Posts by Haigha

Who wants a classic ThinkPad with whizzy new hardware? Lenovo would just love to know

I'd take a serious look at one

I just put an SSD in my X201 (i5, 8GB) in an attempt to make it last longer. The X250 at least brought back the extra buttons above the touchpad, but I still can't get used to that new keyboard (then again, I'm typing this using a Unicomp Ultra Classic).

I generally hang onto Thinkpads for about six years. So a new one next year would be just about right.

Apple abruptly axes Aperture ... Adobe anxiously awaits arrivals

Ok

So they axed a product that wasn't part of their core business model any longer, a product they haven't been keeping up-to-date. I suspect Apple, at one point, saw Adobe's commitment to cross-platform support as a liability, wanting to try to lock customers in. They don't need that any longer - the Macbooks sell well, and ecosystem around the iPhone and iPad help keep customers.

If you want RAW+editing and you want to avoid Adobe, there's always acdsee's products, or OnOne Software Suite and DxO's Optics Pro.

Adobe's Creative Cloud for Photographers deal is actually pretty good. Getting Photoshop and Lightroom for an annual cost that doesn't much exceed the retail cost of Lightroom plus two updates to the less-capable Photoshop Elements (since PS Elements gets updated nearly once a year at this point) is a pretty good deal. Lightroom seems to get updated every 18 to 24 months.

And I have to give Adobe some credit - getting the tablet version of LR included is a huge plus, and they're now moving to a setup where - to do adjustments that the tablet just can't handle like distortion correct - they upload the file to their cloud solution, process it and pull it back down again. They're going to charge a bit extra for that, or you can do that work on your own computer.

Given that I have TIFF files (scans and edited photos) and my camera raw files, plus the fact that Lightroom puts a ton of data in sidecar files (as well as the database being SQLite, there's not much lock-in. I can move whenever Adobe no longer seems like a good deal for me.