I love Apple software. I’m a recent convert, but time and time again the Apple approach seems more elegant, visually enoyable, and efficient than the Windows counterpart. And so I enthusiastically look for Appleware whenever the opportunity presents. Lately a competition has sprung up between Adobe and Apple’s new products for the photographer - Adobe Lightroom (beta) and Apple Aperture 1.5. Each is a suite of advanced tools for the serious to professional photographer, and, at the risk of being flamed by the followers of each, the feature sets are roughly comparable.

I know that only because I can read the capsule summaries of feature sets that each makes available, and can review the related materials - video tutorials and the like - that have sprung up on the ‘net. I don’t know it from my own experience, though, because only Adobe has released its app as trialware. I suspect that Aperture is superb. The reviews are generally adoring, the screenshots look fantastic, and there is that thing about the Apple way. Lightroom is certainly superb; I’ve been using the trialware for several weeks now and it’s a profound improvement on existing tools for the digital photographer (and the recently released Beta 4 is particularly well done).

But I can’t bring myself to spend the US$300 they’re asking me to spend before I can experiment. Better the devil you know, I think. Come on, Apple, let us take a test drive.