Shadowland in Beta

A day late and an OS short… Adobe’s first new (internal, from scratch) product in yonks is finally out in early beta: Lightroom. Only for Mac, alas. No, it’s not a response to Aperture, as everyone thinks on first hearing about it; it’s been in development forever, even when I was there.

This is a lengthy story of the dev. history, a bit too starry-eyed, People-magazine-style for me: Photoshop News » The Shadowland/Lightroom Development Story. Pretty much my take on this whole thing is "Don't try this at home," and better yet, "If we try this at the office, can't we all do better?" Is it that hard to innovate, incubate, and manage the release of a new product?

Maybe one of the lessons here is "Make sure you've got a good UI designer on staff during the whole process." But I'm definitely biased on that reading.