Adobe announce a public Beta of Lightroom

Adobe announced that Lightroom – a new RAW digital workflow application similar to Apple’s new Aperture is now available to download as part of a public Beta program.
The main advantage to Aperture is that it is available to buy NOW, it uses the graphics card to speed up image manipulation and it is Alpha software (the Lightroom application is actually Alpha software – that is, the features and bugs have not been fixed and is at least 6 months away from the final version 1 release).

Please note, whilst it is useful to get a glimpse of where a tool that might become as important as Photoshop is heading – I would recommend AGAINST installing this software on a production machine. Beta means feature complete but still containing bugs.