A Lament for Aperture

Summary

I’m an old Mac-head at heart, and I’ve been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don’t tend to genuinely think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there’s a thing to be said about the simplicity of older software, but most of my fondness for those days is nostalgia. For example, I have wonderful memories of finally getting a copy of ClarisWorks and being able to do pixel-based image editing, which sparked a wonderful childhood “career” of tinkering with icons and various other bits and bobs with that and ResEdit. The things you could do before code signing! However, I’m not going to sit here and say with a straight face that ClarisWorks on System 7 in the 1990s was better than using the myriad of tools we have available to us today. It’s nostalgia for a simpler time — both in computing, and in my life. An exception to that, however, is Apple’s Aperture. I’m still grumpy that Apple discontinued it back in 2015, and I’m not alone. Start spending time in the online photography sphere and you’ll start to notice a small but undeniable undercurrent of lament of its loss to this day. Find an article about Adobe hiking their subscription prices because they added AI for some reason, and amongst the complaining in the comments you’ll invariably find it: “I miss Aperture.” Aperture’s icon. A couple of things have happened recently that spurred me to actually write all of this down rather than grumble occasionally on social media: Apple released macOS Tahoe, which has been pretty constantly raked over the coals for poor design and broken interactions from the day it was released (and even before, if we’re honest). Apple very recently announced their Creator Studio subscription service, and I saw this post on Mastodon by @BasicAppleGuy: When I took this screenshot, the first reply to the post was “I miss Aperture. <long digital sigh>”. So, I dug out the ‘ol Trashcan Mac Pro I lovingl...