It’s out!

Erik posts his first impressions, as does Fraser.

Me?

Let’s review the wishlist.

Improved performance.

You betcha.

RAW import API.

No. And while RAW support keeps improving, Apple’s pace of updates still leaves much to be desired.

Adjustments API.

Yes! Bring on third-party noise reduction plug-ins.

Local editing.

Sooorta. There’s a “local contrast” feature I haven’t played around with yet, and the Retouch Brush (which looks quite powerful in the demo; haven’t tried) falls in the same category. It isn’t quite what I was hoping for, however.

HDRI.

Nope.

Customizable full-screen toolbar.

Nuh-uh.

A metadata HUD for full-screen mode.

Thanks to the new all-in-one HUD, yes!

Much better keyboard-based toggling between metadata input and UI keyboard shortcuts.

Much as I can tell, this hasn’t really improved. If anything, it’s gotten worse. With the Retouch HUD open, using two-finger scroll anywhere on the full-sized image won’t pan it — it’ll drag one of the HUD’s sliders instead. This makes for some really strange results.

Much more background processing, such as of exports.

Yes!

Admittedly, I haven’t actually played around with it much. I don’t have too many halfway recent photos to test it on anyway, and I also lack time — both to take them and to edit them. That said, many of my wishlist items were fulfilled, and the worry of quite a few people that Aperture was effectively dead has, as of today, been proven unfounded. The competition between Photoshop Lightroom and Aperture continues to be exciting to watch — even more so with the price having dropped again, from $499 to $299 to now $199.

And so, I look forward to the day I can go on a trip and take tons and tons meaningful photos, come home and import, organize, post-process and publish them.

It’s the season, and John Nack at Adobe righly observes that, bizarrely enough, that ’season’ doesn’t just focus on virgin births and rampant consumerism, but also on bashing Adobe Systems, Incorporated. But then, while he can be sufficiently smart and apt when talking about then-upcoming products, he becomes defensive and apparently unable to see the bigger picture when such products are criticized.

Aside from split personality, the only reasonable explanation for this strange discrepancy can perhaps be found in what his blog posts – both the asinine ones and the rest – have in common: implicitly portraying Adobe as inimitable and flawless. Whether it’s CS3’s decidedly non-iconic icons (remember that? not that you wanted to) or the current Omniture fiasco.

For, you see, John couldn’t possibly hold such a high position and still not grasp what the criticism is – and still, he pretends just that. His entire rebuttal focuses on that spying can be bad (and that “Tracking user habits can be a good thing” – which I for one don’t disagree with), and that he feels privacy should be taken seriously. But Adobe hasn’t primarily been accused that their apps spying, or their apps violating privacy agreements, implicit or otherwise. Those matters secondarily play a role as well, but aren’t what’s being discussed. The crux of the matter is something entirely different, and just reading more than a few words of the original post that broke the story (which John did in fact link to) should suffice to make it clear.

When you launch a CS3 application the application pings out to what looks like an IP address - and internal IP address: 192.168.112.2O7.

That makes sense, right? Adobe wants to be sure you aren’t running multiple copies of their programs…. Wait something is wrong here.

It’s not (just) about spying. It’s about spying and then concealing this by fooling the slightly unobservant network admin (and possibly broken firewall roles, as John Gruber points out).

(It isn’t just Adobe doing this, either: Apple deserves the same flak.)

This isn’t just another story about phoning home, or about incomplete, misleading or hard-to-accept privacy policies. It’s a story about lies. Apple hasn’t responded at all (bad for them). Now, Adobe has – but with a hard-to-believe pretense of ignorance.