You probably have just come back from long summer days at the cottage, on a trip or just spent lounging away from all of your many commitments. Some part of you looks forward to coming back, re-establishing that routine and settling back into it. Part of my routine is usually paging my way through fall announcements of new computer and photography technology and software. Although I no longer routinely purchase the latest and greatest of anything, I still enjoy (or used to) seeing what the brilliant engineers have come up with. Not this season.
There are some new developments in my astronomy hobby with more and more releases of smart telescopes, and of course the new Apple products have been announced as they always are each September, but all other domains seem ridiculously quiet. Even the rumor sites are quiet. And even the annoucements we do have include staggered or delayed release schedules. I haven’t seen anything like it since the height of the Covid pandemic. So I set out to find out why.
Continue reading “The Season of New Things That Wasn’t”
I’m becoming more puzzled and concerned about new products released by hardware and software companies that invariably get poor reviews and need to be “fixed”. We’ve seen that lately in the Apple 15 inch MacBook Pro (which has been “fixed” by the 16 inch released Nov 15/19). We’ve seen that in Skylum’s Luminar 3 (which as of this writing, has been “fixed” by Luminar 4, released Nov 19/19). We’ve also seen that very recently in Adobe’s Photoshop for iPad, which as of this writing, has not yet been “fixed”, after having been essentially trashed on its release in Oct. First-release mirrorless cameras from Canon and Nikon both needed firmware “updates” (i.e. fixes). And lastly, ON1’s Photo Raw 2020, released in October, seems to have a bug that causes it to do what should be background file management tasks in the middle of a photo edit, preventing any meaningful work from getting done. As of this writing, that has not been “fixed”.
Not quite what you expected? In the northern hemisphere, Fall is typically about shutting down, about returning to routines that don’t include time at a vacation home or sunlit walks in shorts and a floppy hat. We begin to cocoon, bringing in our lives indoors, at least more so when it gets dark 4 hours earlier.
Skylum announced the upcoming release of Luminar 4, scheduled for sometime in the fall. Â Originally released in 2017, the company and the product have gone through some interesting evolutions.
