thomas fitzgerald.net

Aperture 3 is an amazing upgrade. People had begun to worry about the future of the software, as it was two years since the last version came out, but I can see now that they’ve been doing some major work under the hood. I feel silly for doubting Apple’s commitment to the product now. What I find interesting though is that some of the features Apple has chosen to highlight as part of the marketing bumph, namely places and faces, while understandable from a marketing point of view, are not the software’s greatest additions. They really have put a lot of thought into this release and it addresses pretty much all the concerns most people had about it. It more than bridges the gap with Lightroom. There are so many new features though that it can be difficult to get your head around all of them. So then, here are my top ten, in reverse order !

For those of you out there who are running their blogs on Wordpress then you probably already know this but 2.9 has been released, and it seems like a major upgrade. Of biggest interest to me is the new image tools (especially for my little photo site!) although there is a lot more they need to do on that front. Anyway, I haven’t heard of many issues with it yet, so I’d say it’s fairly safe to upgrade. I use a lot of plug-ins on this site so I’m a bit weary, but I’ll probably brave it later today.

Check out MacUpdate Promo Holiday Bundle. I had bought one of their bundle’s before and so keep getting emails whenever they release a new one. I normally don’t pay that much attention to them but there’s some good applications in here for a very low price. Certainly worth getting hold of are PathFinder, Socialite, Drag Thing and Speed Download. Oh, and iPod rip is pretty handy to have too. I was just about to buy socialite as my trial was ending so now I get a bunch of other stuff too! See, sometimes it pays to read your junk mail.

Following up my earlier review of the magic mouse, and thanks to Don in the comments for pointing it out, BetterTouchTool is a small application for OS X that gives you a third mouse click with the Magic Mouse. It does more than that though. It allows you to do all sorts of custom gestures. For example, now If I put my whole hand on the mouse for a second it brings up the application switcher, and swiping down with two fingers is the equivalent of hitting the end key. It’s pretty cool and worth checking out if you have a magic mouse.

Check out this amazing intro to google chrome. Ingenious.

Mac Beta of Chrome is now available

If you work in motion graphics ( like me! ) you may have come across a problem when round tripping between After Effects and Final Cut when using ProRes. Luckily there appears to be a solution

From Adobe’s After Effects Blog:

If you use Apple’s new ProRes4444 codec with After Effects and Final Cut Pro, you may notice a gamma shift (i.e., colors will seem to have too much or too little contrast) when you bring the movies rendered and exported from After Effects back into Final Cut Pro.

Macworld’s Jonathan Seff takes the new (and much improved) handbrake 0.9.4 for a spin