If, like me, you were annoyed by how Aperture 3 imported to a new project rather than using your selection, you can fix this.
Go to Preferences-> Import, and change the “default import location” to “selected item”.
Yay!
29
May 10
No video on my Macbook Pro, again!
I restarted my Macbook Pro at the beginning of the week and was greeted with a black screen.
Yes, for the second time this year my laptop had the Nvidia GPU die. The first time Apple fixed it they were supposed to have put in a new board that wouldn’t have the problem again. It’s not clear if they didn’t do that or if it failed despite that.
Naturally this has soured my opinion of Apple quality somewhat.
On the flip side, when they decide it’s their fault, their customer service is top notch. I took my laptop in on Tuesday and got it back repaired on Friday. They apologized for me having to come in a second time for the same problem.
Bravo!
11
May 10
Another Aperture update, another bug
Aperture 3.03 was released recently.
And of course, the first thing I try to do exposes a bug in it that didn’t exist in previous versions.
Basically, the functionality for mapping pictures to GPS tracks from a GPS device is broken.
It appears to place photos off by one hour when you tell it to assign photos to location based on the time in the track. (Perhaps a bug with daylight savings time?)
Here is my workaround:
I live in the southeast US, in EDT. (which is GMT-4)
So, I import my GPS track.
Then I select “Edit Track Timezone” and select GMT-4 <– THIS IS THE KEY STEP OF THE WORKAROUND.
I drag a photo to the track in the proper location (it showed the photo time as being off by one hour. I’m not sure if my camera had the wrong time or not.)
I choose “Assign Locations” and my photos are placed properly.
I tried select EDT for the track timezone, and that did NOT work correctly. I had to select GMT-4 for it to work for me.
Good luck
01
Mar 10
Aperture 3: Update failed, the fix(?)
If you read my last post, you know how Aperture won’t upgrade due to unrealistic expectations in terms of disk space.
Here is what I had to do so that I could use the new version:
- I moved my 76.3 GB Aperture library to an external hard drive.
- I started Aperture. It created a new empty library.
- I selected to Import Library/Project… and selected my library.
- I waited a day or so for the import to finish. (I’m not exaggerating)
I am now waiting for detecting faces, processing and upgrading thumbnails. It looks like this will take another day or two. (I’m not exaggerating)
SO…
If you want to upgrade to Aperture 3 and you have a lot of photos (tens of thousands).
- Make sure you have an external hard drive around to use.
- Be prepared to wait several days for the process to finish.
I’ll let you know what I think of it if I ever actually get a chance to use the program.
27
Feb 10
Aperture 3 upgrade: A failure in software engineering
It’s probably been obvious from previous posts that I use Apple’s Aperture photo management software for all my photo processing and management.
The size of my Aperture library on my laptop is 76.3GB. It is the largest folder on my harddrive. In fact, it takes up roughly half the harddrive space on my laptop.
The recent upgrade to Aperture to version 3 has an interesting requirement (and by interesting I mean completely and utterly brain dead). After installing the upgrade and running the upgrade it needs to update your Aperture library. To do that it requires somewhere between 40% to 100% of the original library size to be available in free disk space. (It’s not clear exactly how much you actually need free because it doesn’t tell you, and it seems to be different for different people)
For me, it means I need to have somewhere between 30.52 and 76.3GB of free disk space. Unfortunately, with the size of the operating system, there is no physical way that I can free up 76.3GB of disk space on my laptop. I currently have 39.29GB of disk space free on my laptop and that isn’t enough for Aperture 3.
When I try to update the library I first get a message that says:
Insufficient Disk Space
There is not enough free space on your Aperture Library Volume
(OK)
When I click the OK button I get a message that says:
Warning
Update failed.
(Quit)
And of course when I click the Quit button Aperture quits.
Now I happen to know that a majority of the 76.3GB of data in the Aperture library are the actual raw image files from my digital camera (.NEF’s in my case). So why do I need so much free disk space to update my library?
It’s clear this is a failure in software engineering design. It’s also a failure to test likely use cases, but that could be another whole post.
This is one of my rules of software engineering:
Don’t require more resources to do a job then the average person would expect would be required to do that job.
Would the average person think that you would need more than 30GB of disk space free to upgrade to the latest version of a program after they have already installed the new executable? Clearly, they would not.
So how did this happen? Maybe the library has complex interdependencies in it’s data structure. Maybe someone made the decision to create a new library using the original as a source and then deleting the original when finished to ease dealing with the complexity. Unfortunately, this design flaw means that the customers who use the product the most are also the ones who are most likely to encounter a problem. Furthermore, duplicating any of the image files is completely unnecessary, because they aren’t changing in the update process.
Is this what is happening? I don’t know, although it seems possible based on what people are posting on Apple’s support forum.
What I do know is that I have 40GB of free disk space and Aperture 3 won’t run because it says I don’t have enough disk space free. That’s a FAIL any way you look at it.
Read my next post for my fix.
24
Feb 10
Aperture 3.0.1: Lots of bug fixes
Although I already bought Aperture 3.0, I’ve been waiting to install it after hearing about how buggy the release was.
Well, luckily I haven’t had to wait long as Apple has already come out with their first bug fix update for it.
Looks like lots of important fixes in here.
Makes you wonder why Apple didn’t just hold the release until they had cleaned it up to a higher quality. Certainly all of these problems weren’t unknown when they went gold?
The real question now is whether enough has been fixed to install.
Aperture 3.0.1: Release notes.
Aperture 3.0.1 Release Notes
This update improves overall stability and addresses a number of issues in Aperture 3, including:
Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
Importing libraries from iPhoto
Importing photos directly from a camera
Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
Face recognition processing
Adding undetected faces using the Add Missing Face button
Printing pages containing multiple images
Printing photos and contact sheets with borders and metadata
Editing photos using an external editor
Display of images with Definition and Straighten adjustments applied
Zooming photos in the Viewer and in the Loupe using keyboard shortcuts
Accessing Aperture libraries on a network volume
Selecting and moving pins on the Places map
Adding and editing custom locations using the Manage My Places window
Switching between masters when working with RAW+JPEG pairs
14
Feb 10
What is it with electronics recently? HDCP issue
It seems like I have been having a lot of big electronics failures recently.
This time it was my TV.
Last week my TiVo started displaying a message saying that it couldn’t display over an HDMI cable on any of the highdef channels. After some troubleshooting it appears that my Samsung LNR238W LCD TV is not providing a proper HDCP signal anymore. Or at least not in a way that the TiVo can understand.
Audio over HDMI stopped working as well.
I tried hooking up the TiVo to another TV just to make sure it wasn’t a TiVo or HDMI cable problem. That worked fine, so it seems to point to a TV problem.
It seems like an unusual failure. Just HDCP and audio over HDMI, but everything else works fine? I can even still view the HDMI video just fine for channels that don’t require HDCP protection.
Anyone out there know enough about Samsung TVs to know if this is fixable?
03
Feb 10
My Macbook Pro has a defective video chip, but…
it’s being fixed.
for FREE!
I brought my Macbook Pro into the local Apple store genius bar. (Had an appointment) I told them I wanted them to run a hardware diagnostic because my laptop wouldn’t boot but only show a checkboard pattern over the grey Apple logo. (See my previous post)
They plugged in a USB drive, booted from the drive. It ran some program that checked my graphics chip, saw that was defective. This defect was covered beyond the normal warranty. They took my information and sent my laptop off to their repair depot to be fixed.
Looks like I may get it back before the end of the week too.
Good customer experience.
23
Jan 10
My laptop is dieing
I think the picture says it all, but my laptop may be dead. If it is, I hope my time machine backups actually work.
14
Jun 09
Mac twitter clients
A added a new page with a list of Mac twitter clients.
If you have any thoughts on which of these are better, post them in the comments.