Monday, January 09, 2006

Adobe launches Lightroom beta



Adobe has released a beta of a new photo editing application called Lightroom, which competes directly with Aperture. However, the application is still very rough around the edges and is missing some basic functionality such as crop and rotate tools. Just as Aperture 1.0 should have been called a beta when it released, Lightroom would be best described at this point as an alpha. Nonetheless, it's a pretty good start, and for now it's a free download. Moreover, it will run on hardware that is not supported by Aperture.

The most surprising thing about this release though is not just that it's a Mac-only release (for now), but that it's a Mac-only release that is built using Cocoa. That's a pretty strong endorsement of Apple's OS X-exclusive Cocoa programming environment.

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