thomas fitzgerald.net

I’ve discovered a possible cause and solution to some of the speed issues people are having with Aperture. You can read about it on this post over at my new Aperture blog, called, funnily enough, “The Aperture Blog”.

I’ve been reading a lot of negative comments about Apple’s decision to sue HTC over its patents. People like John Gruber and Will Shipley, vocal individuals in the mac community have come out strongly deriding Apple for what they claim is an affront to innovation. This move, it is argued, somehow tarnishes Apple’s image.

I have to strongly disagree with those who say that Apple defending its portfolio of patents is a bad move, or that it stifles competition. For too long Apple has been the main source of progress in much of the technology world. Other companies have thrashed around stale ideas until Apple comes out with something new and then everyone flocks to copy it. Hundreds of companies use Apple’s often game changing products as a basis for their own success and why shouldn’t Apple say “enough is enough”.

I’ve started a new blog dedicated to Apple’s Aperture. I’ve been posting a lot about Aperture lately, and rather than have this taken over by the subject, I’ve set up a separate blog for it. Please check it out and leave feedback. I’ve also set up a separate twitter account for it too, so please follow that as well if you want!

Hot on the heels of Aperture 3 and 3.0.1 comes another Photo related update from Apple adding support for another bunch of Cameras. Of particular note (due to it’s absence from Aperture 3) is the popular Panasonic GF1.

Fresh off the digital presses, Aperture 3.01 has been released which hopefully will address a lot of the issues people were having. From the accompanying support document, the problems addressed are:

1. Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
2. Importing libraries from iPhoto
3. Importing photos directly from a camera
4. Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
5. Face recognition processing
6. Adding undetected faces using the Add Missing Face button
7. Printing pages containing multiple images
8. Printing photos and contact sheets with borders and metadata
9. Editing photos using an external editor
10. Display of images with Definition and Straighten adjustments applied

Many people seem to be having some serious stability issues with Aperture 3, and while I did initially, it seems to be fine now. I’ve been running it for the last few days and it hasn’t crashed on me once. I’m not sure what, if anything I did – but in the interests of those with issues here are a few things I did that you might want to try.

I’ve been playing around with the new adjustments options in Aperture 3 and I’m really impressed. Here’s an example. It’s a pretty bland image to start with.

Note the sky is completely burned out. The recovery slider would only bring it back in so far, but thanks to the new extended range curves adjustment I was able to recover much more of the sky. Here’s the final result after playing around for about half an hour:

I’ve only had a little time to play around with Aperture 3 (as I’m still recovering from a fairly serious illness) but I thought I’d post my first impressions. I had installed the trial version on my laptop and when the boxed version came in the post I put it on my main machine. I should point out that both are about two years old. My laptop is a core2duo 2.4ghz and my desktop is a 24″ iMac 2.4ghz. In no particular order then here are some thoughts on the software: