Through the past three quarters, Aperture users (like myself) have only seen two updates to the pro-level photo processing and organization application from Apple — and those have really only been stability type releases. About a year ago we saw Aperture’s consumer-level sibling get places and faces and some of us figured Aperture wasn’t far behind. Seems we may have figured wrong. I think Aperture users have been patient enough — we want a meaningful update already!

First, to clear the air: I like Aperture, and it works well for me. But it’s application envy that’s got my level of rile slowly compounding, as I watch the ‘little brother’ (iPhoto) get powerful features, and the competing Adobe Lightroom continue to wow and delight users. And at a $200 investment in the software, I feel like I need to stay committed to it and get my money’s worth. But I wonder at what point those of us using Aperture have begun suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, and are defending our captors rather than breaking free for greener pastures.

As a potential conflict of interest, I co-manage a Denver area Photoshop and Lightroom user group. It came about mostly out of my enjoyment of mingling with other shutter-happy folks, but has resulted in slowly painting me green with envy. Lightroom does some seriously awesome stuff! Starting with the fact that it’s 64-bit (which is huge when handling large image processing tasks), and it can handle area-specific color editing with brushes, and so on. It’s a super solid photo processing and organization tool. To boot, Adobe is very public about making its beta release of the upcoming version 3 available for anyone to try. It’s getting harder and harder to rationalize my devotion to Aperture.

Look, I realize Aperture isn’t broken, but neither was my last MacBook when I replaced it. I think we’re all guilty (at some level — I’m closer to the top, I’m sure) of wanting more. More power, more bells and whistles, more better! But If Apple’s going to offer a pro-level tool, it needs to give it care and feeding, thusly, showing some love to those who’ve shelled out good money for it. Here are some features I think Aperture needs to keep current users happy.

64-bit

Snow Leopard supports it now, so what reason is there not to offer this? I had a post similar to this ready around Snow Leopard launch, and trashed it because I figured it was a no-brainer that we’d see an update along these lines to Aperture in the following weeks. I am Jack’s broken heart.

Faces & Places

Aperture should at least keep up with its consumer level sibling. Faces and places are very useful tools — and it drives me batty having to manually tag my Aperture photos with this information.

Fix Tethered Shooting

To my knowledge, it’s probably limited to the Canon 40D, but Apple broke the ability to shoot in tethered mode for my dSLR a while back. This is lame. I want a fix!!

Focused Editing

Taking a page out of the Adobe book, I’d like to see the ability to apply edits to only select parts of a photo. Sometimes you only want to lighten, darken, or change color of a specific part, not the whole thing. I realize this is more an image editing feature, and not processing, but I’ve seen it in Lightroom, and I desire it.

These are just a few ideas, things that are ultimately important to me (though I think they’re general enough that others would agree). But what else? Let’s hear from the Aperture users, or potential Aperture users. What would you need to see in a hopefully sooner than later update to Aperture, to keep you happy and on board with Apple? What would cause you to jump ship and pursue other solutions?

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Home page takeover ads – If you read The New York Times on the web, you must have viewed the BMW video ad that took up the entire home page two weeks ago (see the video here).  Touting BMW’s new line of “clean” diesel fuel cars, the ad made The New York Times’ home page show up as a black screen until the BMW spokesperson in the ad clicked on a light and then took you to the standard home page. The ad still played in the right-hand side of the page, however. It was a jarring interruption in my morning routine.

CAPTCHA ads – If you’re setting up a new account on a web site or purchasing something online, you’ve probably been prompted to fill out a CAPTCHA. It’s those blurry, stretched-out jumble of letters and numbers you’re forced to type into a box. Apparently, Microsoft is using its own form of CAPTCHA to market its products, such as the Xbox 360 video game console. Is Microsoft really that obvious, or is this supposed to be sort of tongue-in-cheek?

Pop-under ads – Though pop-unders are an old-school type of online ad, you can still run into them. Pop-unders catch you unexpectedly, because the ads are hidden underneath your browser. Once you’ve closed the browser, then you see the ads staring right back at you. If you visit The Washington Post’s web site, you’ve likely run into pop-under ads like this one to the left.

Sponsored blog posts – Last month, The New York Times wrote an article about bloggers being reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission for writing about products that companies sent to them for free. Though many bloggers argue that they don’t write about a product unless they truly like it, the FTC has drafted a set of guidelines that may require online media to comply with disclosure rules. Still, it’s often hard for me to tell whether bloggers genuinely likes a product they’re writing about. (Online video stars, including Fred, have been known to advertise certain products during their video clips.)

Hover ads – A different take on traditional pop-up advertisements, Hover ads are the ones that pop up and play a video after you accidentally scroll over them with your mouse. The ad’s purpose is to distract you and hide some of the site’s content for a few seconds. Hover ads are especially annoying because you can’t use a pop-up blocker to prevent them. I often watch the whole video before figuring out how to close the ad. Here’s an example of a hover ad for Project Runway that I found on TV.com

So readers, what type of online ads get under your skin? Over here at the GigaOM Network, Simon at WebWorkerDaily can’t stand the “punch the monkey” ads and Chris at NewTeeVee gets miffed over credit score ads. Share what you think in the comments section.

Photos courtesy of TechFlash and TV.com.

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Wrapping up another seven days and bringing you the freshest picks, it’s time for this week’s App Store Roundup.

Tom Reetsman kicked off the week by calling Technologizer’s Ed Oswald out on an article he wrote about MobileMe, the general gist of it being that Oswald canceled MobileMe, only to lament the disappearance of his data.

By Tuesday, Google added Tasks syncing to the already impressive Gmail web app. Wednesday saw a roundup of iPhone time tracking apps, essential tools for freelancers managing multiple projects. As I’ve mentioned before, Harvest — my favorite time tracking service — has a fantastic web app available for iPhone.

Finally, our own Matthew Bookspan pitted two productivity services against each other — DEVONthink Pro Office and Evernote Premium. Contrary to my preference (I’m an avid Evernote iPhone and OS X app user), it seems that DEVONthink’s tool came out on top.

Moving on, let’s talk about apps, this week I’ve been looking at ExZeus, Aggravate Nails on Chalkboard, Audio Memos Free – The Voice Recorder, Epiphany Recorded and Rolando Lite.

ExZeus ($5.99)
Giant robots, laser cannons, alien invasions, explosions — these are inherently exciting things. Distill these things down to videogame form and there’s a good chance you’re on to a winner. ExZeus finds you playing a robot with a laser cannon causing explosions while fighting off an alien invasion: this is hyperbolic space shooter action at its best. The gameplay captures old Sega classics like Space Harrier while the rainbow gun metal 3D graphics bring Transformers instantly to mind (plagiaricious!).

Audio Memos Free – The Voice Recorder (free)
On to serious stuff then, as we take a look at this voice recording tool. There’s a bevy of options available to those looking for a memo recorder for the iPhone. For those still searching for a audio recording tool, this free, ad-supported app is a good starting point. The app can use either the built in iPhone mic, or the headset mic, records in up to 44100 kHz and even has a scrub tool — letting you skip to the essential parts of each recording.

Epiphany Recorder (free)
While Audio Memos Free is a traditional voice recorder app, Epiphany Recorder has a unique angle on the whole memo recording concept. The idea behind the app is that often you’ll hear something worth recording and, before you get the opportunity to capture it, the moment will be gone. To combat missing those all-important moments, Epiphany Recorder captures the previous two minutes of audio from the moment you hit record. Of course, you have to keep the app open, but it’s still a commendable way of solving an issue for students, journalists and seminar attendees everywhere.

Rolando Lite (free)
Released last year, Rolando is a fantastic tilt ‘n’ touch based puzzler for the iPhone and touch. I wrote up a comprehensive and complimentary review for it a couple of months back, stating that Rolando is an essential for iPhone and touch gamers, “… what we have here is the benchmark for what a complete iPhone (or touch) gaming experience could be and, furthermore, should be.” If you don’t have Rolando and you’ve never tried it, you’re now fresh out of excuses as Rolando Lite is a free demo containing the first few levels of the full game. Get it now!

Aggravate Nails on Chalkboard (free)
Wonderful, yet another way to simultaneously alienate your close friends while illustrating the fact that your state-of-the-art iPhone, with GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and all that digital jazz, is nothing more than a shiny digital whoopee cushion. Except this app is actually quite good, for starters, it knows its place in the pricing pantheon (next to worthless) and is free. And therefore worth the 5 minutes of unadulterated joy you’ll derive from watching your friends’ skin crawl as you screech your fingers down the iPhone’s screen.

Just One More Thing

I’ve noticed a fantastic new trend emerging over at the App Store. It all started two months ago when Olivier Bernal, a French iPhone app developer, decided to pinch stock photography from iStock Photo. Then a too-close-to-the-bone clone of Nintendo’s famous zapper game Duck Hunt appeared on the App Store, only to be pulled last week following a complaint from Nintendo.

It seems that app developers are already running out of original ideas and instead running rampant with other people’s copyrights. I picked three copyright infringing apps, released in the last week, that flaunt it like a middle-aged divorcee speeding round town in a second-hand Porsche with a “Single and Lovin’ It” bumper sticker.

First up is The Eggs, described by the developers as, “A simulation of a popular Soviet game ‘Electronica IM-02′ which was a clone of Nintendo’s Game&Watch series game ‘Egg’.” So, effectively, we’re talking about an iPhone simulation of a simulation of a game which, in itself, was an emulation of a classic Nintendo title.

There are several things I’m not sure about here; firstly, I’m not sure whether I correctly used simulation and emulation. Most importantly though, I’m not up on my Soviet copyright law — was the game originally infringing copyright? Or, in Soviet Russia, does copyright infringe you?

Then there’s Flipt – Heroes Edition, a traditional tile matching game that uses images culled from the Heroes TV series and is almost certainly not an official spinoff. The app description is a giveaway, “Find pairs of matching images all themed around the popular sitcom Heroes™.”

Because, of course, Heroes is indeed a sitcom. I’ve always thought that Sylar is the Chandler of the bunch. And, I particularly enjoy that the app description used the ™ symbol while totally infringing the trademark.

And I’ll skip straight to the point with CuBert — it’s a direct rip of classic Q*Bert, heck the character is exactly the same as the original retro hooter-nosed weirdo. To the guys at LagMac, the game’s developer, this may apparently be “… in homage to Q*Bert creators,” but it’s still a massive copyright infringing bag of profit-generating plagiarism.

How can the people behind these apps be smart enough to program a game for the iPhone and then actually get it on the App Store, but either have no concept of copyright or are simply just risking it? How can you be that smart and yet also that dumb?

I’ll leave you to ponder that final question and see you next Saturday for another App Store Roundup. In the meantime, let me know which apps you’ve been downloading in the comments.

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