Aperture 3: The Ars Review
Aperture 3 includes a ton of workflow tweaks and improvements—so many that covering every little one would be excessive. Sure, the new feature page has some padding like “Space Bar Playback”—that’s a bit of a stretch as a feature. But there are lots of touches that make version 3 a more comfortable, well-rounded workspace for importing, sorting, tagging, developing, and exporting images.
Aperture 3 is really, really good, except that it’s so much slower than Aperture 2. If you have a notebook, even a recent MacBook Pro, I think you pretty much need an SSD, whereas Aperture 2 worked fine for me with a 5,400 RPM drive.
Since there’s no standardized metadata format for faces and names, Aperture 3 lets you export the names in photos as IPTC keywords, which can then be embedded into image for Spotlight or image bank searches. Nice to see that this feature was thought through so well.
Unfortunately, Aperture does not store the faces information as securely as the other metadata. Also, there’s no way to organize faces. I continue to use keywords instead.
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"Aperture 3 is really, really good, except that it’s so much slower than Aperture 2. If you have a notebook, even a recent MacBook Pro, I think you pretty much need an SSD, whereas Aperture 2 worked fine for me with a 5,400 RPM drive."
Tangential, but if you're a buying a new MacBook Pro without an SSD, you need to get your head examined.
I'm a budget consumer on my laptops, but at $300 - $350 through the Apple Store BTO process, getting Apple's custom-firmwared Toshiba SSD has become a no-brainer. (I care less about speed benchmarks than in having a drive Apple is committed to making work with OS X.)
128GB is admittedly small on capacity, but with 5ghz wireless, as long as you've a platter disk elsewhere on your home network, you can live without the onboard extra capacity.
The future has finally arrived, as far as laptop SSD's are concerned.
Arrandale be damned. $1550 for the basic laptop that'll still perform like a champ in 2013 is the pricing sweet spot. (And I'm guessing the thing won't burn my legs either, which will be a first for an OS X Intel laptop...)
@Chucky Right you are. At this point, I think drive speed is much more important than processor speed for most people. And I agree that Apple+Toshiba is the way to go, for the commitment to compatibility and Apple Care.
Michael, you should consider defragging your hard drive. I don't have an SSD yet (waiting for the sizes to go up and prices to come down), but after a full defragmentation rather than relying on HFS+' hot defrag, Aperture 3 ran screamingly fast. It seems like its performance is tied to its (multi-GB) index files and how fragmented they are throughout your drive.
@bbatsell I tried that, and also ran DiskWarrior to optimize the catalog, but it didn’t help much. I’m not sure why there’s such a huge difference, but it’s there.
