That’s why they call it a “Beta” (or RTFM)

The latest buzz to hit the photography world has been a trinity of buzz and hype.  First, Canon announced the 1D Mark IV, then, on the heels of that, Adobe announced the release of Lightroom 3 in Beta form.  To round things out, Lensbaby came out with a couple new optical shift lenses to appeal to the creatively inclined.  I mentioned the 1D Mark IV last week, and today I was going to give a rundown of what the buzz is all about with Lightroom.  We all know about the new features including exporting video (musical slideshows), and I was going to show you screenshots and share a few here on the blog.  But, rather than join the fray in a rush to point out the “cool” factor, an interesting experience illustrated exactly why you must tread carefully with betas.

See, it installed and worked perfectly well with Windows XP, but when I went to load it on my trustworthy Mac running OSX 10.4 (Tiger), got an odd error:

Lightroom 3.0 Beta Error

Lightroom 3.0 Beta Error

As those of us in IT say when we see cryptic errors like this:  “That’s not so good…”

But here, it just serves as a reminder to those of you early adopters out there – keep your existing workflow as you experiment with Lightroom 3, because after all, that’s why they call it a “Beta”!  So, any thoughts on why this would happen?  Feel free to sound off in the comments or with me via email or Twitter.  I’m not too worried about it as I’ve got my LR2 and iPhoto to work with, so am happy just acting as a tester in the Windows world.

Last but not least, I know I promised to have a winner for the October contest announced today, but time just ran away from me with several projects coming to a culmination over the past few days. (Good news for the blog and podcast though as tons of content is about to pour through the siphon here!)  That announcement will come tomorrow…and until then, keep on shooting!

ETA:  Based on the initial comments and my actually taking the time to read the docmentation, it does appear my version of OSX (Tiger, or 10.4) is not supported with Lightroom 3.0 Beta, so until I upgrade the OS, my Beta experience will be restricted to Windows XP.

8 comments for “That’s why they call it a “Beta” (or RTFM)

Leave a Reply to Kevin Mullins Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.