Aperture 2: the missing Help items and Apple's manual site

One of the oddities of the demo version of Aperture 2 is the Help menu is empty. I assume this will be fixed soon and that the shipping version will have the same PDF set Aperture 1 had. (It's another question why Aperture doesn't use Apple's Help system. Sometimes I think it's not really an Apple product at all.)

In the meantime an Apple Discussion Group post pointed me to a site I didn't know about: the Apple Manual page. Every Apple product manual shows up there, sorted by publication date. It's a great resource and I'm going to add it to my custom OS X Search widget.

There's also a "page" (query) for Aperture manuals only, but as of today it only has Aperture 1.x manuals. I assume that's a metadata error and we'll soon see the manuals there.

Aperture 2: Yes, it's much faster.

Now that I've found a workaround for the Aperture 2 .Mac bug, and found Aperture can, at long last, edit dates it was time to test performance on my old, decaying, G5 iMac (2 GHz PPC, 1.5 GB RAM).

I imported by reference a 2300 image iPhoto Library -- all JPEG. After importing I practiced browsing it, and I tested the filmstrip "Preview" browser (tap P to toggle). Preview browsing is extremely fast, at least with JPEG originals. Scrolling the entire set of 2300 images was not as fast is iPhoto but was very acceptable for my purposes. In practice I almost never view that many items at once.

The import worked well, as before slideshows, photo books, calendars, etc are not imported. If you want to switch your iPhoto images to Aperture you need to save these as PDFs. Since iPhoto and Aperture count images differently it's tough to know if all images were truly imported. Movies will NOT be imported from iPhoto, in the past Aperture didn't warn they'd been left behind.

As with earlier versions Aperture imports Smart Albums as "dumb" albums. Aperture's "smart albums" are as dim as iPhoto's: you can't use a Smart Album as an input to a filter (no nested queries in other words). iTunes is more powerful.

I expect I'll buy the product in a week or two.

Aperture 2: you can edit the dates now

In December I wrote:

Gordon's Tech: Will Apple abandon Aperture?

... You can't edit date metadata, you've never been able to edit dates, this hasn't been fixed despite several major updates...

So version 2.0 is out and, yes, you can edit the dates. I don't see any batch editing but I'm not an Aperture expert. At least there's something. The product is not dead yet.

Still no Apple Help file. They must have a pretty limited development budget.

Once I figure out a solution to the .Mac bug I'll start using it over the next two weeks. The date issue was my primary objection to moving to Aperture -- it gave me a worrisome impression of the product manager.

PS. Surprise! Academic licenses cannot upgrade. Going forward the academic discount isn't worth it with the new pricing.)

Update: You can AppleScript date modifications, so there's no problem with batch updating!

Adjust date and time of version/master

The “adjust date” verb has been added to the AppleScript Dictionary, allowing you to modify the EXIF date of images through a scripted workflow.

Update 2/13/08: The tutorial page video shows how to edit dates for multiple selected images.

Aperture 2: There was a problem connecting to .Mac

I took me less than 10 seconds to find a major bug Apple - Aperture 2.

That's a new record!

If you have a .Mac record in your keychain Aperture tries to connect to it -- even if the account is long defunct.

When that happens it displays an alert "There was a problem connecting to .Mac". You can't get the alert to go away, in fact I now have multiple floating dialogs telling me of this problem.

I'm going to try pulling my network cable next time I restart.

They ought to be ashamed, but as far as I can tell Apple is shameless.

Update: I quit, pulled the network cable, and restarted. It hung on start but after a minute or so something timed out and it did run correctly. I then restarted with the network cable and got the looping error message. I'll probably have to locate the .mac entry in my keychain and remove it.

Update 2/13/08: The fix for now is to open the .Mac preferences in your System Preferences. Remove your old username and password for the inactive account. The bug goes away.

Google now supporting Safari?

I've been pretty fed up with Firefox flakiness lately, so I took Safari 3 for a visit to Google's properties.

Gmail RTF was supported. Google Docs no longer warns of an unsupported browser.

Blogger doesn't seem as messed up when using Safari (though it uses div tags instead of the familial p tags).

The only app that warns of an unsupported browser is Google Page Creator -- which is due to be dumped "any time now".

Google is very close to full Safari support, I'm going to try switching for a while. 

I'll be happy to leave Firefox 2/Mac behind. It ain't so great on XP either these days! We need Firefox 3 ASAP.

The worst commercial web site on the net?

The Lowe Alpine web page won't render correctly in either Safari 3 or Firefox 2.

I've never seen that before.

There's a contact link, but it's broken.

I think we've got a winner.

Blackberry Pearl voice memo hack

Emily's Pearl can record -- but only for a costly "media message". Otherwise, you can't record a voice memo.

Happily, there's a workaround. Create an SMS, but save it as draft. Access it via the messages application. Click the link for more details.

My iMac screen - dark band at the top of the display

Bad news! My July 2005 20" iMac now has a dark irregular band across the top of the display - thickest on the right side. It's most conspicuous against the login screen, or the blue background used on startup:



Superficially it looks like dirt on the display, but it's inside. I suspect some sort of LCD delamination or glue defect, perhaps related to the all the heat problems the G5 iMacs were known for. At 2.5 years this machine is out of warranty -- including my credit card extended warranty.

I can't find much about this on the net, so it's probably bad luck. We have a good Apple repair facility in Minneapolis (first Tech), I could try hauling the machine out there if I get the energy.

Update: Sounds like this.

Update 6/17/11: Three years later the band is about twice as wide. This is a kid and movie machine now, and we don't notice it much.

iPhoto 7.1.2 doesn't fix video export bug

iPhoto 7.1.2 was released tonight.

I checked to see if Apple had fixed the movie export bug.

Nope.

If you export a Movie (video) as "Current" iPhoto exports a thumbnail JPEG with an .AVI extension.

Nasty bug, in some circumstances it may result in the permanent loss of important memories.

Update 3/1/2008: It's not fixed in 7.1.3 either. I finally got fed up and filed a real Apple developer bug report:

5775826 iPhoto: default video export produces defective file 100% of the time.

Update 3/4/08: My bug was flagged as duplicate of Bug ID# 5613626. So at least it's known and documented as a bug that's being currently worked on.

Update 5/19/09: iLife '09 still has the same bloody bug!! See also a thread on this bug. Apple's refusal to fix such egregious data destroying bugs smells of Kafka.

Update 7/12/09: No fix. It occurs to me that this bug is a good HR test. Describe the nature and origin of the behavior to the candidate. Explain that the app is behaving "correctly". It's exporting the file that lives in the "current" folder. Ask them what priority they give to changing this behavior. If they say something like "That's crazy. It needs to be fixed immediately." hire them. If they say "it's working correctly" run like the wind.

Bike light breakthrough? The Ixon IQ.

I used to be a real rider. One day I hope I'll be back, maybe sooner than later.

From those days I have an old NiteRider light. It cost a fortune in 1999 and came with a massive NiMH battery that's now toast. Of course it used a proprietary connector (data lock isn't really a new idea) so I'd have to buy a replacement from NiteRider -- if one exists.

So I paid attention to the bike light that saved the world, a post introducing the German IXON IQ LED light. This excellent description tells us it uses conventional or rechargeable AA batteries -- no more "battery lock" issues. The imported device (German plugs) is about $100 US - a bargain for a serious bicycle light.

... Full power setting (14 40 [see comments!] lux) gives a 6 hour run time. Low power gives about 13 hours. Run times are for fully charged NiMH batteries. Full power is adequate as a standalone headlight for most cyclists in most situations up to about 20mph. Two Ixons at full power should be more than enough for any situation except perhaps a very fast downhill, say well over 25mph. Low power is more than adequate for low speed riding, up to perhaps 10 mph on dark roads or bike paths. For urban cycling with overhead street lights, the low power setting is perfect. These are my estimates based on my own experience using this light. Everyone's night vision is different!....

Note that NiMH battery power output drops precipitously in cold weather, these numbers don't apply to MN winters. Front wheel dynamo systems weren't big when I was in the market, but I suspect they're the answer for a MN winter rider.

Nokia 6555 plays iTunes AAC. Does everything do this now?

It wouldn't have occurred to me to try this, but I'd already discovered that Emily's BlackBerry Pearl plays non-FairPlay iTunes AAC encoded tunes.

When I learned I could mass storage mount and charge my Nokia 6555b with a mini-USB cable and a (well made) Motorola mini-USB to micro-USB adapter the next test was to drop a podcast, an MP3 song and an AAC song into the mounted music folder. I then opened the music player, selected artists, and from the options menu chose "update library".

The All Songs list showed all three files [1] and they all played.

What's with music players and AAC? I don't remember anyone mentioning that players that were once entirely MP3 now all support AAC as well.

Unfortunately our HOSA headset adapters work only slightly better on this phone than on Emily's BlackBerry. If I don't press the 3.5mm terminal entirely in I get good stereo sound on my Bose QC IIs, but unbalanced stereo sound on a pair of Apple earbuds. If I do entirely engage the 3.5 mm connector I get mono sound. I'm tempted to try the Bose mobile communications kit.

The sad news is that the fairly crude music player doesn't support bookmarks, so it's not an adequate podcast player.

Even so, this is interesting enough to make me go ahead and buy another Sandisk 2GB media card, especially because I'm able to get my headphones to mostly work.

--

[1] It also showed the "." (dot) prefixed files that OS X creates on FAT formatted media, an annoying quirk of OS X that cannot be readily managed. There are ways to remove these, but I ignored them for this experiment.

User group one: Winzip ignores NTFS attributes stored in alternate data stream

Occasionally I come across an issue nobody but me cares about.

Ok, more than occasionally.

These are "user group one" issues -- as in a user group with one member. (Thank you Andrew.)

I, for example, am the only person in the known universe who uses NTFS file attributes. I tweak my Explorer views to show the comment field in list view, for example. I even show the Title field! [1]

Being the only person who does this, I'm the only person to discover that WinZip 10 doesn't store these attributes. I'm guessing XP stores them in the NTFS alternate data stream [2] and WinZip ignores the ADS attributes [3]. I found this out when I unzipped some work and lost my metadata.

This is all very annoying.

To the user group of one.

[1] Not only does this introduce functionality that came with PC Magazine's DOS based dirnotes.com application in 1985, it also allows me to provide documentation on file shares about what certain data sets are good for. In addition Sharepoint honors these attributes (which Office apps reflect back into their internal attribute store), so I don't have to re-enter them when I upload files to my Sharepoint Libraries.

[2] Windows NT server had a very robust Macintosh file share service, it stored MacOS Classic resource forks in the NTFS alternate data stream. Later, some aftermarket solutions (DAVE) did the same thing. Worked great.

[3] I have a vague recollection that XP's copy command may ignore them too, and many backup products miss 'em.

macintosh pims (personal information management software) a Google Groups (w/ feed)

A hundred years ago I ran a mailing list called PIM-L - about personal information management. It was surprisingly popular, but I didn't have time to keep it up.

I remembered that, when Ted Goranson (The ATPM Outliner guy), bemoaning the reluctance of users to pay for good software, referred to the macintosh pims Google Group (feeds).

I think Goranson is sort-of-wrong about the software price issue. The real cost is cost of ownership, and cost of ownership of software includes the cost of data loss (or imperfect conversion) related to atypical file formats. Of course most people don't realize this is the real cost, so my point is probably academic. Still, it's a very good reason NOT to buy cool software with neat features that's supposed to hold lots of personal and unique data of lasting value.

On the other hand, the email list is wonderfully obscure. There's are feeds of course, though Google's presentation of them is very confusing. I went with the Atom 1.0 message feed.

Monitoring Dyer with ChangeDetection.com and Bloglines email subscriptions

Dyer is an iconoclastic historian journalist who, purely to spite me, refuses to create an RSS feed so I know when to visit his news page.

I may have him now.

My Bloglines feed reader supports "email subscriptions":

You can create an unlimited number of special Bloglines email addresses that are tied to your Bloglines account. The email addresses show up as subscriptions in your My Blogs page, and email sent to those email addresses appears as new items.

When you create a Bloglines email address, a subscription is added to your account. If you unsubscribe from that subscription, the email address becomes invalid and mail sent to it will bounce.

Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing lists that don't provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary email addresses.

To rename or move your email subscriptions, use the 'Edit' link under the 'My Feeds' tab.

I created one of these disposable email addresses for a new feed I called "Dyer" and stored it in the usual place I keep journalist feeds. Then I went to "ChangeDetection(tm) - Monitor any web page for changes" and set up a monitor on Dyer's 2008 article page.

Any changes, in theory, now trigger an alert -- almost as though Dyer had a real feed in place. Of course I only get an alert -- not the text. Still, that's all I need.

I'll update this post with news on how it works. In the event that the Dyer email address starts collecting spam it's trivial to remove it.

Sandisk 2GB microSD kit is impressive

I bought JR.com's Sandisk 2GB microSD Mobile Memory Kit

This thing is impressive. $25 for a 2GB micro-SD card, smaller than the proverbial fingernail. The kit includes a mini-SD and an SD adapter for the micro-SD card. The latter works in our camera, the card itself is in our BlackBerry*.

The combination of Google Checkout and J&R was likewise an excellent combination.

* I'm much less impressed with the BB, but that's another story.

Update 2/5/08: Amazon has 4GB versions for about the same price, and 2GB versions for about the price of lunch. Cue hysterical laughter, this is ridiculous.