Aperture has Arrived

We got our first stocks of Apple Aperture a few days ago, and yesterday we got an NFR copy out of stock to try (except Apple don't do NFRs as such). As a lot of visitors have come to the blog searching for info on Aperture, I thought I'd say something.

First of all, no, you can't have it.

I watched over James' shoulders as he played around with it. He's running it on a dual 1.8GHz G5 with 2.5GB RAM, which just about covers the requirements. He's also got an upgraded graphics card (an GeForce 6800 GT with 256MB RAM), which must help, too.

Anyway, the software looks great, and seemed to run quite respectably on his machine. I will be trying it on an 1.8GHz iMac G5, just to see how it copes, but for professional use, on a professional machine, it looks good.

The magnifier glass thing is a bit of an odd experience. First of all, it seems slightly counter-intuitive that the magnifier is working on the bit your cursor is pointing to, rather than the bit you move the magnifier over (which is not how it would be in the real world, of course). But it does work, very well. At first we thought you couldn't view the image at 100%, and that only the magnifier would allow you to see bits at 100%, but in fact, you can zoom to 100% and view portions of the image at up to 800%.

I'll post more on the long-term experience, and maybe James will add his own words, but it certainly didn't look like a disappointment.