I'm just about to invest in my first proper camera (and proper HD film camera) in the shape of a Lumix GH1. I don't think iPhoto and iMovie are going to be up to scratch! I currently have an ancient copy of Photochop kicking around -- I presume I'll need to upgrade this. So, do I need (want!) Aperture for?
The GH1 is a great camera, but absolutely highlights one of the big problems with Aperture. I was happily using Aperture with a Nikon D50 since Aperture supports Nikon's raw files. However, it does not support Panasonic's most recent raw files - so with a GH1 you either have to shoot in JPEG (yuk), convert raw to JPEG using Silkypix (which is bundled with the camera - and it's very slow) or use LR. I'm using the LR Beta for the next few months and waiting to see whether Apple ever sorts out the Panasonic issue.
(You can however use iMovie to edit video from the GH1 and the results are pretty good. FCS would be better though - of course.)
But Aperture X (3) makes some sense. QuickTime X also gives a clue. The final app name may not be decided yet, but it looks plausible that Apple will use the "X" branding for the apps which take advantage of the new technologies (OpenCL, GCD).
In many cases the books come alongside the product release (even Apple-related ones). In any case, the date gives a very approximate timeframe. All deadlines (both in Aperture development and book publishing) could slip. I am fine with your "a likely max shipping date for the software" statement, but I also think that it is unlikely that the product will ship much earlier (say, March 2010). If anything else, deadlines tend to be pushed back, not forward, especially in the software industry.
Yes, it is plausible to rename Aperature to an X, but I think it is unlikely. Quicktime X is a brandname that where you don't really pay attention to the version number. But applications such as Aperture, FCP or even Adobe products need to be differentiated in their branding from version to version. That makes the X(3) a little bit of a branding headache. But still it is Apple and they've done stranger things before.
As for the release date... in all my years I've rarely seen a book ship alongside the product. I've seen tons of books that followed 3 to 8 months after a products release. In fact Apple products are the worst about this since Apple is so secretive of upcoming products. Adobe is a lot better about helping publishers target closer to the product ship date. As for your assertion that "if anything else, deadlines tend to be pushed back..." That is very true for BOTH software and books. If Aperture gets pushed to spring, then the books will be pushed to summer or fall. I saw a lot of books for Microsoft products get pushed way back due to MS's slips.
I used to work in the tech book publishing industry, and I can tell you that this article is way off base. The only thing we can really deduce from the info that Apple Insider spotted is that a new version of Aperture will be out between today and the day this book is expected to ship.
1. "Aperture X"... It is common practice to use "X" when the final version number has not been given by the software vendor. The real number will be inserted in once Apple let's the author or the public know what it will really be called.
2. The books shipping date does not indicate anything more than a likely max shipping date for the software. If, anything it suggests a much earlier shipping date since books take quite a bit of time to edit, proof and print... and the editing and proofing take even longer with a product that hasn't shipped since the final UI and features could change at any time. Most books ship about two to six months after the actual product when the author is a beta tester.
Yes, Kasper went a bit rogue on the whole 'X' thing. It is standard Amazon practice to list products as 'X' when the title is under NDA. The date is also likely a placeholder. The exact same scenario played out with the last few versions of Filemaker.
Apple should have been paying a lot more attention to the "pro" apps. I own both Logic Pro 9 and Aperture 2.whatever, and Apple makes me feel like a 2nd class citizen with both of them.
Aperture's long-term bugs and shortcomings - empty, useless histograms; failure to recall window size, position, and organization; failure to initialize plugins correctly in a multi-monitor environment; lift and stamp requiring multiple irrelevant UI steps for "crop" stamping to work; bizarre magnification limits; no way for developers to create inline tiles, only this godforsaken overweight TIFF passing mechanism; no curves (no curves? are they out of their tiny little minds? Curves is as "tilable" as any 768-byte remap function is (levels, contrast, brightness, windowing, gamma and a zillion more, both common and arbitrary); incessant preview (re)(re)(re)processing, consuming all eight cores for NO purpose; incomplete camera support (like SRAW... Adobe's got it handled, so what is Apple's excuse? Oh, wait, they don't make excuses. They just don't DO anything.
Apple rates a serious FAIL here.
And yeah, I just ordered Lightroom. I'm just tired of Apple's half-efforts to make pro apps. Great ideas are one thing; but if you can't keep your eye on the ball and address the issues in at least some vaguely timely manner, you might as well not try.
And as for Aperture requiring Snow Leopard... it's just a buggy beta. I won't put Snow Leopard in my machine until the poor hoodwinked innocents out there have discovered the rest of the serious bugs *and* Apple has addressed them. Apple couldn't even post an update to 10.5 without breaking it (for example, they totally hosed HDMI monitor support for the mini... then SAT on any fixes for months); no wonder the 10.6 release, a huge rewrite, broke tons of legacy apps, outright lost user data, fails to recover apps with low disk space, fails to show office files in spotlight, and was just generally chock *full* of bugs. Not to mention the huge list of working apps Apple broke at...
I gave up on Aperture and moved to LR2 awhile ago and have no issues with it. Adobe seems to be on the ball when it comes to compatibility updates and they already have the beta for v3 out now for download. (I still have to try it)
It just felt like Apple released Aperture 2 and then forgot about it.
Apple had a great idea with Aperture, but screwed it up as much as could be done upon release. It's difficult to get rid of a bad reputation gotten from the starting gate.
Lightroom has taken over the pro market where people don't need the complexity of PS, or need a simpler app with the full CR feature set, where they MAY need PS later.
Aperture just hasn't made it, hence the large price drop. Apple is now marketing the program mostly to amateurs.
There are still things about Aperture I don't like, and while I hope Apple will fix them, I'm beginning to doubt it.
Aperture is a Cocoa app, the rest of the Pro apps are Carbon.
Aperture could benefit a lot from OpenCL and GCD. Both technologies are well suited for this kind of work and "parallelizing" the code in this particular case is almost a no-brainer.
Regarding the "X" stuff. It might be a placeholder, and having a number like 3 is fine for Aperture. But I think Apple will get rid of the year in iLife and iWork. The problem there is that the product MUST be upgraded on yearly basis, otherwise it will look outdated. Dropping the year makes room for more meaningful version numbering, like upgrade form 3.0 to 3.5 or from 3.0 to 4.0, to emphasize the scope of the changes. Well, that's the version of the package, not the individual apps, but the disadvantages of having the year in the name are still there.
... no wonder the 10.6 release, a huge rewrite, broke tons of legacy apps, outright lost user data, fails to recover apps with low disk space, fails to show office files in spotlight, and was just generally chock *full* of bugs. Not to mention the huge list of working apps Apple broke at...
...and now Apple is scrambling like mad to post "updates." Sure, that's what I want under MY "pro" apps. Not!
Just a few things on that - SL is a huge improvement in many areas. Many of us Pro users in lots of areas are not seeing any issues at all. Yes legacy stuff broke - that's to be EXPECTED. In fact that was part of SL's purpose, to remove old APIs and old things that had been deprecated for years. Most of the stuff in the list of "bugs" are really just the result of developers not paying any attention. Stuff like the outright lost user data is a major bug, but it also only affects those with guest accounts. Office files in spotlight is not a bug - its a fact of when you have Office 2004 with PPC spotlight importers not working because that's legacy and SL doesn't support them.
I can mostly agree that Aperature has had a difficult history, but honestly I cannot find myself using LR. Its interface is just not something I enjoy using. Same with Adobe Bridge. Aperature is simply a lot better in the interface dept. Now Apple simply has to fix the rest of it.
The GH1 is a great camera, but absolutely highlights one of the big problems with Aperture. I was happily using Aperture with a Nikon D50 since Aperture supports Nikon's raw files. However, it does not support Panasonic's most recent raw files - so with a GH1 you either have to shoot in JPEG (yuk), convert raw to JPEG using Silkypix (which is bundled with the camera - and it's very slow) or use LR. I'm using the LR Beta for the next few months and waiting to see whether Apple ever sorts out the Panasonic issue.
(You can however use iMovie to edit video from the GH1 and the results are pretty good. FCS would be better though - of course.)
Thanks. I suspect for now I'l be the limiting factor on the video. I may invest in FCS when I develop some talent!
I am glad that Apple is finally working on Aperture some more, but it is too little too late for the Pro market I am afraid. I think it will find life in the Amateur and Prosumer side though.
Most pro photogs (myself included) have used PS for so long that they don't see a need to switch. I finally made the jump this Spring and decided to test both Aperture and LR2 so that I could make an informed decision. This is in spite of having a few colleagues that had moved away from PS, suggest LR2 off the bat, and trying to steer me away from Aperture. I figured they likely stayed with Adobe out of "comfort" and I wanted to make up my own mind. Well, they didn't have to convince me. I didn't find Aperture too intuitive, and while LR2 required me to learn a new UI as well (it's made by Adobe but it's certainly not similar to PS) it fit the way I work every day much better and I took to it right away. Plain and simple. Clearly other people have had the opposite experience so YMMV.
I think the casual photographer, or the enthusiast, has different needs than the real Pro photog here, and some of the differences may lie there. I don't get to control all of my variables unlike the home user, so some of the workflow has to fit into established patterns set by the publication you are working for, etc... Also, I don't only use LR anyway, and most photogs use a series of different (specialized) products to complete their work; my card ingest, selects and captioning are done with Photo Mechanic, then I go to LR, and in some instances I then go to PS. All of this has to happen quickly! At times you're uploading photos for immediate release in the middle of an event, not hours (or days) later.
I can say that from my personal observations, the statistics of Pro users for LR, Aperture and PS that the article mentions are indeed accurate.
Personally I'd love an Pro Apple version of a Photoshop type app that used all the great and intuitive UI features of iLife / iWork apps. They could call it Mac Paint Pro
I'm sure someone must have floated the idea of Apple buying Pixelmator before, it's a great alternative to Photoshop when you need something easy to use without the intimidating breadth of functionality and bloat. With a rebrand it'd fit in nicely to Apple's software library, and with the improvements it sees with every update there's clearly a lot of scope for development.
Regarding the "X" stuff. It might be a placeholder, and having a number like 3 is fine for Aperture. But I think Apple will get rid of the year in iLife and iWork. The problem there is that the product MUST be upgraded on yearly basis, otherwise it will look outdated. Dropping the year makes room for more meaningful version numbering, like upgrade form 3.0 to 3.5 or from 3.0 to 4.0, to emphasize the scope of the changes. Well, that's the version of the package, not the individual apps, but the disadvantages of having the year in the name are still there.
I?m not so sure about that. The jump in version numbers with QuickTime X(10.0) is very deliberate. The only thing that makes sense to me is that any major apps (or in this case suites) being rewritten to be Cocoa and 64-bit will get X. To me, it seems very Apple-like. I also expect iTunes X to appear September-ish with the next iPod releases and be fully Cocoa and 64-bit on OS X. Only time will tell.
I have a feeling that some of Apertures stability problems may relate to Core Image, and the app being a bit ahead of its time. Apple was using Core Image to leverage the power of the GPU before the industry started its big push toward GPGPU computing. I'm sure Apple used its experience in developing Core Image to write the spec for OpenCL. Now with OpenCL there is an official vendor supported method of using the GPU for computation. I don't doubt that Aperture will be a better product if it is rewritten to take advantage of GCD and OpenCL.
I posted on dpreview a month or so ago why I think it makes perfect sense for Aperture 3 to be coming out soon. Apple obviously put a lot of time and effort into developing a forward-looking operating system in Snow Leopard, given OpenCL, Grand Central Dispatch and SL's 64-bit kernel. Apple I'm sure is counting on developers to start writing new, complex code that takes advantate of GCD and OpenCL. Snow Leopard I believe will finally shine fully once we see how these new optimized apps work with GCD and OpenCL. In fact, sometime last month Apple (if I recall) even released some of the GCD framework to the open source community, to encourage a more rapid adoption and, I'm sure, standardization.
Prior to all of that happening, what would be an ideal way for Apple to demonstrate the power of 64-bit/GCD/OpenCL/Snow Leopard? Why, to introduce its own sofware that takes critical advantage of these new technologies. I would have thought that Final Cut Pro would have been a prime candidate, but the new release earlier this year calls that into question, leaving Aperture in my opionion as a PERFECT fit. It's WAY overdue for an upgrade. I suspect we've been waiting so long because Apple is devoting some serious resources to develop a Snow Leopard-optimized Aperture. Heavy batch processing within Aperture 2.1.4 seems to tax, dependning on the day of the week, either my memory, my qua-core CPU or my GPU. I'm sure 3.0 (or X, as it might be caslled) should effectively utiilize all three of these critical hardware components.
A SL-optimized Aperture, also hopefully of course with new editing tools that bring it more on par with LR, could be mighty powerful software. I know this might not fit with the PowerPC/Tiger/Leopard crowd, but for me, bring it on!
Comments
More seriously though, can someone explain what Aperture and/or Lightroom can do to make my life better?
I use Aperture for all of my digital photography. I love it for several reasons:
1) It leaves your originals alone, and as you edit, crop, lighten up, change, etc. each
photo it stores the *adjustments* in its database, so you don't have bloated libraries with
multiple versions of each photo.
2) It has a large set of adjustments you can make (white balance, auto-adjust, color level
adjustments, red-eye reduction, dozens more . . .) that are intuitive and very easy to
start using right away.
3) Most importantly for me, I tend to take hundreds of pictures at a family event, and then
I want to go through them quickly, weeding out the no-goods, touching up the good ones
with a crop here, a blemish-removal there, a lightening of shadows there . . .
With Aperture, I can do that in record time, and export the subset of 50 good ones easily.
What used to take me many hours with another product I can do in 30 minutes to
an hour now. It just works.
I do have my complaints about it. I agree with those who say it's good but it could be
great with a few improvements here and there. I look forward to the new version!
I'm just about to invest in my first proper camera (and proper HD film camera) in the shape of a Lumix GH1. I don't think iPhoto and iMovie are going to be up to scratch! I currently have an ancient copy of Photochop kicking around -- I presume I'll need to upgrade this. So, do I need (want!) Aperture for?
The GH1 is a great camera, but absolutely highlights one of the big problems with Aperture. I was happily using Aperture with a Nikon D50 since Aperture supports Nikon's raw files. However, it does not support Panasonic's most recent raw files - so with a GH1 you either have to shoot in JPEG (yuk), convert raw to JPEG using Silkypix (which is bundled with the camera - and it's very slow) or use LR. I'm using the LR Beta for the next few months and waiting to see whether Apple ever sorts out the Panasonic issue.
(You can however use iMovie to edit video from the GH1 and the results are pretty good. FCS would be better though - of course.)
My thoughts exactly.
AND it better support Canon sRAW or I'm gone as well.
If you feel that strongly about it, make sure they know you feel that strongly about it:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html
But Aperture X (3) makes some sense. QuickTime X also gives a clue. The final app name may not be decided yet, but it looks plausible that Apple will use the "X" branding for the apps which take advantage of the new technologies (OpenCL, GCD).
In many cases the books come alongside the product release (even Apple-related ones). In any case, the date gives a very approximate timeframe. All deadlines (both in Aperture development and book publishing) could slip. I am fine with your "a likely max shipping date for the software" statement, but I also think that it is unlikely that the product will ship much earlier (say, March 2010). If anything else, deadlines tend to be pushed back, not forward, especially in the software industry.
Yes, it is plausible to rename Aperature to an X, but I think it is unlikely. Quicktime X is a brandname that where you don't really pay attention to the version number. But applications such as Aperture, FCP or even Adobe products need to be differentiated in their branding from version to version. That makes the X(3) a little bit of a branding headache. But still it is Apple and they've done stranger things before.
As for the release date... in all my years I've rarely seen a book ship alongside the product. I've seen tons of books that followed 3 to 8 months after a products release. In fact Apple products are the worst about this since Apple is so secretive of upcoming products. Adobe is a lot better about helping publishers target closer to the product ship date. As for your assertion that "if anything else, deadlines tend to be pushed back..." That is very true for BOTH software and books. If Aperture gets pushed to spring, then the books will be pushed to summer or fall. I saw a lot of books for Microsoft products get pushed way back due to MS's slips.
I used to work in the tech book publishing industry, and I can tell you that this article is way off base. The only thing we can really deduce from the info that Apple Insider spotted is that a new version of Aperture will be out between today and the day this book is expected to ship.
1. "Aperture X"... It is common practice to use "X" when the final version number has not been given by the software vendor. The real number will be inserted in once Apple let's the author or the public know what it will really be called.
2. The books shipping date does not indicate anything more than a likely max shipping date for the software. If, anything it suggests a much earlier shipping date since books take quite a bit of time to edit, proof and print... and the editing and proofing take even longer with a product that hasn't shipped since the final UI and features could change at any time. Most books ship about two to six months after the actual product when the author is a beta tester.
Yes, Kasper went a bit rogue on the whole 'X' thing. It is standard Amazon practice to list products as 'X' when the title is under NDA. The date is also likely a placeholder. The exact same scenario played out with the last few versions of Filemaker.
Aperture's long-term bugs and shortcomings - empty, useless histograms; failure to recall window size, position, and organization; failure to initialize plugins correctly in a multi-monitor environment; lift and stamp requiring multiple irrelevant UI steps for "crop" stamping to work; bizarre magnification limits; no way for developers to create inline tiles, only this godforsaken overweight TIFF passing mechanism; no curves (no curves? are they out of their tiny little minds? Curves is as "tilable" as any 768-byte remap function is (levels, contrast, brightness, windowing, gamma and a zillion more, both common and arbitrary); incessant preview (re)(re)(re)processing, consuming all eight cores for NO purpose; incomplete camera support (like SRAW... Adobe's got it handled, so what is Apple's excuse? Oh, wait, they don't make excuses. They just don't DO anything.
Apple rates a serious FAIL here.
And yeah, I just ordered Lightroom. I'm just tired of Apple's half-efforts to make pro apps. Great ideas are one thing; but if you can't keep your eye on the ball and address the issues in at least some vaguely timely manner, you might as well not try.
And as for Aperture requiring Snow Leopard... it's just a buggy beta. I won't put Snow Leopard in my machine until the poor hoodwinked innocents out there have discovered the rest of the serious bugs *and* Apple has addressed them. Apple couldn't even post an update to 10.5 without breaking it (for example, they totally hosed HDMI monitor support for the mini... then SAT on any fixes for months); no wonder the 10.6 release, a huge rewrite, broke tons of legacy apps, outright lost user data, fails to recover apps with low disk space, fails to show office files in spotlight, and was just generally chock *full* of bugs. Not to mention the huge list of working apps Apple broke at...
http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/
...and now Apple is scrambling like mad to post "updates." Sure, that's what I want under MY "pro" apps. Not!
It just felt like Apple released Aperture 2 and then forgot about it.
Apple had a great idea with Aperture, but screwed it up as much as could be done upon release. It's difficult to get rid of a bad reputation gotten from the starting gate.
Lightroom has taken over the pro market where people don't need the complexity of PS, or need a simpler app with the full CR feature set, where they MAY need PS later.
Aperture just hasn't made it, hence the large price drop. Apple is now marketing the program mostly to amateurs.
There are still things about Aperture I don't like, and while I hope Apple will fix them, I'm beginning to doubt it.
- Aperture is a Cocoa app, the rest of the Pro apps are Carbon.
- Aperture could benefit a lot from OpenCL and GCD. Both technologies are well suited for this kind of work and "parallelizing" the code in this particular case is almost a no-brainer.
Regarding the "X" stuff. It might be a placeholder, and having a number like 3 is fine for Aperture. But I think Apple will get rid of the year in iLife and iWork. The problem there is that the product MUST be upgraded on yearly basis, otherwise it will look outdated. Dropping the year makes room for more meaningful version numbering, like upgrade form 3.0 to 3.5 or from 3.0 to 4.0, to emphasize the scope of the changes. Well, that's the version of the package, not the individual apps, but the disadvantages of having the year in the name are still there.... no wonder the 10.6 release, a huge rewrite, broke tons of legacy apps, outright lost user data, fails to recover apps with low disk space, fails to show office files in spotlight, and was just generally chock *full* of bugs. Not to mention the huge list of working apps Apple broke at...
http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/
...and now Apple is scrambling like mad to post "updates." Sure, that's what I want under MY "pro" apps. Not!
Just a few things on that - SL is a huge improvement in many areas. Many of us Pro users in lots of areas are not seeing any issues at all. Yes legacy stuff broke - that's to be EXPECTED. In fact that was part of SL's purpose, to remove old APIs and old things that had been deprecated for years. Most of the stuff in the list of "bugs" are really just the result of developers not paying any attention. Stuff like the outright lost user data is a major bug, but it also only affects those with guest accounts. Office files in spotlight is not a bug - its a fact of when you have Office 2004 with PPC spotlight importers not working because that's legacy and SL doesn't support them.
The GH1 is a great camera, but absolutely highlights one of the big problems with Aperture. I was happily using Aperture with a Nikon D50 since Aperture supports Nikon's raw files. However, it does not support Panasonic's most recent raw files - so with a GH1 you either have to shoot in JPEG (yuk), convert raw to JPEG using Silkypix (which is bundled with the camera - and it's very slow) or use LR. I'm using the LR Beta for the next few months and waiting to see whether Apple ever sorts out the Panasonic issue.
(You can however use iMovie to edit video from the GH1 and the results are pretty good. FCS would be better though - of course.)
Thanks. I suspect for now I'l be the limiting factor on the video. I may invest in FCS when I develop some talent!
+1 for London too!
Most pro photogs (myself included) have used PS for so long that they don't see a need to switch. I finally made the jump this Spring and decided to test both Aperture and LR2 so that I could make an informed decision. This is in spite of having a few colleagues that had moved away from PS, suggest LR2 off the bat, and trying to steer me away from Aperture. I figured they likely stayed with Adobe out of "comfort" and I wanted to make up my own mind. Well, they didn't have to convince me. I didn't find Aperture too intuitive, and while LR2 required me to learn a new UI as well (it's made by Adobe but it's certainly not similar to PS) it fit the way I work every day much better and I took to it right away. Plain and simple. Clearly other people have had the opposite experience so YMMV.
I think the casual photographer, or the enthusiast, has different needs than the real Pro photog here, and some of the differences may lie there. I don't get to control all of my variables unlike the home user, so some of the workflow has to fit into established patterns set by the publication you are working for, etc... Also, I don't only use LR anyway, and most photogs use a series of different (specialized) products to complete their work; my card ingest, selects and captioning are done with Photo Mechanic, then I go to LR, and in some instances I then go to PS. All of this has to happen quickly! At times you're uploading photos for immediate release in the middle of an event, not hours (or days) later.
I can say that from my personal observations, the statistics of Pro users for LR, Aperture and PS that the article mentions are indeed accurate.
Personally I'd love an Pro Apple version of a Photoshop type app that used all the great and intuitive UI features of iLife / iWork apps. They could call it Mac Paint Pro
I'm sure someone must have floated the idea of Apple buying Pixelmator before, it's a great alternative to Photoshop when you need something easy to use without the intimidating breadth of functionality and bloat. With a rebrand it'd fit in nicely to Apple's software library, and with the improvements it sees with every update there's clearly a lot of scope for development.
Regarding the "X" stuff. It might be a placeholder, and having a number like 3 is fine for Aperture. But I think Apple will get rid of the year in iLife and iWork. The problem there is that the product MUST be upgraded on yearly basis, otherwise it will look outdated. Dropping the year makes room for more meaningful version numbering, like upgrade form 3.0 to 3.5 or from 3.0 to 4.0, to emphasize the scope of the changes. Well, that's the version of the package, not the individual apps, but the disadvantages of having the year in the name are still there.
I?m not so sure about that. The jump in version numbers with QuickTime X(10.0) is very deliberate. The only thing that makes sense to me is that any major apps (or in this case suites) being rewritten to be Cocoa and 64-bit will get X. To me, it seems very Apple-like. I also expect iTunes X to appear September-ish with the next iPod releases and be fully Cocoa and 64-bit on OS X. Only time will tell.
Prior to all of that happening, what would be an ideal way for Apple to demonstrate the power of 64-bit/GCD/OpenCL/Snow Leopard? Why, to introduce its own sofware that takes critical advantage of these new technologies. I would have thought that Final Cut Pro would have been a prime candidate, but the new release earlier this year calls that into question, leaving Aperture in my opionion as a PERFECT fit. It's WAY overdue for an upgrade. I suspect we've been waiting so long because Apple is devoting some serious resources to develop a Snow Leopard-optimized Aperture. Heavy batch processing within Aperture 2.1.4 seems to tax, dependning on the day of the week, either my memory, my qua-core CPU or my GPU. I'm sure 3.0 (or X, as it might be caslled) should effectively utiilize all three of these critical hardware components.
A SL-optimized Aperture, also hopefully of course with new editing tools that bring it more on par with LR, could be mighty powerful software. I know this might not fit with the PowerPC/Tiger/Leopard crowd, but for me, bring it on!
A SL-optimized Aperture, also hopefully of course with new editing tools that bring it more on par with LR, could be mighty powerful software.
Especially considering that Adobe is unlikely to leverage any OS-specific features like Grand Central that aren't available for its other platform.