One thing that always puzzled me about Aperture was that it treated DNGs as raw files, and wouldn't read them if they had originally been shot on a camera it didn't support. Reading DNGs as DNGs would, at a stroke, have extended the range of cameras the program supported. And that is what Apple now seem to have done, as AUPN writes:

Once files [from unsupported cameras] are imported as DNG, a new option will be available in the “RAW Fine Tuning” section of the Adjustment inspector, which indicates that the file is being adjusted using the DNG decoder. This box reads “2.0 DNG” and changes to the image using the 2.0 DNG converter are made based on the DNG specification of the file.

If the DNG is for a file that Aperture can already support (or if the file is viewed after support for a format is added) there will be the standard choice of processing the image using the Aperture 2.0 conversion, by selecting “2.0″ from the drop down menu. The idea here is that the specific Aperture conversion does a better camera-specific job than the generic DNG does….

The new DNG support opens up worlds of possibility for Aperture users, and in fact we've recently imported thousands of images from previous test shots from cameras like the Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n and several Hasselblad backs. It's great to be able to work with these legacy files using the powerful adjustment tools in Aperture.

As well as this nice feather in Aperture's cap, it also now reads the metadata in DNG files (though it still fails to read raw files' XMP sidecars). Taken together, these changes benefit those of us who don't get the Mac thing and/or see no benefit in switching to Aperture. Why? Well, because these are both moves that really help cement the value of DNG as an archival format.

You see, I do say nice things about Aperture now and again.