A promising start for Mac Flickr client.

There is a new release today for a Flickr Mac client, the application show promise and I am all in favor of decent front end clients to cloud services. Photonic has some nice features, the ability to view your photo stream, browser and add favorites and also see contacts photos. The Photoset viewing feature (and most in the app for that matter) looks very iPhoto like, and I have no problem with that. However there are some omissions that I think should be in there like the following

- Ability to add comments to photographs
- The image viewer seems to show keywords below photos rather than descriptions
- The Ability to add or edit sets already on Flickr, I mention this since you have the ability to view them

I think that front end clients to cloud services should provide the basics of functionality you get within the web page otherwise you are forcing users to go back and use the web page for part of the process, and who would pay for an application to only use it part of the time?

Now all that said, this app I think shows great potential and will be killer once all the basic services are in there. And the price until Mid March is only $20 I believe, well worth it if you do a lot of Flickr work on the Mac. Again check it out at http://www.photonicapp.com/

Apple releases Aperture 2.0 and it’s way better than 1.x releases.

I’m a big Lightroom user, but before then I tried Aperture which if I recall was either 1.1 or 1.5 then. It was nice but seriously slow and the interface was most annoying for doing simple things, however the ideas in there were nice and I still think the highlight recovery tool works better than Lightroom. So when Apple released 2.0 without much fanfare (strange enough for Apple as it is) I was interested enough to down the trial the very same day of the release.

I have to say that I’m seriously impressed, so much in fact that I ordered a copy the very same day. Now I’m not saying I will stop using Lightroom, but I will start using Aperture and see which I end up using the most. for me the new speed and interface of Aperture (not to say the usual wonderful integration with everything else that Apple does so well) has me impressed enough to work with it. On my first gen 06 iMac MacTel it runs fast for the first time ever, and certainly enough that I can work with it. The new reworked RAW engine is very nice and for me it does some things better than Adobe’s CameraRaw. However I do with Apple would work with Adobe and get CameraRaw in there, as I’m sure when Adobe Releases a new version we’ll start getting the same old DNG issues we did with the previous Aperture releases.

I always found the way Aperture allows us to deal with organizing via projects to be wonderfully intuitive and makes Lightroom look primitive in this area. I have yet to try printing from Aperture to my Epson R1800 and that maybe the decider for me, but until then I am liking the new version very much and certainly see it as a good competitor to Lightroom just aslong as they release updates more often for new cameras which is where they fall flat every time due to the non plug-in idea like Adobe and CameraRaw.

I’ve said it before……if only Apple and Adobe would get together the tools from integrating both companies products would be stellar! Maybe one day I’ll get that Aperturoom product to solve all my problems with one app.