The Photos app class prefix is IPX, which sounds like @gruber’s iPhoto X to me! http://t.co/wkBf8UWNEb
— Steve T-S (@stroughtonsmith) February 5, 2015
So, once upon a time, Apple announced iPhoto and Aperture for OS X are going away, and will be replaced by a new photo app, sometine in 'early 2015'. Well, the new app is here -- at least, a beta version for developers and testers. The final version will be ready in 'Spring 2015', but you can take a sneak peek...
Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:
As someone who primarily uses iPhoto for light-to-medium-sized image editing, Photos seems like a respectable replacement. If you're an Aperture user reading this preview, I imagine you might feel like Final Cut Pro users did when presented with Final Cut Pro X for the first time. If you want to be able to compensate for lens warping or to do basically any of the advanced stuff listed on the Aperture page, it doesn't look like that's what Photos is for. It may add features later and third-parties may create some useful Extensions to make it more powerful, but the core app is far more concerned with iPhoto users than with Aperture ones.
The best thing I noticed about Photos while I was using it (and trying to find where it had hidden all the stuff I need) is that it's fast and smooth.
I’ve had very little time with Photos but my general impression is that it hits a sweet spot for the casual-to-enthusiastic iOS and digital camera shooter. Its navigation is more nimble and, from what I can tell, its performance is significantly improved over iPhoto’s, which I found sluggish with large image libraries. And, scaling back to the big picture, it’s the first of the old iLife apps that shares a common experience among the Mac, iOS devices, and iCloud. All your photos, your most recent edits, wherever you are. It’s an app worth looking forward to.
But even more impressive than the new coat of paint is just how fast Photos is. iPhoto was often criticized for choking on large image libraries, but Apple says it built Photos to handle large and growing photo libraries, since people are taking so many more photos than they used to before. From our experience, it seems that Apple's efforts have paid off: the new Photos app effortlessly scrolls through thousands of photos, and you can quickly page through your collection, marking images as favorites. It supports all of the trackpad gestures you'd expect — two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, and rotation — and performance is really fast and smooth, at least with the demo photo library we tested on a new MacBook Pro.
Even in its pre-public-beta version, Photos is fast, slick, and very easy to learn and navigate (partly because it’s so stripped down).
When can you expect to see Photos arrive on your own computer? What's changed from iPhoto? What's stayed the same? Read on.
If they follow the path of hearing aids, future generations of wearables will be more immersive, more complex, more difficult to troubleshoot, and more pervasive in their data collection. As long as we see wearables as toys or luxury goods, it is easy to write off these challenges. But there is a real opportunity for wearables to improve the lives of many in substantial ways just as they’ve improved my life since 1986.
A non-tech alternative to self-driving cars is walkable cities. But those sound hard.
— Eric Gilbert (@eegilbert) February 4, 2015Thanks for reading.