I think it's cute how this was missed by the open beta. Makes sense considering the one feature that was not available in the beta was catalog conversion.
Actually, that was a sensible, even shrewd, decision by Adobe.
Back in the late Softwarestocene Era, when product cycles were measured in multiples of years, Beta testers were carefully-selected, invited customers operating under nondisclosure agreements who executed specified evaluation regimes using realistic but throwaway datasets, and provided regular (often weekly) progress reports. This typically happened only after extensive Alpha testing within the company—sometimes with input from a handful of customers who had particular expertise in dealing with edge cases and other conditions that were not expected to arise naturally among the majority of users—had plucked, and engineering had corrected, the low-hanging bugs.
But that was then.
These days, the market requires just about every manufacturer to push code out the door as a public Beta the instant it seems more-or-less stable. Or sometimes before then. (I'm not accusing Adobe of this, but there are some other companies I could name. . . . ) And then to take the heat in public forums for both real and imagined problems reported by users whose knowledge and skills are for the most part unknown to the poor bastards who have the job of finding and fixing the real bugs, with management, marketers and public relators breathing down their necks.
Anyway, if the LR4 public Beta had provided the ability to convert our LR3 catalogs, how many of us could have resisted the urge? How many of us would have made certain we had an untouchable (read that as read-only in a non-modifiable directory) back-up copy that even in the most apocalyptic scenario could never have been hosed by a runaway conversion process?
This curves conversion issue seems to be the most serious problem anyone has encountered with LR4—and we've already been assured a fix is in the works. Some users are also experiencing display updates that lag behind the sliders (I'm one of them, although I'm not at all sure my problem isn't caused by inadequate physical memory and a slow demand-paging device), but performance optimization usually lags behind (pun intended) bug fixes, and for good reason: first you have to get the functionality right.
Actually, my impression is that the LR4 release is pretty clean
by today's standards. Maybe not the way we used to do it, but, Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore.
Chris
