I played with Aperture yesterday afternoon on a 1.4GHz iBook. I didn't have the time to install the OS update required for Aperture on a PowerBook. I meant to give the G5 a whirl but didn't get to it. Maybe tomorrow.

It was somewhat usable, but I found a number of oddities that caused the cursor to perform in an erratic manner. It was the first time I'd touched that particular machine, so it may have had a dodge touch pad or I may have just been seeing problems/bugs in Aperture. I did get it to produce a couple of error dialogs with an options to report the bug - it didn't crash/hang though.

Something a bit faster than the iBook would be nice. I don't know how much performance will increase with better graphics (such as in a PowerBook), so I'll eventually have to give that a whirl as well. The biggest sore spot with the test iBook was resolution. 1024x768 is NOT (not anywhere close) enough resolution to run the Aperture interface. Unfortunately I don't think the 1280x854 resolution of PowerBooks previous to the current generation will be high enough either.

All of Apple's lovely screen shots and demos were created with the application presented on a 30" Cinema HD. You're not likely to find a better monitor to run this program to tell you the truth. It has a good balance of screen real-estate while still producing a pixel-pitch large enough to render the text at a readable size (Apple has yet to allow resolution-independent GUI rendering to be controlled by the end-user - though the foundation for such technology was introduced with the first Tiger release).

I also didn't have manual handy and while perhaps not as complicated as Photoshop, it was a bit of a shock jumping into it. I've been using Photoshop for so long that I just find it second nature, so jumping into Aperture I know what PS newbs feel like. Anyone familiar with Apple's other Pro tools will have an easier time navigating the interface.

I miss not having some type of status bar that immediately tells me what my pointer is hovering over. Not all their icons are as descriptive as the could/should be - and pop-up tooltips seemed to be hit or miss (sometimes coming up, other times not, sometimes having to wait too long to see them).

I couldn't figure out how to get the light table view while in full screen and I couldn't get the Book layout thing to work at all (just gave me a BEEP and wouldn't show the layouts).

I don't know the date of the version we've got in the office but it must not be the final yet. Looks very promising though and it will definitely replace Photoshop for some parts of a user's workflow. Perhaps all parts for some people.

Bruno