11 ms·

The strangest thing for me reading this is that, well, I loved Aperture. I used it loyally from v1 until long after it was EOL'd. I spent thousands of hours in

The strangest thing for me reading this is that, well, I loved Aperture. I used it loyally from v1 until long after it was EOL'd. I spent thousands of hours in it, and it really fit my ideal workflow. There was a lot of functionality/crap in there that I did not use, a lot of functionality was hidden away behind context menus and a lot of promised features around integration with plugins and 3rd party never really materialized, but in terms of core function it was a total workhorse. Apple ultimately went to great lengths to purge it from existence, even for those of us with paid licenses who'd been told (or at least safely presumed) that we'd be able to install it on new machines via the app store, even if it wasn't available for purchase. In reality, they removed the binary from the cache. At one point, I went through a ridiculously elaborate process of obtaining a certain kind of physical license from eBay and spent hours emailing random Apple employees - likely some of the folks mentioned in this story - getting them to make exceptions and pull favours to make it possible for me to install it one last time before Catalina pulled the rug out for good. Fuckin' Apple.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Fyi there’s a process to get Aperture working on Catalina. Don’t have the link on hand, but if you need it I’d be happy to dig it up.
- peteforde 7y ago
  I would be very grateful.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Here you go! https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive As an aside, the author's "Technical Deep Dive" is worth a read: https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-retroactive-work-95fe0e5ea49e https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-ret...
    - andrew_n 7y ago
      The technical deep dive was a great read, thanks! I think it would be a good submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/submit https://news.ycombinator.com/submit
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        I did try; got no attention sadly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229101
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Yet they keep FileMaker rolling on. I never understood the decision to drop Aperture.
- hhas01 7y ago
  Different product, different business, different time. When AppleWorks and FileMaker were spun off, they were likely significant chunks of revenue in their own right. By the time Aperture was taken out back, it wouldn’t even have been a rounding error in Apple’s accounts. Far quicker, easier, and cheaper to kill it. Remember, everything Apple does, it does to advance the interests of Apple. The company. Not the products, not the departments, not the employees, and definitely not the customers. The same is true of any large org. The knockout success of iPhone grew the business by magnitudes almost overnight. iPhone Apple, frankly, is too big to be wasting its time now on niche products with limited potential for growth, even if those products are very successful within their own niche. If a product doesn’t fit with the current business strategy and portfolio, it’s out. It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted. And definitely don’t be sentimental. Poor Aperture just got left in the iPhone’s dust.
  - jfb 7y ago
    This is very true, but it's also important to realize that the hyper focussed Apple culture comes as an adaptive response to their near-death experience, before Jobs came back. A company that makes a billion dollars in revenue a day can afford to diversify; a company that is on death's door cannot. I think the situation currently is an overcorrection to a vaguely remembered pre-Jobs past.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted. What does that mean in the context of a huge corporation? From my perspective, $1K in profit is still $1K, even if you're making $100K elsewhere. Tim Cook certainly has limited time and needs to prioritize, but he also doesn’t need to touch every part of the company. Independently-profitable projects can be spun out into their own teams as needed.
mokus 7y ago
Same here. I never found a system that fit the way I wanted to work as well as Aperture did, so I quit bothering to drag around my DSLR. Then I quit bothering to offload pics from my phone. Then I quit bothering to take them in the first place. Which is all a shame because I loved photography for a couple decades, and now I have small kids and I’m sure I’ll regret it, but it’s just such a pain in the ass to do these days if I don’t want my entire life tethered to services and data in the fuckin cloud.
- Terretta 7y ago
  YES. It was an integrated part of an everyday DSLR workflow. So much so, that I too eventually stopped with DSLR after losing it.
- kahnjw 7y ago
  Imagine a photographer from the 1900s who had to pay to develop every roll of film reading and reacting to this. I don't use the cloud. Just lightroom classic and some offline storage. You can buy a very small and portable 4tb HDD for under $100.[1] Hacker news is turning into a cesspool of self pity. As if the cloud is some huge step backward and there is no other way to do things. Cry me a river. [1] https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-elements-portable-usb-3-0-hdd?utm_medium=pdsh2&utm_source=gads&utm_campaign=wd-us-pla&utm_content=298648459158&utm_term=WDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN#WDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-...
  - mokus 7y ago
    I literally was that photographer before DSLRs got affordable. I love film and still own some extremely expensive film kit, but it is still a hassle. And when it’s not my job and real life kicks in, the fact remains that there used to be a digital workflow that “just works” for me, and Apple killed it. Photos.app was a joke and Adobe was in the process of flushing their entire suite down the cloud, and shipping horrific bloatware for everything else. I probably should look into Lightroom but at the time it was just not an appealing option. And the self-pity interpretation is off, but whatever. I guess we all like to be mad at the people we post at.
forgotmypw 7y ago
I had a similar affair with Picasa, but at least it's allowed to be downloadable. I've never found anything even close to Picasa on responsiveness when browsing photos. Stories like this is why I rarely bother with proprietary software anymore.
- firecall 7y ago
  It totally was so fast! I remember using it when I got my first digital cameras :-)

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

Fyi there’s a process to get Aperture working on Catalina. Don’t have the link on hand, but if you need it I’d be happy to dig it up.

peteforde 7y ago
I would be very grateful.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Here you go! https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive As an aside, the author's "Technical Deep Dive" is worth a read: https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-retroactive-work-95fe0e5ea49e https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-ret...
  - andrew_n 7y ago
    The technical deep dive was a great read, thanks! I think it would be a good submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/submit https://news.ycombinator.com/submit
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      I did try; got no attention sadly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229101

tonyedgecombe 7y ago

Yet they keep FileMaker rolling on. I never understood the decision to drop Aperture.

hhas01 7y ago
Different product, different business, different time. When AppleWorks and FileMaker were spun off, they were likely significant chunks of revenue in their own right. By the time Aperture was taken out back, it wouldn’t even have been a rounding error in Apple’s accounts. Far quicker, easier, and cheaper to kill it. Remember, everything Apple does, it does to advance the interests of Apple. The company. Not the products, not the departments, not the employees, and definitely not the customers. The same is true of any large org. The knockout success of iPhone grew the business by magnitudes almost overnight. iPhone Apple, frankly, is too big to be wasting its time now on niche products with limited potential for growth, even if those products are very successful within their own niche. If a product doesn’t fit with the current business strategy and portfolio, it’s out. It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted. And definitely don’t be sentimental. Poor Aperture just got left in the iPhone’s dust.
- jfb 7y ago
  This is very true, but it's also important to realize that the hyper focussed Apple culture comes as an adaptive response to their near-death experience, before Jobs came back. A company that makes a billion dollars in revenue a day can afford to diversify; a company that is on death's door cannot. I think the situation currently is an overcorrection to a vaguely remembered pre-Jobs past.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted. What does that mean in the context of a huge corporation? From my perspective, $1K in profit is still $1K, even if you're making $100K elsewhere. Tim Cook certainly has limited time and needs to prioritize, but he also doesn’t need to touch every part of the company. Independently-profitable projects can be spun out into their own teams as needed.

mokus 7y ago

Same here. I never found a system that fit the way I wanted to work as well as Aperture did, so I quit bothering to drag around my DSLR. Then I quit bothering to offload pics from my phone. Then I quit bothering to take them in the first place. Which is all a shame because I loved photography for a couple decades, and now I have small kids and I’m sure I’ll regret it, but it’s just such a pain in the ass to do these days if I don’t want my entire life tethered to services and data in the fuckin cloud.

Terretta 7y ago
YES. It was an integrated part of an everyday DSLR workflow. So much so, that I too eventually stopped with DSLR after losing it.
kahnjw 7y ago
Imagine a photographer from the 1900s who had to pay to develop every roll of film reading and reacting to this. I don't use the cloud. Just lightroom classic and some offline storage. You can buy a very small and portable 4tb HDD for under $100.[1] Hacker news is turning into a cesspool of self pity. As if the cloud is some huge step backward and there is no other way to do things. Cry me a river. [1] https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-elements-portable-usb-3-0-hdd?utm_medium=pdsh2&utm_source=gads&utm_campaign=wd-us-pla&utm_content=298648459158&utm_term=WDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN#WDBU6Y0040BBK-WESN https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-...
- mokus 7y ago
  I literally was that photographer before DSLRs got affordable. I love film and still own some extremely expensive film kit, but it is still a hassle. And when it’s not my job and real life kicks in, the fact remains that there used to be a digital workflow that “just works” for me, and Apple killed it. Photos.app was a joke and Adobe was in the process of flushing their entire suite down the cloud, and shipping horrific bloatware for everything else. I probably should look into Lightroom but at the time it was just not an appealing option. And the self-pity interpretation is off, but whatever. I guess we all like to be mad at the people we post at.

forgotmypw 7y ago

I had a similar affair with Picasa, but at least it's allowed to be downloadable. I've never found anything even close to Picasa on responsiveness when browsing photos. Stories like this is why I rarely bother with proprietary software anymore.

firecall 7y ago
It totally was so fast! I remember using it when I got my first digital cameras :-)