Some applications deserve ‘outing’ and Nikon ViewNX is one of them. I’ve used at least a dozen image editors, viewers, managers over the years – and the one that potentially means the most to me – sucks big time.

Not long ago I bought some of Nikon’s top gear. I love their lenses, and the new FX bodies are out of this world – but Nikon – you need to get your software in order.

Below is a screen shot of Process Monitor – filtered for Nikon ViewNX. I stopped recording events after we hit two million. That’s 2,309,221 file system events – and Nikon ViewNX was still going strong.

What’s more, ViewNX and Capture NX 2 appear to have been developed by different teams (not even able to agree on where the NX should go), using different explorer components and other features. That’s just silly – since the navigation panel is an obvious candidate for object reuse. Not sure who’s UI tools they’ve used to skin their applications – but they both occasionally ‘drop’ their skin and revert to Windows classic chrome.

I don’t underestimate the size of the task in producing Mac and Windows versions of fairly hefty applications – but you guys need to do better than this. Capture NX even featured in a recent YouTube parody over the Nikon D3x – so I’m not alone in my concerns about Nikon software.

Bummer…