apple, aperture 3, and the salve

if you'll recall from a few weeks ago, Apple released the third iteration to its (heretofore) awesome photo management application, Aperture. i'd been waiting for this for a long long time, especially for its support of 64-bit compooting powerz.

and then you'll recall the major huge issues i had with it. i started a thread on the Aperture support forums that at the end of it all weighed in at a super hefty 24 pages of comments, replies, possible solutions, and general frustrations from other disgruntled upgraders.

soon after starting the thread, i was directly contacted by someone at Apple HQ and after a couple of back & forths, they sent me an external hard drive to copy my backed-up nonupgraded original Aperture 2 library onto for testing. i promptly sent it back in... and that was that.

about a week later, an update for Aperture 3 hit the airwaves, fixing most, if not all, problems that users had been running into. a few days after that, my original Apple contact was back in touch with me, saying they were sending the hard drive back with my old library on it. i told him that was alright, no need to do that, as i still had a copy at home and everything was running fine anyways.

and then i got a separate email saying that they were sending me the hard drive as a thank you for helping in their testing, plus "a little something to help you keep in iTouch with your music." i thought, "yay! an iTunes gift card, perhaps? awesome!"

actually... they sent me the hard drive (which is awesome in its own right) and a 64GB iPod Touch.

o.O

yeah.

so, thanks to Apple for a couple of things...

for getting the fix out for Aperture 3 in a relatively manner, especially considering how many fixes were in the update. seriously; their engineers had to have been working around the clock to get that ready for mass consumption, and then for it to actually work... gold stars all around.
for the "thank you" gifts with no strings attached: no NDA, no weird paper to sign, no "our little secret" contract.

WIN.

-sha-

About