Having seen Apple's new software Aperture at the PhotoPlus Expo and having done some reading online, I have a few questions and thoughts.

• One of Aperture's strongest features is the how it handles the whole photo library. The library contains RAW images, edited versions, any snapshots you may have created, as well as a huge range of metadata. Very cool. Also cool is how easy Aperture makes backing up the library; plug in a FireWire drive and create a "vault" that backs up all or part of the library. However, Aperture seems designed to use a directly connected main library. It looks as if the main library has to be created on your internal drive(s). Given that every time I go shooting I bring back two gigabytes of images, it wouldn't take long to fill my internal drive. If Aperture can't maintain a catalog of offline vaults or libraries, that is a serious limitation.
• Aperture's editing tools are also impressive. It can non-destructively set white, black, and grey points, adjust exposure, crop, and adjust color channels using a slick versioning scheme. Every edit to a master photo does not actually modify the master. Rather, edits represent instructions applied to the master, much like an edit decision list or photoshop layer (they are not represented as layers, however). This is all very cool, but what is the internal image format? Because adjustments can't be applied as layers, Aperture's usefulness as an editing tool is limited.
• Aperture can pass an image to an external editing tool, like Photoshop. This makes sense given that Aperture lacks most of the filters and plugins that Photoshop has. It isn't clear whether or not Aperture can handle Photoshop layers, or whether images have to be flattened before saving back to Aperture.
• The metadata handling and manipulating tools are excellent. Adobe should really do something like this with Bridge and Photoshop.
• The cataloging and vaulting tools also appear to be excellent and very useful; take a look at these demo clips.
• It seems that Aperture would be a great front-end to Photoshop, replacing the RAW workflow in a tool like Bridge or Extensis Portfolio.
• My concern, however, about using Aperture for RAW processing is that all RAW tools are not created equal. There are noticeable, sometimes shocking differences between the same RAW file converted with the Canon RAW tool and Photoshop's Camera RAW plugin. Photoshop's tool almost universally creates better looking, sharper images. I'd like to see some careful comparisons of Aperture's RAW conversion tool with the Camera RAW plugin.