I've been stung a few times in the past, and as the saying goes 'once is bad judgement, twice is a fool'. This is in relation to buying into a promise that a product will do what it says on the tin, only to find that it doesn't live up to expectations. Apple's version 3 of Aperture has just hit the shelves. When Aperture 1 came out, I was a big fan. I liked the approach, the philosophy behind it, but the performance of the software (the more hardware you throw at it, the more it consumed) along with the number of bugs in it really left me feeling short changed.

Then version 2 was announced I had high hopes that they'd fixed the performance of it. But they hadn't. They'd covered up some of the cracks with 'fast preview' buttons for example, to make it appear that the software was working fast. The only thing was that my CPU was getting hammered all the time - just even by opening it up.

So I did what I didn't want to do: I moved to lightroom, which I felt at the time (and still do) had poor library features and a clunky interface. But Lightroom is fast, it will work on any piece of hardware and even my old G5 is very happy playing ball with it. So I've come to love Lightroom, besides the interface and the poor library features, it does what it says on the tin, and it does it really well.

I feel Apple had a chance back at version 1 of Aperture. Lightroom was still new and a bit wet behind the ears too. But it's perhaps too late for Apple to convince all those but their existing customers to give Aperture 3 a go.

I'm no longer in the market for a Raw Converter program but I am in the need of a good software library, so I guess my pondering over Aperture is a bit moot. Lightroom and Aperture both have similar issues with dealing with large film-scanned images - they don't perform well. But this is mostly irrelevant for photographers these days as the number of film shooters is really in the minority now.