Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto and iTunes on macOS Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur | Hacker News Reader

Retroactive: Run Aperture, iPhoto and iTunes on macOS Ventura, Monterey, Big Sur

github.com

https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-ret... goes into detail all the things needed to make this work

I've read the article but some questions still remain. Does Retroactive install the shared dylibs of previous macOS releases? Or does it use an approach similar to https://www.macports.org/ ?

They mention this, the frameworks that are missing are copied from earlier releases.

Why the heck Apple kill Aperture anyway?

When it first came out, I thought it was a little porky. But then machines got faster.

What I loved was that your original photos were read-only

Lack of interest is my guess. That plus someone in Apple imagining that it shouldn’t compete with Adobe Lightroom. Aperture, during its peak, was well liked by users. Many even liked it better than Lightroom.

Even the iPhoto of that time (on iOS) had features that Photos doesn’t have till today (I recall buying iPhoto that allowed erasing things from a photo or blurring things from a photo just by using one’s finger).

Maybe also related to the decline of enthousiasts walking around with a big DSLR/mirrorless camera. If you only use your phone to take pictures that don't need big adjustments you probably aren't going to your desktop to further refine them.

It honestly feels like all of these problems - auto-bans by Meta and Google, enshittification of formerly-professional Apple products, nuke-your-money grabs by Ebay and Stripe - all come from a shared culture of corporate narcissism.

Not only is there no genuine empathy for users, it seems important that giant corporations should have the freedom to disappoint, manipulate, and abuse everyone, should they choose to.

Shareholders and investors always want more while becoming more risk averse over time, so a company loses the ability to innovate and then switches its focus to squeezing the customer.

Not to mention the cohort in product, design and engineering who want to work on the new shiny and embark on massive rewrite projects that deliver only a subset of old functionality because the ‘metrics’ support it. They’re never around to maintain it long term.

Not an issue if you don’t go public or accept VC or have perverse incentives that encourage enshittification over excellence. Nobody pulling the strings for you then.

I'm impressed by the ingenuity of people who keep old software running just a bit longer! When Catalina first came out, I used Retroactive for iTunes. This let me get one last update out for my track joiner (https://www.davidschlachter.com/misc/trackconcat), targeting both the new Music app and iTunes.

speaking of "I miss old s/w" I miss Picasa. I do like Apples photo stuff, but I loved Picasa.

I miss hello. It was great, simple and fast. Then google bought picasa and it went away. :( I kept using picasa a long time after it was no longer updated, but there wasn't a good hello alternative. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/picasas-hello-disco...

Google also acquired then killed Sparrow[1]. I really enjoyed that mail app.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparrow_%28email_client%29

Seems like this is restricted to a few Apple applications. Is there something more generic to run older software? There was a “Swiss Army Knife” application for handling media files (mainly audio and photos? I forget) called Media Rage, by Chaotic Software. The company seems to have gone out of business (the domain is now parked with ads). Since Media Rage was 32-bit, it wouldn’t work from macOS Catalina.

An old article about a Media Rage update on Mac World: https://www.macworld.com/article/175779/mediarage19.html

I’d love to see this for Lightroom, as The last perpetually licensed version is stuck on 32 bit. I’ve got an old machine (just) for it now, but it would be nice to run it on hardware made this decade.

So if I already converted to Apple Music and load an iTunes legacy version, will this have to duplicate the Music library?

Can this application be removed after say Aperture is working, or do it have to stay installed?

Also, does it produce a new application package that can be installed on other computers that doesn't have Retroactive installed, or is Retroactive needed on each target machine?

Anyone had luck getting these apps running on macOS 14/Sonoma?

Side topic: I wish macOS would stick to just numbers in their os updates to make it drop dead easy to recall which update and how old one is. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Californian geography and even if I did, that doesn’t help me remember what Big Sur was vs. Catalina

Same. From that headline I have no way of telling which is the oldest and which is the newest. Just put a damn number.

Even big cats I could keep track because I had a mental image of what they represented. Panther was an awesome release. And snow Leopard? Woooo!

Even worse, internally they use California wines as codenames for the OS.

Noooo… you mean there’s a Mac OS Bonnydoon floating around the Apple O-ring?

Not anymore.

It's been a while since I left, good to hear, it was getting old. :)

It helped that they did major releases only every 2-4 years. I think a new major release every year is too much, especially when the changes are things like "we rearranged the system preferences menu" or "new emoji"

I wish they went back to this. A two year release cycle, alternating iOS and macOS could result in much more polished software, and more meaningful updates. If they took their environmental stuff really seriously they could do a two year cycle with devices too, alternating iPhone's and iPad's. I guess everything is so tightly coupled on the software side that this probably isn't possible (at least the alternating part).

Even living in one of the cities doesn’t help me. They used to go west to east, but now the OS codenames have no pattern.

Even better they could use the year, like Ubuntu

And Samsung. I can actually tell when the Galaxy S22 was made. What a revolutionary idea.

I can't even keep track of which iPhone or macOS we're on now.

Both MacOS and Ubuntu have a funny name and a number, the question is really just which people actually use. You could call Sonoma MacOS 13 or Sonoma, and you can call Ubuntu 22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish.

At least the Ubuntu names increment alphabetically

This makes Ubuntu's naming scheme way better, IMO.

Yes and the number should match the iOS release of the same vintage.

...except every OS update does have a number?

In tech circles I try to use the actual OS release number whenever I can for this reason.

Clearly I meant only use the number.

One of Apple's core strength is marketing. Just using numbers will never happen.

Works for iOS.

There should be an ACM award for retro-computing like this. I miss Aperture so much that it's difficult to express.

I dislike photo editing deeply, but for some reason, the Aperture design just made sense to me, being a person who could never grok photoshop.

I’m curious how it performs on modern hardware. When it was new (1.0) it was dog slow on the fastest tower Apple sold. I bet it’s very usable now by comparison.

I used it as long as possible with Retroactive till maybe about a year ago on an iMac with an external SSD drive. I was actively trying to fight the Adobe tax. It was fine for quite a while, but in the end, it just got too buggy. Each macOS release seemed to slow it down more, and very often, thumbnails would not render. It doesn't help that Retroactive itself doesn't seem to be actively maintained.

I’m curious if you tried Lightroom.

The one thing that really put off of Aperture were the destructive edits, so in that regard Lightroom was a much better fit for me. Unfortunately while the app has been 64-bit for a while Adobe never sold a perpetually licensed version with a 64-bit installer, so I've stuck with macos 10.14. I'll be damned if I'm going to rent software from Adobe.

There are alternatives to Lightroom that have perpetual licenses, like DxO Photo Lab and Capture One.

As a hobby APS-C photographer who bought DxO PhotoLab yesterday, I feel obliged to say that unless you actually make money from photography, you WILL shed a tear when paying for either.

$229?[0] I don’t find that to be excessive. You gotta hit four digit to get my tear ducts to engage.

[0] https://shop.dxo.com/en/dxo-photolab7-elite.html

Yeah $229 is about $229 too much for something that comes bundled with a rootkit (nee Pace Interlok). Lightroom was about $140 ($80 for an upgrade) with no DRM, and pretty slick asset management.

Is that still true? I only found some very old forum posts, but nothing about the newer versions.

https://www.dxo.com/eula/

  For security reasons, DxO integrates DRM (“Digital Rights Management”)
  software components in the Software.

Don't know if it's still Pace Interlok, don't care.

I’m in a lower cost of living European country, a lot of people use $200 phones here. $230 for “some photo editing software” made even my fiancée raise her eyebrows, and she’s used to seeing me pay a lot for computer stuff.

DxO came bundled with that rootkit disguised as DRM. No idea if they still do, but I've not bothered with them since. The C1 workflow never reall gelled with me, but really neither do the asset management thing that Lightroom does so well (although to some extent Aperture came close).

I don't dislike photo editing necessarily but I miss Aperture.

I've never been in to photo editing and whatnot but when Aperture came out I decided to spend time learning it, organizing my library, tagging things and figuring all that stuff out.

I invested a lot of time and even bought some ebooks and whatnot to learn it better.

Then the EOL'd it and I just have never recovered. I have to sit down and spend time learning Lightroom, redoing all my libary and reworking my storage.... and I just have never had the desire to do it. Many of my photos are sitting in an old Aperture library tar'd up on my NAS.

Have a look at RAW Power from Gentleman Coders. It's the closest thing I've found to Aperture. https://www.gentlemencoders.com

For a while in the 2000s, it seemed like Apple really had something special going. FCP, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Aperture, Shake, Logic, XSan, XServe. Even their iLife and iWork suites used to compete with mainstream productivity apps. Now they've been really dumbed down.

What in the world happened?

(At least we have DaVinci Resolve now... but it just doesn't have the finesse that Apple pro apps once had.)

Apple moved focus to mobile. Found mad cash money there to be made and neglected their existing ecosystem.

If it was neglected they would not touch it. The current versions have less functionality for no obvious reason.

macOS gets iPhone hand-me-downs. Apple’s cross platform endeavors start on the phone, now. Catalyst replacement apps were initially abysmal, and are glacially improving, but have not approached their former Mac greatness, and probably won’t. I’d hoped the Apple Silicon reinvigoration of the Mac would help, but it hasn’t yet. iOS reigns supreme.

Well, they constantly take tiny steps towards making it an iOS for the desktop. That's down to the name. Mac OS X became macOS (based on iOS).

Their argument for denying users the ability to sideload software on iOS is that said software may include critical security vulnerabilities or even malware. So, why are they leaving their macOS users exposed to vulnerabilities? Why wouldn't they attempt to go in the same direction with macOS?

Their absolute main reason is of course that they take a cut on all software sold via the App Store. Thankfully the EU is doing something[1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-13/will-appl...

They want your subscription money.

Logic, FCPX and Motion are still extremely good and pro-grade. Numbers is all right.

iLife was the reason I bought a Mac. I dreamed of getting one for years as a kid specifically for that software suite. The web creator product in iLife was really fun, letting you publish your own good looking websites with zero know-how.

Greed happened. Apple is run by someone who thinks that if something doesn't make a billion dollar it is not worth doing. At the moment where Apple had the most money to finance many things that don't make that much money or new experimental stuff they just stopped spending any money. All in the name of the shareholders.

And peoples mostly talk about the annoying front-end stuff that has been removed or neglected but if you look at all the small things that you could find on a Mac it's really sad.

This is exactly why I now say that Apple is not worth it nowadays. The hardware is nice sure, but there is plenty of nice hardware provided you are willing to pay the price. The software is becoming terrible quicker than ever and it already is a poor copy of what it was before (the way they "remade" the iWork suite is almost criminal).

> Greed happened.

I don't see any evidence that Apple's product managers are directly influenced by quarterly returns and AAPL share price fluctuations. If we were talking about Apple's financial behavior (such as their stock buyback program, or the killing of an entire product line), then perhaps. But I strongly doubt Apple's product managers were motivated by what you call "greed" when they made the choices that led to today's iWork suite.

Perhaps it was something more like building the product that most of their customers wanted. Maybe market research told them they'd have better success letting Microsoft build the productivity suite for people at work, and instead build a product that people would use at home (even/especially people who don't use Office or any productivity suite at work). These are both credible possibilities that don't involve "greed".

I'm very curious to know what really happened.

https://www.darktable.org/ is a great RAW editing software which runs on macOS

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