J O N A T H A N JK . C O M

I’m going to quote the entire quote from today’s post by John Gruber on daringfireball as it’s such a good one.

On the appointed day, Evangelist and the rest of the team gathered in the boardroom. They’d brought page after page of prototype screen shots showing the new program’s various windows and menu options, along with paragraphs of documentation describing how the app would work.

“Then Steve comes in”, Evangelist recalls. “He doesn’t look at any of our work. He picks up a marker and goes over to the whiteboard. He draws a rectangle. ‘Here’s the new application,’ he says. ‘It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says BURN. That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make”.

Gruber basically states that ‘Bronson Watermarker‘ (homepage) does exactly the same thing except for PDFs that iDVD did for movies. Gruber is not a photographer so it’s understandable (and entirely forgivable) when he undersold the app by not mentioning that Bronson Watermarker also works with the popular image types as well (JPEG [and JPEG2000], GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF files). This looks to be a very handy application for me considering I never could get Aperture to insert my watermark into my images during export. It’s the reason why my photography doesn’t have any; watermarks were always a stupidly, crazy, small, size and forced into the bottom righthand corner. I’ve always wanted them to appear in the same way as they do on the VII website.

I just wish the Aperture design team had the same discussion with Steve Jobs about the user interface as the iDVD team on that aspect of the application. Once I’m in the mood to watermark my work again, I’ll be giving this a go.

Anyway the app is £6.99 ($9.99) on the Mac App Store (link).