is claiming this application is a comfortable complement to Photoshop rather than an outright competitor, I simple don’t believe it. This has all the makings of a Photoshop killer.
One issue I worry about though: Apple understands the importance of metadata in the application, but it surprises me they didn’t adopt Adobe’s XMP for that; both for elegant extensibilty, and for seamless interoperability with Adobe tools (and perhaps in the future OpenDocument).
For the most part, Apple understands application design better than any other major competitor. They are willing to take chances to improve the end results that others simply won’t. Compare, for example, Pages and OpenOffice 2.0. Pages has a horrendous non-standard XML format that OpenDocument beats by a mile. However, while Apple took the bold move to totally de-emphasize presentational styling by getting rid of bold and italic from the GUI (which in fact fits much better the strengths of having an XML document format to begin with), OO.o took the opposite tack by adding the brain-dead hack of Microsoft’s “format painter.” Why? Because users requested it. Ugh … perhaps users requested this because Writer needs a better and more intuitive interface to apply styles?
I frankly think both worlds have somethig to learn from each other. Apple needs to get much more serious about open standards and interoperability. NIH will kill the company if they don’t wake up. Conversely, OOo needs to be more bold; less always focused on copying Microsoft. There is much in XML that should make us rethink what productivity applications can be, and what they offer to end users.
I am, of course, primarily an end-user, and I’m tired ot uninspired or poorly interoperable productivity applications.
