This is a fol­lowup from my quick thoughts on Aperture 3.

When I first opened Aperture 3, I noticed a cou­ple of changes with the UI, I didn’t know what it was yet, but it was some­thing fun­da­men­tally big.

First, the splash screen was gone. No more was the Apple Pro-apps-styled white sheet with launch sta­tus indi­ca­tor, but a dia­log sheet wel­com­ing us to the Aperture Trial with ‘Authorize, ‘Buy’ and ‘Continue’ but­ton. The but­tons are slightly big­ger than the ones in Aperture 2, the dia­log sheet & the but­ton ren­ders in a dif­fer­ent, yet famil­iar man­ner. I’ve seen it before, I’ve felt it before. And what comes next put all pieces together.

When the main UI appears, I noticed the main tool­bar icons are big­ger, it looks more ‘candy’ than its pre­de­ces­sor — less ele­gant, poten­tially more func­tional I thought — the candy color & the size and the spac­ing makes it feel less ‘Pro’, the effec­tive­ness & use­ful­ness of this change will have to be proven over time and I’m not ready to make any con­clu­sion this time, and than there’s the sub-toolbars, it’s also big­ger, though not much more, but it retains its predecessor’s style (spac­ing & ratio), which makes it less for­eign & more effective.

What’s with all of that? Why did Apple go to such lengths for Aperture 3? I knew it’s a full 64-bit app, I knew its Cocoa, but then I remem­ber a blog post I read from Daring Fireball:

In short, there are new APIs and fea­tures in Mac OS X which are only avail­able to 64-bit apps, and because there are no 64-bit Carbon APIs, 64-bit apps implic­itly means 64-bit Cocoa apps.

Being one of the lat­est edi­tion of Apple’s Pro App, I never thought Aperture as a Carbon app, its UI is dif­fer­ent than other Pro App and it’s beau­ti­fully crafted to the level of com­fort I don’t even see in Mac’s native Apps. So out of curios­ity, I decided to do some digging.

Following this one, I fired another tweet address­ing Jason Snell & John Gruber:

@jsnell Was Aperture 3 ported from Carbon to Cocoa for full 64-bit sup­port. Was Aperture 2 Carbon+AppKit? /@gruber’s http://bit.ly/cUZ7fz

Later, I went over to Apple Discussion Board and found a sim­i­lar topic was in dis­cus­sion where posted a claim that Aperture was Cocoa from day one and dis­puted that claim quot­ing Gruber’s arti­cle with this note.

A few hours later, some­one responded to my claim, and (sort-of) con­firm­ing my the­ory. William S. wrote:

Apple shipped betas of Carbon64 prior to WWDC 07 but pulled out at the last minute and moved to Cocoa64. They offi­cially say Carbon doesn’t sup­port 64bit, for some oper­a­tions, but it can be used (and is not con­sid­ered dep­re­cated) safely for 64bit pro­grams. Read here: http://zathras.de/angelweb/blog-adobe-on-carbon-64-bit.htm … But I digress. And I think you are write. Previous ver­sion of Aperture were not true Cocoa based pro­grams. Aperture 3 has been fully rewrit­ten in Cocoa64 and to my knowl­edge, doesn’t have an ounce of car­bon in it.

It’s inter­est­ing to see how Aperture has become one of the first Pro app to be 64-bit and full Cocoa, all of their Pro apps and most of their Pre-Snow Leopard native apps are also Carbon; they have rewrit­ten Finder and all Mac OS X sys­tem apps except DVD Player, Front Row, Grapher, and iTunes have been rewrit­ten in 64-bit.

I can’t vouch for every­one here, but my early expe­ri­ence with this new, Cocoa fla­vored Aperture 3 has been great, respon­sive­ness has improved and every­thing feels nat­ural despite the huge over­haul on the code base, it’s not an easy job main­tain­ing the look & feel of an App after a total archi­tec­tural recon­struc­tion, and for all its worth, Apple deserves a pat on their shoulder.

There’s still no offi­cial word from Apple, nor affir­ma­tive cita­tion if Aperture 3 was ported from a Carbon code base, to a full Cocoa code base for its 64-bit-ness, dis­cus­sion is still going over at this thread, feel free to jump in.

Aperture 3 Tech Specs.