James Duncan Davidson has posted an interesting article about his meeting with Apple's Aperture team. He told them what irked him about Aperture as a photographer and they went off and fixed it. But how did they fix it?

I've looked a little at the internals of Aperture 2.0 and there are some striking differences between the two. It looks as if the whole core of the application has been rewritten.

Here is one thing I found. That diagram below is the data model for Aperture 1.5. The boxes represent information stored about things like versions, albums, vaults, adjustments etc., all the things that are carefully managed by Aperture and kept in a consistent state, all the things that are needed to display and manipulate images through the interface:

What matters is the number of lines in the diagram. I reckon there are about twenty. Each one is a relationship between the data in the boxes and many lines means much complexity and lots of work to keep things in order. And the impact of complexity grows very quickly as the number of items increases.

Now have a look at the data model for Aperture 2.0:

Still plenty of boxes, several more in fact, but hardly any lines. And only two are actual relationships, the two in the center representing inheritance instead. This means that Apple has eradicated the complexity inherent in the data model and moved it elsewhere, clearly to something faster.

This is at least partly why Aperture 2.0 is so much faster than Aperture 1.5. The other benefit of removing the complexity is that reliability should increase, so I'm hoping for a more stable, less buggy application.

For anyone wondering how I got hold of the data models for Aperture; it was easy. I just decompiled the .mom file in the application with Xcode.

Tags: Aperture, Cocoa, Core Data, Xcode