It's been announced, and now it's here - Aperture. By Apple. The video about it is nice, and it looks very useful, what they've done. And I would even let myself be persuaded to pay the almost 500 Euros - okay, Photoshop updates would be cheaper for me, but Aperture is built with a focus on RAW and Photoshop only has a RAW importer. But what really bothers me: the hardware requirements. The programmers have lost their marbles.
Yes, photo editing needs memory - after all, it's a lot of data. And you need decently powerful hardware for using filters. And yes, a fast graphics card is useful. But the minimum requirements for Aperture are already partly beyond belief - especially since we know how these minimum requirements will work - probably as well as Mac OS X with 256 MB of memory ...
Sorry, but photo editing is not rocket science and not weather simulation - what is this completely exaggerated resource demand of the software? Have today's programmers completely forgotten how to optimize?
Man, I scanned and processed an entire film with Photoshop 5 on an Apple with 128 MB of RAM and a 275 MHz 603e CPU not so long ago. Of course, RAW images are larger - but why should a photo editing program require a dual G5? Ridiculous. Delusions of grandeur.
So I'll probably just continue working with Photoshop 7, even if the Open Dialog still crashes under Tiger. At least it works decently on my nice, old 12" Powerbook (yes, the one with 867 MHz and only 640 MB of memory). It's enough for my purposes, I don't want to shell out several thousand Euros just to be able to start the photo editing program ...