Apple has come out with a product called Aperture that looks to directly challenge Adobe's Bridge preview and Camera Raw input hegemony. From what I've seen on Apple's website, it looks like a killer app (see http://www.apple.com/aperture/quicktours/), doing just about everything a documentary photographer would want to do. It isn't Photoshop but it's lightweight and fast and does the types of color correction, photo library management (the biggest thing for me), and formatting output that I need to do. It's retailing at $499 for civilians and $149 for academics. I've placed an order, but shipping is 6-8 weeks. Phooey!
The new quad-core G5's also look like they're exactly what the HDV documentary filmmaker has wanted for a while. Twin dual-core G5's at 2.5 ghz. Wow, you could almost do live H.264 encoding on these. :-) And only $2499 for the model I want. What a bargain.
want!
too bad i'm already in debt to apple . . .
You can't really say Aperture competes with Adobe Bridge, as that would imply Bridge actually is capable of running more than 3 seconds without keeling over and dying.
Looks fine, but with those minimum requeriments it seems little treat to Adobe tools which run fine in more modests machines being a market standard.
Now what I hadn't first appreciated is what Apple recommends for Aperture in terms of hardware:
Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 or faster
2GB of RAM
One of the following graphics cards:
ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition
ATI Radeon 9800 XT or 9800 Pro
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL or 6800 GT DDL
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 LE or 6600
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500
5GB of disk space for application, templates, and tutorial
It's easy to be blazing fast if you're running the darn thing on twin 2.5ghz G5s!
The minimum requirements lists means that my little PowerBook G4 (1.67ghz) will just barely clear the bar:
Power Mac G5 with a 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) or faster PowerPC G5 processor
17- or 20-inch iMac G5 with a 1.8 GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processor
15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor
1GB of RAM
It doesn't make much sense to me why the desktops require a 1.8 ghz G5 while the PowerBook is fine with a 1.25 ghz G4. I'm expecting it to be slow as molasses.
But just to get you salivating at what it could do on a powerful machine, check out this video of wedding photographer Joe Buissink.
Just discovered another example of the type "Apple designers and engineers don't talk to each other":
A Mac Mini is a 1.25GHz G4 and so fullfills the minimum requirements for CPU power(just!), but:
The Apple utility which checks for compatibility says that it is too slow. Why?
Because sysctl shows the clock not as 1.25GHZ, but as 1.249999995GHZ..
That is exactly the difference between marketing values and the real world.
ARRRRGHHHH!