It was the case of the missing PhD student.

As another academic year got under way at Imperial College London, a senior professor was bemused at the absence of one of her students. He had worked in her lab for three years and had one more left to complete his studies. But he had stopped coming in.

Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple.

“He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left,” said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. “It’s five times the salary I can offer. It’s unbelievable. We cannot compete.”

Summary of major new features
Full support for high-DPI (e.g. 4K and 5K) monitors.
Redesigned Rename dialog, with new features like:
A unique macro recorder, which lets you perform complex batch renames without regular expressions.
Enhanced scripting capabilities.
Better handling of recursive renames and filename clashing.
An Apply button which lets you perform multiple renames without closing the dialog.
 
Improvements to the Image Viewer including:
Configurable toolbar and hotkeys, including the ability to run arbitrary commands on the current image file.
A new image marking system which makes it much easier to sort through a folder of photos to identify the ones you want to keep, print, share, etc.
A read-ahead cache for faster image loading.
An integrated metadata panel which lets you edit EXIF and other metadata from within the viewer.
 
Enhanced file and folder labels including:
The ability to assign more than one label at once (label attributes are combined).
Label categories (lets you organise your labels into groups).
Adjustable label priority (for when more than one wildcard or filter label applies to a file)
A new status icon system that lets you assign one or more status icons to each files (e.g. to track which files are ‘done’, ‘watched’, ‘urgent’ or ‘to-do’).
 
A manual sorting mode that lets you sort your files and folders exactly how you want.
An integrated dialog editor that lets scripts create their own complex user interfaces.
File display enhancements including:
Vertical folder tabs (displayed down the left or right side of the file display).
You can assign your own tab colors for specific folders.
Optional vertical as well as horizontal gridlines.
Relative size and age graphs displayed as the background of size and date fields (rather than requiring their own column).
A new “show everything” mode to quickly disable all filters.
 
Improvements to Folder Options including:
Configure column widths to expand and fill the usable space in the file display.
A column filter makes it easier to find and add the columns you want.
File and folder name filters can be configured using regular expressions if desired.
 
File copy improvements including a transfer speed graph in the progress dialog.
Toolbar enhancements including scrollbars and distinct labels in drop-down menus.
Lister layouts can now be arranged into folders and sub-folders.
… and as always, much, much more!

-What's New