Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Tex]

re Aperture

Does this look like Apple working to introduce a Cocoa environment in which developers can replace Photoshop with standard plugin kits atop an Apple app for photo collections?

Or is this still really for managing collections?

I'm kinda curious about image manipulation on MacOS X. Photoshop has been the standard forever, but (a) it's not Cocoa and thus isn't going 64-bit soon, (b) Cocoa developers' access to Apple's image-manipulation APIs provides a way to get hardware acceleration that's specific to a whole host of hardware Apple may release in the future without having to re-issue the plug-ins, making the upgrade cycle and the performance potentially advantageous both to developers and to users, and (c) Apple and Adobe seem to be at odds lately (Flash, etc.). So ... I'm expecting someone to provide competition to Photoshop, especially given its price point.

If Aperture offers services which third party apps might tap, then third-party Cocoa apps can use Aperture's versioning and library to access photos for manipulation in the third party apps. This might be a lot closer to the behavior one would expect in a Unix/NeXT environment than a monolithic "this app does everything" environment.

Anyone with more familiarity with image manipulation on the Mac have something to say about where this is likely headed?

Take care,
--Tex.