Verbal.

The vast majority of professional photographers today make use of some software package, be it Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop or Apple’s Aperture. We tend to rely on these software releases for a wide array of tasks and when the chance to upgrade to a new version presents itself, most of us jump at the opportunity.

This is where the danger sets in. Coming from a software development background, I’m familiar with how software houses go about their release cycle, and history has shown us that the end product that is sold is anything but ready for human consumption. Maybe it’s age, maybe I’m still hoping that one day software will be developed correctly and tested thoroughly, but what ever the case, I upgraded to Apple’s Aperture 3 release this week. I’ve been a big fan of the Aperture package, especially as it works well with my workflow. We’ve been left in the dark for the past two years, with many wondering if they’d seen the last of the software.

Aperture 3 was launched in the usual manner associated with Apple products these days, glitzy testimonials from working professionals, who all sing the praises of this god-like software. It offers to do this, will streamline your approach and save you money, ok maybe not the last bit as it’s still a steep 200 US (160 quid). With a two year development lifecycle, you’d think that Apple had followed the necessary steps to ensure the most glaring bugs had been resolved, right?

Wrong.

Below is an image from my latest project on Gamers in South Africa. Nothing overly special about the images, a mix of Leica M8 and scanned Medium Format film (TIFF format). The upgrade went ok, Aperture converted my old library and said all was ok when processing the thumbnails. As you can see, it’s anything but ok and resulted in corrupt images in my library, incorrect previews shown for selected images and black images being exported. In the end I had to remove it and restore the previous version from the backups. In 2010, I expect more and this is a piss poor attempt at a software release.

To give you an idea of how software houses usually work with code, there are a handful of stages often performed before it is deemed fit for consumption. They are:

• 1: Conception and design phase
• 2: Coding starts
• 3: Testing to ensure it meets the specifications discussed in phase 1
• 4: QA testing (well we need to make sure this is thoroughly tested before going live)
• 5: Security testing. It has to be secure
• 6: Release

You, the customer, would expect this to be done by trained professionals, but here’ s a little insiders secret: those professionals looking at the QA side are often you. QA testing (Quality Assurance Testing) is often expensive and time-consuming. Many big software houses feel it’s better to fix the glaring bugs and then ship the product, as they know many customers will call in, e-mail and let them know of the other bugs.

It’s a win win situation for software houses. They have a customer paying for an unfinished project and at the same time have the necessary army of testers checking for bugs. You, on the other hand, are left with an unfinished piece of software when you are trying to do your day job. This is not me just being paranoid, have you ever noticed how large the updates for Apple’s OS X are? What about Windows Vista?

My advice, and one I’m really going to stick to from now on, is to ignore any software release that has a .0 at the end. I’d hedge a bet and say a .2 or .3 release is often a better platform to use, as you can bet thousands of fellow pro’s have already helped with the QA process.

Keeping up with the Joneses isn’t always a good thing, especially with software.

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