There has been a great deal of speculation as to what will be in the next release of Aperture -- even as to whether it will be called 2.0 or 1.6 -- but now there are rumors starting to appear. I saw this one on DPReview. It's a typical "I have a friend of a friend whos hair cutter knows this guy who overheard two people on a bus talking" kind of rumor. So there is no way to know how accurate it is. There are so many things that could be changed or improved, that practically any subset would be believable. You can even see how people were thinking a while back at MacPredict (the site appears to no longer be updated).

What does appear to be unanimous is that either Apple will announce something at PMA this week, or thousands will defect to Lightroom. Apart from some bug fixes, it has been an awfully long time since any significant changes were made: 1.5 was released September 29, 2006 according to Wikipedia.

Fraser Speirs posted his wishes for Aperture a short time ago. And Eric Barzeski made his wish-list known a year ago and is itching for information. Sören Nils Kuklau has a list that he posted last year. Inside Aperture speculated some time ago, around the same time that Ed Fladung had a go. Chuqui hoped for 2.0 before Christmas 2007, but was disappointed.

My needs are modest, so I'm wishing for things like better speed and better keyboard navigation. For the product, I think the best thing that could happen would be a flexible plug-in architecture so that the application could be expanded by third parties. I would also like to be able to have Aperture handle all media types, not just photos, and to have a lightweight application that can read the database independently. That would allow plugins and automation scripts run at the same time as Aperture, so not interrupting workflow.

We shall see. I hope it's not Leopard-only because I'm still on Tiger, waiting for a compatible update to SuperDuper.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Wild Guesses, Photography, Anticipation