
Apple Aperture: Senior QA (2004-2005) - CharlesW
https://techreflect.net/2019/12/10/aperture-senior-qa-2004-2005/
======
peteforde
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.

~~~
mokus
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.

~~~
pkulak
I was a huge Aperture fan myself, and have since moved to DxO. They put out a
new version every year that has an upgrade fee, but there's no issue staying
put for as long as you like. And it's 100% filesystem-based, so it's much
easier to work into whatever backup workflow you like; cloud or otherwise.

I actually like it so much, that I even use it since I switched to Linux
recently. I have a Windows VM with one app installed that I boot up every
month or so to process photos.

~~~
peteforde
Just learning about DxO for the first time. I purchased another app called
Luminar that I tried once and wasn't totally blown away by. What I'm looking
for is a sane workflow and lightning quick navigation, hopefully with some
basic edits and tight photoshop integration.

One of my favourite things about Aperture+PS was being able to spawn an edit
process that, when you save the file in PS, created a duplicate version with
the changes back in Aperture. The more I think about it, this was the secret
sauce. Is this replicated in DxO?

~~~
pkulak
Oh, I have no idea about that, sorry. Don't use Photoshop myself. I just need
to do some cropping, lighting/color/contrast adjustments and noise reduction,
then I move on to the next family photo. :D

------
bonaldi
This was always going to wrong from the minute I read “we had a collection of
demos ... and a hard deadline to launch a year later at a Photo exhibition”.

That isn’t a real deadline, it’s a management ambition. And a badly set
ambition, based on some demos and the belief they could scream good code into
existence.

Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from
releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.

To make parents work weekends without their children for an entire 6-month
period just to try and hit a management fantasy is a symptom of a toxic
culture.

(And is also counter-productive. The slow and buggy v1 that resulted wasn’t
good enough to capture the market — but it _was_ enough to finally wake up
Adobe, who dramatically accelerated efforts on Lightroom, which launched first
on Mac and went on to dominate the market)

~~~
caycep
Even Lightroom arguably hasn't achieved the technical abilities of
Aperture...it's slow.

Plus now there's a fork of Lightroom "classic" and a weird cloud-only version,
and also Adobe's subscription pricing. There are a few other apps that have
added digital asset management, but overall, there's really nothing that has
taken its place.

~~~
wlesieutre
Affinity might have something in the works, no official news that I can find
but it’s been rumored for years and seems like an obvious product for them.

Edit: most recent I can find is that a year ago they weren’t working on it
[https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when...](https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/78025-when-
are-damcataloging-and-tethering-features-coming-to-affinity-photo)

~~~
httgp
That is disappointing, because Serif makes amazing products.

------
spiderfarmer
As a former manager I always read these management failures and wonder how on
earth these people ended up in their positions. To be fair, I hated being a
manager but I enjoyed having a happy, confident and competent team. So maybe
the job just attracts people who love drama.

~~~
hhas01
As a former manager (who sounds like a good one), are you able to shine any
light on why management cultures appear so reluctant to eject malignant
managers?

Any bad employee will damage the business and those around them. But where a
typical bottom-rung grunt has a very small scope of influence and is
relatively easy to fire, even a mid-level manager has more than enough power
to ruin entire departments; and once they’re c-suite the game is all but done.

~~~
goatinaboat
_why management cultures appear so reluctant to eject malignant managers?_

A typical engineer will gladly stab another in the back for something so
trivial as what nearly-identical-anyway programming language or framework or
IDE to use. Meanwhile managers, like lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers
and every other profession, prioritise solidarity within the profession. We
can debate whether that’s good or bad but there’s no doubt why they prosper
while engineers are the first to be outsourced or exploited.

~~~
briandear
> Meanwhile managers, like lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers and every
> other profession, prioritise solidarity within the profession.

Have you worked for any length of time in those fields? Don’t know if you ever
worked as a lawyer but “solidarity” isn’t a core value.

~~~
goatinaboat
_Don’t know if you ever worked as a lawyer but “solidarity” isn’t a core
value._

Solidarity to the profession. They may squabble amongst themselves but they’ll
never compromise the general prestige of lawyering. Nor tell the client that
what they do is easy and anyone can learn it, even if that’s true.

------
Wowfunhappy
I wasn't old enough to be paying attention when Aperture first released, but
because I've only ever heard great things about the program, I kept expecting
this story to end with some miraculous turnaround for the engineering team.

That didn't happen. And while the author doesn't say that Aperture 1.0 was
bad, he doesn't appear to have thought too highly of it either. Separately,
it's hard to imagine such a rushed and mismanaged process producing a stellar
end-product (although, I'm sure stranger things have happened).

What was Aperture like at release? Were later versions a substantial
improvement?

~~~
pluckytree
We were proud of it given the circumstances. I'll edit the quote below to make
that more clear.

"So, we shipped the product and introduced it at the show as planned. Despite
a long list of warts and terrible performance, I thought it turned out well
given the schedule and the circumstances. I continued to use it as my primary
photo app, even though I’m not a hard-core professional. Others on the team
were too bitter, such that they refused to use the final product."

\- cricket

------
izacus
Is this kind of working environment normal at Apple? This isn't the first
story I've heard about mandatory long hours and screaming in the office. Can
anyone else chime in?

~~~
grecy
Reading that story made me feel sick. As a young Engineer my dream was to work
at Apple, but I'm happy I never did.

I don't understand why people tolerate that kind of treatment. Never in a
million years would I work nights or weekends or allow anyone to scream in my
face. That's just not life.

~~~
SloopJon
Flash-in-the-pan stories like this are fascinating to me. I've never seen this
kind of drama at work. No nights, no weekends, no screaming, no passive-
aggressive snubs like the gift-bag iPods. I did a double take on the dates
when I first saw this on Daring Fireball--who has this much to write about in
a year or two?

On the other hand, I've never built a product from scratch so quickly. Google
and Facebook didn't exist when I started my current job. Now they're
gazillion-dollar companies. I've had projects on my wish list longer than
Aperture was a product.

~~~
WWLink
Aside from a hospital or a life-or-death situation, I can't think of any other
time where screaming in a workplace would ever be remotely acceptable. Ever.

------
whalesalad
These are the kinds of posts I live for on HN. Stellar inside look.

------
mathewsanders
> Fast forward ten years and the Apple Watch team offered me a job working on
> SwiftUI in 2015. (The project started on the Watch team).

That’s an interesting nugget I’ve not heard before about history of SwiftUI!

------
therealmarv
Such a shame that Apple let go of this program... all in the name of their new
cloud services. Apple had the big chance to show the world what a joke Google
Photos is in comparison... now it's more the other way round in my opinion.

------
kissgyorgy
> Many people, including myself, developed long-term health problems. One
> person, as I mentioned, had a nervous breakdown, others just took forever to
> get any spark back in their careers. I would look these people in the eyes,
> and they had this look like someone close to them died.

The same thing happened to me last year, and basically this is the reason I
have been shadow-banned from HN. I stayed for 2.5 months only, but it was
still too much, because I thought I got a decent salary. It cost me twice as
much since then because I wasn't able to work since 4 months and I have no
clear idea how I will crawl out this huge hole despite taking antidepressant,
tranquillizer and going to psychotherapy every week.

DON'T PUT A PRICE TAG ON YOUR MENTAL HEALTH, and get out of a terrible job
until it's too late! It's not worth it, believe me!

~~~
davedx
Hang in there mate, it will get better. Humans are resilient. FWIW I see your
posts fine.

------
dmitriid
When I started reading it, I came across this:

> “Since this was a professional product, they knew the quality had to be
> high.”

I sighed heavily because instead we got Photos.app. Which is just bad and sad.

But then I continued to read about all the management screwups and development
hell. And I now I know _exactly_ why Photos.app is such a disaster.

~~~
briandear
Photos is amazing. Not sure when you’ve last used it.

~~~
dewey
I use it at least once a week and there are a lot of places where it could be
improved when it comes to stability or making you feel like it's a safe place
to store your pictures.

I always run into this issue and I'm not alone, some people put their
libraries in disk images just so they can properly eject their external disks:
[https://annoying.technology/posts/ebd70c6c5715bcd8/](https://annoying.technology/posts/ebd70c6c5715bcd8/)

