Apple – Aperture – Gallery

Just when I was taking jpegs rather than mess around with RAW in Nikon’s less-than-wonderful NikonView, along comes Apple with Aperture, reminding us that being the premier company for ‘our digital lives’ also includes still photography (as well as music, film and air-guitaring for GarageBand).

I came to this wondering why anyone needed a Quad G5, and now I know. The only question will be that, once Santa brings the G5, twin cinema displays and a home xserve setup for storage, whether I’ll ever get out of the house to take any photos!

Desire rating: 8/10.

S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

This is great and much better than the ‘save as HTML’ option in PowerPoint[r].

It’s a bit too difficult to simply replace the ease and ubiquty of *.ppt but I could see this being added to applications that export to ppt (eg the mindmapping software NovaMind for the Mac has great export to text, ppt and Keynote: I’m sure that these applications could manage the CSS and bits of javascript that’d just be too tricky for the rest of us – especially while cranking the ppt handle in the run-up to a presentation…