By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: January 9, 2006
Monday, 9 January 2006
- Google Ad Deal With Chicago Sun-Times ★
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Google gets to put classified-style text ads in the empty space that the Sun-Times would have otherwise filled with house ads.
- Adobe Lightroom First Look and Primer ★
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Michael Reichmann’s early look at Lightroom for The Luminous Landscape:
So, is Lightroom Adobe’s response to Apple’s Aperture? In a way, yes, but it wasn’t originally intended to be. Lightroom was begun more than 18 months ago as a project to create a new paradigm for image management and processing. It’s rather remarkable given the time span how similar in overall concept the two programs are. It’s almost as if this is a design concept whose time had come, and both companies saw it coming roughly simultaneously.
- The Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story ★
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Photographer Jeff Schewe on the development history of Adobe Lightroom.
- Adobe Lightroom Public Beta ★
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Direct competitor to Aperture, available for download as a free public beta that expires in June (intriguingly, only for Mac — support for Windows is coming later). Don’t miss the video tour of Lightroom’s features and interface.
Lightroom is a product of Macromedia Labs, so it’s something Adobe picked up with they bought Macromedia. It looks great, so it may well be one of the reasons they bought Macromedia.Update: Lightroom has been under development at Adobe for about four years, under the code-name Shadowland — many of the engineers previously worked on ImageReady. That the download is available on the macromedia.com site is a side-effect of Adobe using the former “Macromedia Labs” group and moniker as a testing ground for cutting-edge software.
Also noteworthy are the system requirements, which are much less than Aperture’s:
Adobe Lightroom Beta requires Mac OS X version 10.4.3 (Tiger) or higher, a 1GHz or faster PowerPC G4 or G5 processor (including iBook G4 or PowerBook G4), and 768 MB of RAM (although more is recommended), and 1 GB or more of free hard drive space.
At the very least, we can abandon any thoughts that Adobe will cede anything at all to Aperture. Aperture-v.-Lightroom is going to be a good old-fashioned arch rivalry.
(Via John Siracusa via AIM.)