[Leica] Is Lightroom 2.0 Really Shipping?

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

I clung to Bridge and PSCS3 until the number of images that I had online 
crossed 20,000. At that point I decided to give Lightroom a try. I was very 
suspicious of the way it played fast-and-loose with the location of my image 
files, but I learned how to control where it puts things, and ever since 
then I've become comfortable with it. There was one feature of Bridge that I 
couldn't live without (the ability to analyze a selection according to image 
size, camera, file type, aspect ratio, etc) but 
a watered-down version of that is in LR2 now.

What makes Lightroom so maddeningly hard to learn is that it is 
asynchronous. This means that when you ask it to do something, it doesn't do 
it right away. It starts doing it and then comes back ready to process 
another command. If you are an expert Lightroom user, this is great, because 
it means you can do more than one thing at a time. But if you are learning 
Lightroom, this means that you can't use the tried-and-true technique of 
trying a command to see what happens and then doing an Undo if 
that wasn't what you wanted. You never know how long you have to wait to see 
what has happened, because you never really know when Lightroom finishes 
doing the task that you asked it to do.

In my opinion what Lightroom needs most to help bring new users onboard is a 
Preferences setting that says, in essence, "I am still learning Lightroom. 
Please finish each command and update the display before letting me start 
another one."

Brian Reid