Up against the Wall!?

Once again Apple has unleashed upon its faithful users a fundamentally flawed upgrade to the "professional" application Aperture. While posting directly to Facebook, et. al. is close to the bottom of important features for my work flow it seems incomprehensible that such a fundamental thing for many users was not adequately tested. This is particularly odd as I see Apple forcing FB and other "social media" connections into the OS.

So now we have AP 3.4. Apple's official procedure for installing this upgrade is to delete your existing application, reinstall - either by downloading or from CD - then apply the latest upgrade. See Apple's word at http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4412?viewlocale=en_US Has anyone at Apple even considered the incredible amount of lost time and energry to first do this, and then sort out all the preferences that set up the environment for each unique workflow? (To say nothing of not knowing if the preference even still exists in this release?)

Perhaps I'm being unreasonable here, but the requirement that I destroy the program before I update it drives me back to the dim early days of computing when such a procedure was often necessary, but NOW? I'll be as blunt as possible: Professional users (particularly on a deadline) do NOT, I repeat NOT have time for this exercise in stupidity.

So is it time to give up on Apple and AP and move to the dreaded LR? I haven't examined LR in detail since ver. 2. Then, I greatly preferred AP's interface, its ability to organize by project rather than date (yes, I know it is an "overlay" and the "real" data is in time order), and several truly useful plug ins. I'm also aware of a significant number of Mac users who have left for Lightroom and while they all seem to miss parts of AP, the overall stability and the relative predictability that Adobe will support and improve the program drove their defection.

Can anyone give us any assurance that Apple will continue to even keep Aperture much less actually improve it?

I'm studying what it will take to move to LR and calculate probably 2-3 days of exacting and boring work to "relocate originals", reorder them in such a way that LR will "add" them. I'm counseled repeatedly by LR users to accept a date based ordering system and develop "collections" to give my library the order necessary for me to use them. Not counted in this calculation is how long it will take to learn a new program nor the fact that every single image modification I've ever made within AP will be lost. Fortunately ITPC data can be retained, but not much else.

That's the wall. Keep working in AP without assurance of its continuation or bite the bullet, take a few days out of my life and start over with another program and probably spend months wondering where everything is?

I suppose this is just a rant, but if this recent (and continuing) failure by Apple to keep this program relevant has caused any other professional users to re-evaluate their commitment to AP, I'd be interested in your thinking.

Robert 😟

Yeah, I know Apple will eventually pull its head out and offer us 3.4.1 (or .2) to fix this. Anyone remember the 3.3 debacle?