Aperture vs Lightroom day 4

One of the posters on O'Reilly's Inside Aperture is doing a week long comparsion of Lightroom and Aperture. I've been following along and downloaded he trial of Lightroom. As much as there is to like about Lightroom, his latest post spells out a fundamental difference of the two programs. I have to agree with him Aperture's UI is it's strength.

As I started sorting through my images in Lightroom, I began to notice a few details about the user interface. Let me preface this by saying that most of the problems with the interface are just things I need to learn, but as I have been saying all along, I think that intuitiveness is an important component of an intelligently designed and useful user interface.

For example, to rotate those upside-own images all at once I have to be in Lightroom’s Library module and in Grid view. If you are in any other module, or looking in another view mode in the Library module, you can only rotate images one at a time. On top of this, the rotate arrows that are present in the Grid view thumbnails aren’t present in the film strip or anywhere else. So, you have to use either the keyboard shortcut, or a menu option to rotate anything at all outside the Grid view.

In Aperture there is always a rotate left or right button on the bottom bar, and it can be used to rotate a single image or a set of images, regardless of where you are in the program. I suppose it might sound like I’m really nitpicking here, but I have to say, it just reinforces my main problem with Lightroom: the modules.I really don’t like having to think about where I am in a program in order to do something as simple as rotating a set of images. I will save most of my opinions about the modules for my upcoming summary article, but in a nutshell, I really think the whole concept of a step by step workflow is a tired and linear way of thinking. Am I alone here?

Aperture Vs. Lightroom: Day 7 - River Rotations - O'Reilly Digital Media Blog