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apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandon

apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them. it would be very neat if apple started to build the necessary portfolio of software to provide a viable, ideally not-subscription-based competitor to adobe's suite of products. they certainly have had the chops to be competitive in the creative space for a long time, so it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it. i haven't been as in touch with the video editing space as i was 2 decades ago when i worked in TV, but it feels like FCP is not the juggernaut it once was from the outside. my read may be wrong. similarly, logic doesn't feel as prominent in the music world anymore - i really rarely see musicians using it these days, though again that may just be my bias in the kinds of folks i pay attention to. would be cool to see the apple pro suite really regain its mojo and shake things up.

vr46 2y ago
Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared. FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected. I went all in on Logic, however, and that has proved a great buy, no subscription model, fantastic extras and works super well. If they can rebuild a enthusiast-targeted set of apps again, but stick with it, the future looks bright. I cannot imagine Apple ever competing with Capture One or most of the other circle of RAW image processors, which have some rather niche features, but they might be able to take on Lightroom.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jwells89 2y ago
  The no-subscription aspect is a huge differentiator IMO, and depending on situation is even worth trading off features. Losing access to your work because you stopped your Adobe subscription sucks, as does the eventual premium over single-purchase.
- hggigg 2y ago
  Yeah this. Aperture was a mess. Some of the "full" edit tools from Aperture are actually lurking in Photos which is a fairly competent photo editor on macOS surprisingly. I think they have a chance. I know a couple of professional photographers. One uses Capture One and only for tethering support. The other an ancient copy of Lightroom that was a one time purchase and use that for persistent contract work for one of the larger advertising companies in London. If the price is right and it's good enough, they are probably going to do fine. I'm an amateur and I want to get off LR because I hate giving Adobe money every month and the damn thing is a fat pig compared to Photomator. Photomator is missing decent dehaze and because I have a shitty little DX mirrorless, I need the denoise and it's not as good as LR is.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I was quite surprised (pleasantly) with the editing features available in Photos. I rarely use it on the desktop, and primarily only use it on the device I took the image, but to see how much more in depth the editing was on desktop was one of those that I thought for a second might make me switch to using it for device captured image editing. For non-device camera images, I still use full tilt apps as that's just my workflow and I do not ever see Photos working its way into that workflow
    - hggigg 2y ago
      Yeah I’m currently using lightroom for my mirrorless. I export that to photos then share / keep the flattened images in there.
- tigeroil 2y ago
  Logic is a weird one. It has really truly excellent included instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself feels rather outdated. The mixer, whilst having had some nice features added since Logic 9, is in dire need of an update.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Wouldn't that be a sign of a product that was purchased by Apple and then left to languish as is with just enough effort to not let it rot?
    - selectodude 2y ago
      Apple bought Logic over 20 years ago. I’d be surprised if it shared any code with the pre-acquisition version.
      - srockets 2y ago
        Why not? Current macOS ships code older than that.
    - cesaref 2y ago
      I believe the Logic team are still based in Germany, where the original Emagic team that produced Logic were based, so it's not that they are languishing, but an intentional decision has been made (either by them or Apple) to keep this structure. Logic has such a long history, it's not surprising that it shows it's age, and has 'weird' behaviour that you wouldn't choose today. It's got stuff in there from the early 90s, as it started out as a midi sequencer before pulling audio into the product.
  - butterknife 2y ago
    All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff! It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.
- AlanYx 2y ago
  One of the senior Aperture team members went off to use the underlying OS RAW infrastructure in product called Gentleman Coders Nitro. It's a decent but little known Lightroom alternative with no subscription, albeit without all the recent Lightroom AI-infused features. It does have AI masking though.
  - grahamj 2y ago
    omg thanks for the tip! It seems to support iCloud-synched smart albums which is a key feature I've wanted for years since Aperture.
  - jitl 2y ago
    Amazing, this looks like just what I've been wanting
  - vr46 2y ago
    A fantastic product but the colour science does not look great from a first play, and I don't know if seven days is long enough to figure it out. If I had a job I'd pull the trigger anyway, but too much of a luxury right now. I can't believe I did not know about this application. Shocking marketing! :D
  - Vegenoid 2y ago
    Wow, can’t believe I didn’t find this while looking for Lightroom alternatives several months ago. Looks great!
  - hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
    I bought their previous software "RAW Power", because it was a one-time perpetual license. Then they rewrote the app (it's worse now BTW), rebranded as Nitro, and stopped updating the previous one to be able to charge again. The Pixelmator team did the same thing with "Pixelmator Classic".
- holman 2y ago
  > FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected. I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial photography. As someone who's still eagerly awaiting like... any reasonable prosumer device to shoot for Apple Vision Pro, I think all of this industry is going to really ramp up in the next few short years very quickly. Gonna be interesting.
  - gannonburgett 2y ago
    Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts) seems like the natural place to put those efforts.
  - radicality 2y ago
    It feels a bit strange though that they made FCP for iPhone/iPad a subscription, and completely separate one from the Mac App. Like, Apple probably doesn’t even need to make money from any of FCP? IMO should be used for driving people to buy more hardware. It’s a little bit offensive for them to charge $5/month on top of a $300 Mac app. On my Mac I have Davinci, and was considering perhaps trying FCP, but not at those prices / subscriptions.
    - spectre3d 2y ago
      Fair enough. I don’t use the iPad version of FCP or Resolve, but I’ve paid for both Mac apps and have enjoyed free updates from Apple and Blackmagic for close to 10 years.
- grogenaut 2y ago
  At this point for video I'm just using DaVinci Resolve which is free except for 8k work and works on windows/mac/linux.
- segasaturn 2y ago
  >suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and producing corrupted files?
  - vr46 2y ago
    Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed together with original image files - a total mess. The digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then, and some people trusted Aperture with their original images whereas later versions allowed or encouraged people to keep their "masters" elsewhere. Because the whole thing was as slow as a slug dragging a ball-and-chain, pre-SSD, issues with that filesystem or master database were sometimes mistaken for just general slowness. I jumped to Lightroom faster than you could say Gordon Parks.
    - spacedcowboy 2y ago
      Aperture 1.0 was very slow. The stories I could tell about its genesis... I came on board just before 1.0 release, and for 1.5 we cleaned things up a bit. For 2.0 we (mainly I) completely rewrote the database code, and got between 10x and 100x improvements by using SQLite directly rather than going through CoreData. CoreData has since improved, but it was a nascent technology itself back then, and not suited to the sort of database use we needed. The SQLite database wasn't "vulnerable to corruption", SQLite has several articles about its excellent ACID nature. The design of the application was flawed at the beginning though, with bindings used frequently in the UI to managed objects persisted in the database, which meant (amongst other things) that: - User changes a slider - Change is propagated through bindings - CoreData picks up the binding and syncs it to disk - But the database is on another thread, which invalidates the ManagedObjectContext - Which means the context has to re-read everything from the database - Which takes time - By now the user has moved the slider again. So: slow. I fixed that - see the other post I made.
Forgeties79 2y ago
The abandoning of FCPX after surviving the reputation blow it took during the transition from 7->X is baffling to me. In the mid 2010s it was actually a fantastic NLE, I used it for professional work for a solid decade. When it comes to speed editing there’s just nothing like it. But starting around 2019 or 2020 they just began to let it languish. To say they don’t have feature parity with resolve and premiere is beyond an understatement, whereas they were trailblazing some great stuff previously. Their multi-cam and audio sync’ing was next to none at one time.
- throwaway-11-1 2y ago
  I was around there ~2019 the original FCPX design team was purged when the art director from a print magazine took over for the pro apps. He brought in people worked on stuff like the LinkedIn website, ESPN baseball apps and Disney games. Engineers and QA were annoyed having to explain concepts like timecode
  - Forgeties79 2y ago
    Well that certainly explains things lol
WillAdams 2y ago
Still sad that the Apple-award-winning vector drawing program Lineform all-but vanished. (and don't get me started on Freehand being bought by Adobe which is why I need to find a replacement vector drawing tool) Cenon is nice, but hasn't seen much updating (but at least, being opensource gets updated as new versions are released). Inkscape is workable, but still a bit awkward (and I doubt it will ever get all of Freehand's functionality/keyboard shortcuts). I've been buying Serif's Affinity Designer (and their other apps), but they're still not as comfortable as FH/MX --- wish the Quasado/GraviT folks would get further along.
- detourdog 2y ago
  I use Cenon for my CAM. I didn’t realize it was open source and I never expected to hear anyone else mention it.
  - WillAdams 2y ago
    It's only the drawing portion which is: https://cenon.info/ https://cenon.info/ FWIW, I tried very hard to find every possible CAD/CAM program when researching the Shapeoko wiki.... though I found Cenon because I was a long-time NeXT user.
    - detourdog 2y ago
      That is why I settled on it. The other one I was working with was FabBSD. I still have the source to that it is an OpenBSD focused on CAM. I think the developer lost interest when OpenBSD switched the security model for GPIO. I think they are both good though.
waffletower 2y ago
Logic is still solid, they even added audio stem decomposition in Logic Pro 11 recently.
- twoWhlsGud 2y ago
  that is a very fun feature - reminds me of the excitement I used to have with new versions of software...
TimTheTinker 2y ago
Apple gained so much professional mindshare in the early 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe, etc. I worked in a graphics/media studio at the time, and the excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps was just fun. It feels like a shame that only vestiges of that time remain today. The bar is much higher in some ways (lower in others), it takes a lot more skill and specialized knowledge to compete, and almost all vendors don't put in the same careful attention to detail (especially UX) that the Apple pro apps of that era had.
- dylan604 2y ago
  It seems there was a huge loss of software in the 32bit->64bit switch. Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift (or whatever the specific languages were). FCPX is such a different version than FCP. Just like QTPlayerX is so different than QT Player 7 Pro was such a regression of capabilities. I doubt there was a "this is the best QT Player we've ever released" on that "upgrade".
  - sgjohnson 2y ago
    > Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift C#, not Cocoa. Cocoa is an API. You can write a Cocoa application in Swift, if you really want to (but you should really use SwiftUI for anything new)
    - bangaroo 2y ago
      not to well actually you, but i assume you meant objective c? c# is a microsoft thing.
      - sgjohnson 2y ago
        Oh yes
comboy 2y ago
Logic is stellar. Why would you feel like its being abandoned? Professional tools don't change UX every 2 years.
- bangaroo 2y ago
  Apple is clearly investing in it, but for whatever reason it's simply not got the foothold it once had and they don't seem super interested in pushing it and people aren't using it. I feel like it's substantially less prominent in the industry than it was a decade or two ago, I see it in far fewer studios (or, even further I'll say I literally have not seen anyone using it in person in the past ten years, which is a marked change.) For a very long time, I feel like cubase/logic/pro tools were The DAWs That People Used. Logic doesn't seem to be appealing to new producers as much and it doesn't seem like Apple is as invested in pushing or promoting it as it used to be. I might be wrong, though! I much more frequently see Ableton for folks doing electronic music now (that really eats up most of the dance music space, as far as I can tell) with pro tools being the juggernaut in the live recording space. That said, I'm like... a hobbyist audio engineer who records and mixes friend's bands, so it's not like I'm in and out of studios all the time and there's tons I haven't seen. It's just anecdotal.
- changing1999 2y ago
  Logic falls into a weird space between pro (studio) software and home studio software. Professional studios mostly use Pro Tools and Cubase (Europe). Home users mostly migrated to Live. It's obviously an oversimplification but it does reflect the problem Logic is facing. Live is far ahead of Logic in the electronic music space. With a streamlined UI and M4L it dominated the market for the new(ish) generation of musicians. Every single musician I know (100s) moved from Logic to Live within the last two decades. The only people I know who still use Logic are composers (Live lacks music notation) using laptops at home. Not to say that Logic is not a great piece of software. Drummer tracks were revolutionary, built in plugins are solid.
  - Applejinx 2y ago
    There's some other places that migrated to Reaper because of its own specialties. Reaper runs great and is absurdly, unreasonably customizable. That of course means extensive skinning capabilities, but it also means ReaScript, a scripting language with a whole API. I recently succeeded in using ReaScript to take my control surface, the faders of which I'd colorcoded, and using them to on the fly adjust output level controls on plugins I wrote. Not just 'assign the plugins to a fader', or 'assign controls to plugin parameters on the selected track, or discontinuous selections of tracks', though those are also things Reaper happily does. I mean, in a big mix I can assign track colors to the tracks in Reaper, and the parameters (in plugins, mind you, anywhere in the FX stacks) will all jump to the live position of the control surface fader with that color. A bit specific and personal, but it's entirely done in scripting. The game industry uses Reaper for similar reasons: being able to automate generation of a game's entire collection of sounds has its uses. I would say it is the DAW equivalent of what Blender is, in 3D modeling.
fny 2y ago
My guess is that this a purchase of what will become the ever missing “MS Paint.” It’s kinda wild that macOS bundles Garage Band but doesn’t come with anything for graphics.
- grvbck 2y ago
  OS X used to have iPhoto, which was a really decent app in the days of early digital photography. Until Apple decided to replace it with a more "streamlined" Photos app, by removing a lot of features. I guess a lot of the editing has since moved to the photo-taking device (and the early iPhones/iPads lacked the processing power), but is that the cause or effect?
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
> final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them. They're professional tools. For use by people who are paid to use them. You don't want there to be buzz, you want them to just work. Buzz is a godawful metric for useful software.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  To the contrary, you want there to be buzz around their new features. As a professional, you need to keep up, and you want new features to reduce your busywork in the app. Buzz is actually a pretty good metric, because it means the product is being maintained and improved, and you want to be investing in tools that will continue to meet your needs over the next 10 years rather than become stagnant, and then you have to re-train on a competitor.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    I suppose we need to be more specific about what we mean by buzz. I mean "buzz" to be a general enthusiasm about the software even among non-users. I recall times when there was quite a lot of this kind of buzz about both Logic and Final Cut, in part I think because they were a part of Apple's Mac OS X comeback story. I suspect you mean "buzz" to be enthusiasm in the community of users of the tools. I know software I've worked on in the pass, the general public couldn't care less about our product, but new releases always got a lot of buzz in our forums. This kind of buzz might actually be a pretty good metric.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - jwells89 2y ago
    I dunno, I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a version of Photoshop CS1/CS2 that runs on modern operating systems where all development effort goes into fixing bugs and improving performance instead of something like current Photoshop CC, where the focus is on gee-whiz gimmicky features. Plugins can fill in for the gee-whiz stuff without turning the core app into a cosmically bloated mess.
FinnKuhn 2y ago
> ideally not-subscription-based competitor What I think would probably be a more likely thing to happen is for Apple to create a subscription called "Apple Creative" or sth. as soon as they have a similar assortment of programs to rival Adobe as having one subscription for all of their applications is currently their biggest advantage.
rty32 2y ago
> it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it. I agree, but history just proved that Apple does not care. And let's be real: Photoshop is cross-platform, and lots of content creation software is cross platform (or a web app). There are many more content creators that use Windows than people here are aware of or want to acknowledge (on HN, sometimes you get the impression that Windows is a forgotten OS that nobody uses). Now, Apple is at a huge disadvantage for losing that market -- often you can only be a big player if you have enough users. Apple also is never known for putting apps on the web like Figma and doesn't appear to have plan to do so. A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither users nor Apple seem to care about it. In the end, they just kind of development native Mac OS software half-mindedly. Which is fine -- that's what they want to do.
- mxey 2y ago
  > A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither users nor Apple seem to care about it. I would disagree on that, at least about Keynote. I’m not the only one who loves it.
  - TimTheTinker 2y ago
    Keynote thrives because Apple does their in-person stage presentations using it. They need something to handle that... and because it's Apple they won't use PowerPoint.
  - seec 2y ago
    Sure but what Keynote does is pretty niche. On the other hand, Pages is nowhere near the capabilities of Word and still not a good layout program either. Numbers is OK only if your spreadsheet needs are very basic and you mostly care about the presentation of it. Its performance is so bad that even Google sheet feels better (it's way more capable nowadays, in any case). Apple have those things only to say they have them and pretend that they have "solutions" instead of having to rely on 3rd party. But they are not really competitive outside of the most basic need and in my opinion their existence is not worth all that much in today's landscape where both Microsoft and Google basic offering are free.
robenkleene 2y ago
It's weird seeing all this discussion of this being a new entry into Apple's pro apps, I'm curious what you folks think Apple has to gain from expanding their pro line up today? Apple was into pro apps 20 years ago when they were trying to win over creatives to their new platform (OS X). That's hasn't been a priority for them since then, they've vaguely migrated to the prosumer market (Final Cut Pro X). But that strikes me more as a compromise to give the products more life without doing things that are antithetical to Apple (mainly backwards compatible, i.e., real pros need this). I've speculated here that my only guess is this is about visionOS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42018695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42018695), but curious to hear from anyone what specific problem expanding their pro line up solves beyond that? (I guess maybe getting another pro app on iPad is a little bit of something, but I don't think that's acquisition worthy.)
chongli 2y ago
apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while I blame it on Apple’s corporate culture and its relentless focus on secrecy and big event announcements. This strategy works extremely well for them in the consumer space but it’s just frustrating for pros to deal with. When professionals invest in a software tool for their business they need to have some assurance of commitment from the software vendor. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to retrain for new tools and retool for new workflows. Pros really like when a company that makes their tools is really open about the development roadmap and engaged in two-way conversations about issues with the tools and what needs to be fixed, what new features are needed, etc. Apple has traditionally been seen to be hostile to that sort of relationship.
duped 2y ago
fwiw, you're forgetting Mainstage, which is the defacto industry standard (alongside Ableton, to an extent) for live performance. There's a cottage industry of Mainstage session sales and sound design that is funded by basically every theater production in the United States from high school to Broadway which is wild if you think about it. Garageband is also way more popular than people realize. Logic, (which is Garageband+ since version 10, essentially) has a few features that anyone in that ecosystem really wants. Logic + Mainstage is still unbeaten for the value for recording/production/performance, while Ableton continues to rot and Bitwig gets slightly better (but is still no Logic, and costs 3x more for fewer features) Final Cut had its lunch eaten by DaVinci and Premiere. And anyone with money was/is using Avid still, just like with Pro Tools.

vr46 2y ago

Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared. FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected. I went all in on Logic, however, and that has proved a great buy, no subscription model, fantastic extras and works super well. If they can rebuild a enthusiast-targeted set of apps again, but stick with it, the future looks bright. I cannot imagine Apple ever competing with Capture One or most of the other circle of RAW image processors, which have some rather niche features, but they might be able to take on Lightroom.

deleted 2y ago
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jwells89 2y ago
The no-subscription aspect is a huge differentiator IMO, and depending on situation is even worth trading off features. Losing access to your work because you stopped your Adobe subscription sucks, as does the eventual premium over single-purchase.
hggigg 2y ago
Yeah this. Aperture was a mess. Some of the "full" edit tools from Aperture are actually lurking in Photos which is a fairly competent photo editor on macOS surprisingly. I think they have a chance. I know a couple of professional photographers. One uses Capture One and only for tethering support. The other an ancient copy of Lightroom that was a one time purchase and use that for persistent contract work for one of the larger advertising companies in London. If the price is right and it's good enough, they are probably going to do fine. I'm an amateur and I want to get off LR because I hate giving Adobe money every month and the damn thing is a fat pig compared to Photomator. Photomator is missing decent dehaze and because I have a shitty little DX mirrorless, I need the denoise and it's not as good as LR is.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I was quite surprised (pleasantly) with the editing features available in Photos. I rarely use it on the desktop, and primarily only use it on the device I took the image, but to see how much more in depth the editing was on desktop was one of those that I thought for a second might make me switch to using it for device captured image editing. For non-device camera images, I still use full tilt apps as that's just my workflow and I do not ever see Photos working its way into that workflow
  - hggigg 2y ago
    Yeah I’m currently using lightroom for my mirrorless. I export that to photos then share / keep the flattened images in there.
tigeroil 2y ago
Logic is a weird one. It has really truly excellent included instruments (such as Alchemy) and effects, but the app itself feels rather outdated. The mixer, whilst having had some nice features added since Logic 9, is in dire need of an update.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Wouldn't that be a sign of a product that was purchased by Apple and then left to languish as is with just enough effort to not let it rot?
  - selectodude 2y ago
    Apple bought Logic over 20 years ago. I’d be surprised if it shared any code with the pre-acquisition version.
    - srockets 2y ago
      Why not? Current macOS ships code older than that.
  - cesaref 2y ago
    I believe the Logic team are still based in Germany, where the original Emagic team that produced Logic were based, so it's not that they are languishing, but an intentional decision has been made (either by them or Apple) to keep this structure. Logic has such a long history, it's not surprising that it shows it's age, and has 'weird' behaviour that you wouldn't choose today. It's got stuff in there from the early 90s, as it started out as a midi sequencer before pulling audio into the product.
- butterknife 2y ago
  All the AI hubris but Logic still does not do fades or zero crossings when cutting audio clips. And don't get me started on the audio zoom. This is basic stuff! It feels like the audio code was not touched since emagic days.
AlanYx 2y ago
One of the senior Aperture team members went off to use the underlying OS RAW infrastructure in product called Gentleman Coders Nitro. It's a decent but little known Lightroom alternative with no subscription, albeit without all the recent Lightroom AI-infused features. It does have AI masking though.
- grahamj 2y ago
  omg thanks for the tip! It seems to support iCloud-synched smart albums which is a key feature I've wanted for years since Aperture.
- jitl 2y ago
  Amazing, this looks like just what I've been wanting
- vr46 2y ago
  A fantastic product but the colour science does not look great from a first play, and I don't know if seven days is long enough to figure it out. If I had a job I'd pull the trigger anyway, but too much of a luxury right now. I can't believe I did not know about this application. Shocking marketing! :D
- Vegenoid 2y ago
  Wow, can’t believe I didn’t find this while looking for Lightroom alternatives several months ago. Looks great!
- hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
  I bought their previous software "RAW Power", because it was a one-time perpetual license. Then they rewrote the app (it's worse now BTW), rebranded as Nitro, and stopped updating the previous one to be able to charge again. The Pixelmator team did the same thing with "Pixelmator Classic".
holman 2y ago
> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected. I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial photography. As someone who's still eagerly awaiting like... any reasonable prosumer device to shoot for Apple Vision Pro, I think all of this industry is going to really ramp up in the next few short years very quickly. Gonna be interesting.
- gannonburgett 2y ago
  Yea, if Apple is going to want their VR products to succeed they're going to have to rely heavily on some vertical integration on video capture/editing software, and FCPX (and now Pixelmator for the spatial photography efforts) seems like the natural place to put those efforts.
- radicality 2y ago
  It feels a bit strange though that they made FCP for iPhone/iPad a subscription, and completely separate one from the Mac App. Like, Apple probably doesn’t even need to make money from any of FCP? IMO should be used for driving people to buy more hardware. It’s a little bit offensive for them to charge $5/month on top of a $300 Mac app. On my Mac I have Davinci, and was considering perhaps trying FCP, but not at those prices / subscriptions.
  - spectre3d 2y ago
    Fair enough. I don’t use the iPad version of FCP or Resolve, but I’ve paid for both Mac apps and have enjoyed free updates from Apple and Blackmagic for close to 10 years.
grogenaut 2y ago
At this point for video I'm just using DaVinci Resolve which is free except for 8k work and works on windows/mac/linux.
segasaturn 2y ago
>suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to How does that happen? Forgetting to periodically save their work and have the app crash, or was it saving incorrectly and producing corrupted files?
- vr46 2y ago
  Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed together with original image files - a total mess. The digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then, and some people trusted Aperture with their original images whereas later versions allowed or encouraged people to keep their "masters" elsewhere. Because the whole thing was as slow as a slug dragging a ball-and-chain, pre-SSD, issues with that filesystem or master database were sometimes mistaken for just general slowness. I jumped to Lightroom faster than you could say Gordon Parks.
  - spacedcowboy 2y ago
    Aperture 1.0 was very slow. The stories I could tell about its genesis... I came on board just before 1.0 release, and for 1.5 we cleaned things up a bit. For 2.0 we (mainly I) completely rewrote the database code, and got between 10x and 100x improvements by using SQLite directly rather than going through CoreData. CoreData has since improved, but it was a nascent technology itself back then, and not suited to the sort of database use we needed. The SQLite database wasn't "vulnerable to corruption", SQLite has several articles about its excellent ACID nature. The design of the application was flawed at the beginning though, with bindings used frequently in the UI to managed objects persisted in the database, which meant (amongst other things) that: - User changes a slider - Change is propagated through bindings - CoreData picks up the binding and syncs it to disk - But the database is on another thread, which invalidates the ManagedObjectContext - Which means the context has to re-read everything from the database - Which takes time - By now the user has moved the slider again. So: slow. I fixed that - see the other post I made.

Forgeties79 2y ago

The abandoning of FCPX after surviving the reputation blow it took during the transition from 7->X is baffling to me. In the mid 2010s it was actually a fantastic NLE, I used it for professional work for a solid decade. When it comes to speed editing there’s just nothing like it. But starting around 2019 or 2020 they just began to let it languish. To say they don’t have feature parity with resolve and premiere is beyond an understatement, whereas they were trailblazing some great stuff previously. Their multi-cam and audio sync’ing was next to none at one time.

throwaway-11-1 2y ago
I was around there ~2019 the original FCPX design team was purged when the art director from a print magazine took over for the pro apps. He brought in people worked on stuff like the LinkedIn website, ESPN baseball apps and Disney games. Engineers and QA were annoyed having to explain concepts like timecode
- Forgeties79 2y ago
  Well that certainly explains things lol

WillAdams 2y ago

Still sad that the Apple-award-winning vector drawing program Lineform all-but vanished. (and don't get me started on Freehand being bought by Adobe which is why I need to find a replacement vector drawing tool) Cenon is nice, but hasn't seen much updating (but at least, being opensource gets updated as new versions are released). Inkscape is workable, but still a bit awkward (and I doubt it will ever get all of Freehand's functionality/keyboard shortcuts). I've been buying Serif's Affinity Designer (and their other apps), but they're still not as comfortable as FH/MX --- wish the Quasado/GraviT folks would get further along.

detourdog 2y ago
I use Cenon for my CAM. I didn’t realize it was open source and I never expected to hear anyone else mention it.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  It's only the drawing portion which is: https://cenon.info/ https://cenon.info/ FWIW, I tried very hard to find every possible CAD/CAM program when researching the Shapeoko wiki.... though I found Cenon because I was a long-time NeXT user.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    That is why I settled on it. The other one I was working with was FabBSD. I still have the source to that it is an OpenBSD focused on CAM. I think the developer lost interest when OpenBSD switched the security model for GPIO. I think they are both good though.

waffletower 2y ago

Logic is still solid, they even added audio stem decomposition in Logic Pro 11 recently.

twoWhlsGud 2y ago
that is a very fun feature - reminds me of the excitement I used to have with new versions of software...

TimTheTinker 2y ago

Apple gained so much professional mindshare in the early 2000s with FCP, Shake, Logic, Aperture, Motion, XSan, XServe, etc. I worked in a graphics/media studio at the time, and the excitement was palpable. And creating things with those apps was just fun. It feels like a shame that only vestiges of that time remain today. The bar is much higher in some ways (lower in others), it takes a lot more skill and specialized knowledge to compete, and almost all vendors don't put in the same careful attention to detail (especially UX) that the Apple pro apps of that era had.

dylan604 2y ago
It seems there was a huge loss of software in the 32bit->64bit switch. Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift (or whatever the specific languages were). FCPX is such a different version than FCP. Just like QTPlayerX is so different than QT Player 7 Pro was such a regression of capabilities. I doubt there was a "this is the best QT Player we've ever released" on that "upgrade".
- sgjohnson 2y ago
  > Code bases in Cocoa were too heavy to switch to Swift C#, not Cocoa. Cocoa is an API. You can write a Cocoa application in Swift, if you really want to (but you should really use SwiftUI for anything new)
  - bangaroo 2y ago
    not to well actually you, but i assume you meant objective c? c# is a microsoft thing.
    - sgjohnson 2y ago
      Oh yes

comboy 2y ago

Logic is stellar. Why would you feel like its being abandoned? Professional tools don't change UX every 2 years.

bangaroo 2y ago
Apple is clearly investing in it, but for whatever reason it's simply not got the foothold it once had and they don't seem super interested in pushing it and people aren't using it. I feel like it's substantially less prominent in the industry than it was a decade or two ago, I see it in far fewer studios (or, even further I'll say I literally have not seen anyone using it in person in the past ten years, which is a marked change.) For a very long time, I feel like cubase/logic/pro tools were The DAWs That People Used. Logic doesn't seem to be appealing to new producers as much and it doesn't seem like Apple is as invested in pushing or promoting it as it used to be. I might be wrong, though! I much more frequently see Ableton for folks doing electronic music now (that really eats up most of the dance music space, as far as I can tell) with pro tools being the juggernaut in the live recording space. That said, I'm like... a hobbyist audio engineer who records and mixes friend's bands, so it's not like I'm in and out of studios all the time and there's tons I haven't seen. It's just anecdotal.
changing1999 2y ago
Logic falls into a weird space between pro (studio) software and home studio software. Professional studios mostly use Pro Tools and Cubase (Europe). Home users mostly migrated to Live. It's obviously an oversimplification but it does reflect the problem Logic is facing. Live is far ahead of Logic in the electronic music space. With a streamlined UI and M4L it dominated the market for the new(ish) generation of musicians. Every single musician I know (100s) moved from Logic to Live within the last two decades. The only people I know who still use Logic are composers (Live lacks music notation) using laptops at home. Not to say that Logic is not a great piece of software. Drummer tracks were revolutionary, built in plugins are solid.
- Applejinx 2y ago
  There's some other places that migrated to Reaper because of its own specialties. Reaper runs great and is absurdly, unreasonably customizable. That of course means extensive skinning capabilities, but it also means ReaScript, a scripting language with a whole API. I recently succeeded in using ReaScript to take my control surface, the faders of which I'd colorcoded, and using them to on the fly adjust output level controls on plugins I wrote. Not just 'assign the plugins to a fader', or 'assign controls to plugin parameters on the selected track, or discontinuous selections of tracks', though those are also things Reaper happily does. I mean, in a big mix I can assign track colors to the tracks in Reaper, and the parameters (in plugins, mind you, anywhere in the FX stacks) will all jump to the live position of the control surface fader with that color. A bit specific and personal, but it's entirely done in scripting. The game industry uses Reaper for similar reasons: being able to automate generation of a game's entire collection of sounds has its uses. I would say it is the DAW equivalent of what Blender is, in 3D modeling.

fny 2y ago

My guess is that this a purchase of what will become the ever missing “MS Paint.” It’s kinda wild that macOS bundles Garage Band but doesn’t come with anything for graphics.

grvbck 2y ago
OS X used to have iPhoto, which was a really decent app in the days of early digital photography. Until Apple decided to replace it with a more "streamlined" Photos app, by removing a lot of features. I guess a lot of the editing has since moved to the photo-taking device (and the early iPhones/iPads lacked the processing power), but is that the cause or effect?

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

> final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them. They're professional tools. For use by people who are paid to use them. You don't want there to be buzz, you want them to just work. Buzz is a godawful metric for useful software.

crazygringo 2y ago
To the contrary, you want there to be buzz around their new features. As a professional, you need to keep up, and you want new features to reduce your busywork in the app. Buzz is actually a pretty good metric, because it means the product is being maintained and improved, and you want to be investing in tools that will continue to meet your needs over the next 10 years rather than become stagnant, and then you have to re-train on a competitor.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I suppose we need to be more specific about what we mean by buzz. I mean "buzz" to be a general enthusiasm about the software even among non-users. I recall times when there was quite a lot of this kind of buzz about both Logic and Final Cut, in part I think because they were a part of Apple's Mac OS X comeback story. I suspect you mean "buzz" to be enthusiasm in the community of users of the tools. I know software I've worked on in the pass, the general public couldn't care less about our product, but new releases always got a lot of buzz in our forums. This kind of buzz might actually be a pretty good metric.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- jwells89 2y ago
  I dunno, I'd be more inclined to subscribe to a version of Photoshop CS1/CS2 that runs on modern operating systems where all development effort goes into fixing bugs and improving performance instead of something like current Photoshop CC, where the focus is on gee-whiz gimmicky features. Plugins can fill in for the gee-whiz stuff without turning the core app into a cosmically bloated mess.

FinnKuhn 2y ago

> ideally not-subscription-based competitor What I think would probably be a more likely thing to happen is for Apple to create a subscription called "Apple Creative" or sth. as soon as they have a similar assortment of programs to rival Adobe as having one subscription for all of their applications is currently their biggest advantage.

rty32 2y ago

> it feels like something they'd be well-positioned to seriously take on if they invested heavily in it. I agree, but history just proved that Apple does not care. And let's be real: Photoshop is cross-platform, and lots of content creation software is cross platform (or a web app). There are many more content creators that use Windows than people here are aware of or want to acknowledge (on HN, sometimes you get the impression that Windows is a forgotten OS that nobody uses). Now, Apple is at a huge disadvantage for losing that market -- often you can only be a big player if you have enough users. Apple also is never known for putting apps on the web like Figma and doesn't appear to have plan to do so. A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither users nor Apple seem to care about it. In the end, they just kind of development native Mac OS software half-mindedly. Which is fine -- that's what they want to do.

mxey 2y ago
> A similar example is the iWork suite. It exists, but neither users nor Apple seem to care about it. I would disagree on that, at least about Keynote. I’m not the only one who loves it.
- TimTheTinker 2y ago
  Keynote thrives because Apple does their in-person stage presentations using it. They need something to handle that... and because it's Apple they won't use PowerPoint.
- seec 2y ago
  Sure but what Keynote does is pretty niche. On the other hand, Pages is nowhere near the capabilities of Word and still not a good layout program either. Numbers is OK only if your spreadsheet needs are very basic and you mostly care about the presentation of it. Its performance is so bad that even Google sheet feels better (it's way more capable nowadays, in any case). Apple have those things only to say they have them and pretend that they have "solutions" instead of having to rely on 3rd party. But they are not really competitive outside of the most basic need and in my opinion their existence is not worth all that much in today's landscape where both Microsoft and Google basic offering are free.

robenkleene 2y ago

It's weird seeing all this discussion of this being a new entry into Apple's pro apps, I'm curious what you folks think Apple has to gain from expanding their pro line up today? Apple was into pro apps 20 years ago when they were trying to win over creatives to their new platform (OS X). That's hasn't been a priority for them since then, they've vaguely migrated to the prosumer market (Final Cut Pro X). But that strikes me more as a compromise to give the products more life without doing things that are antithetical to Apple (mainly backwards compatible, i.e., real pros need this). I've speculated here that my only guess is this is about visionOS (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42018695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42018695), but curious to hear from anyone what specific problem expanding their pro line up solves beyond that? (I guess maybe getting another pro app on iPad is a little bit of something, but I don't think that's acquisition worthy.)

chongli 2y ago

apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while I blame it on Apple’s corporate culture and its relentless focus on secrecy and big event announcements. This strategy works extremely well for them in the consumer space but it’s just frustrating for pros to deal with. When professionals invest in a software tool for their business they need to have some assurance of commitment from the software vendor. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to retrain for new tools and retool for new workflows. Pros really like when a company that makes their tools is really open about the development roadmap and engaged in two-way conversations about issues with the tools and what needs to be fixed, what new features are needed, etc. Apple has traditionally been seen to be hostile to that sort of relationship.

duped 2y ago

fwiw, you're forgetting Mainstage, which is the defacto industry standard (alongside Ableton, to an extent) for live performance. There's a cottage industry of Mainstage session sales and sound design that is funded by basically every theater production in the United States from high school to Broadway which is wild if you think about it. Garageband is also way more popular than people realize. Logic, (which is Garageband+ since version 10, essentially) has a few features that anyone in that ecosystem really wants. Logic + Mainstage is still unbeaten for the value for recording/production/performance, while Ableton continues to rot and Bitwig gets slightly better (but is still no Logic, and costs 3x more for fewer features) Final Cut had its lunch eaten by DaVinci and Premiere. And anyone with money was/is using Avid still, just like with Pro Tools.