PDNOnline has a fairly detailed overview of Aperture

They've put a good review together. Biased towards the positive certainly, but it's not hard to see where they ran into problems. After reading about the pending update I'm hopeful I'll be moving to Apterure withing a few months: Putting Aperture Through Its Paces: Part I

Another OS X cache related problem

OS X caches cause no end of trouble. This one caused a 'corrupt font' error in Office:

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

...So you would think it was a file in my home directory. Wrong! The culprit was Apple's system level font cache, which caches fonts by user. Deleting /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/(uid)/, where (uid) is my user id (just check with get info if you don't know your id - yours is the one you own) solved the problem.

Google and Firefox: getting more serious? Two extensions

Google has published two useful extensions to Firefox, one related to blogging, the other to spotting phishing scams. I've installed both. Interesting by itself, but is this an early sign of a more vigorous Google/Firefox collaboration? I don't remember Google previously delivering anything for Firefox before IE.

Philip Greenspun's on building a digital SLR system and selecting lenses

Philip Greenspun's Weblog. Phil is a great writer and photographer. I liked his pithy summary comment: "[If you don't want to read this article and are impatient to get started immediately, get a Canon Digital Rebel XT and Sigma 30/1.4 lens.]" and this other emphatic opinion:

... The market leader in the professional/advanced amateur photography world is Canon. If you don't have a major investment in lenses you will probably want to buy a Canon digital SLR. The number two spot is occupied by Nikon, which is also a reasonable choice. Fuji and Kodak have made digital SLRs that accept Canon- and Nikon-mount lenses. Once you get beyond Nikon and Canon it becomes very difficult to rent lenses and the companies that make the more obscure systems don't have a large enough market share to invest enough money to build competitive bodies. Leica, Minolta, Olympus, Pentax, and Sigma are the small vendors in the digital SLR market. Unless you have an enormous investment in lenses for one of these brands the only one of these worth considering for purchase is Olympus, due to its innovative Four-Thirds system, discussed below...

I got an XT with the kit lens, and a Canon 50mm 1.8 lens. I think my next lens though will be the Sigma 30/1.4, then after that a vibration-damped zoom if/when Sigma makes one.

Porting MSN Virtual Earth to an OS X Dashboard Widget

MacDevCenter.com: Dissecting a Dashboard Virtual Earth Widget. Intereting. Now if only the Dashboard was properly implemented! (Widgets should live on te desktop, not in some silly floating layer.)

MySQL on Mac OS X

via AppleInsider, two pointers to open source database work on OS X:

1. OReilly MacDevCenter.com: Managing MySQL on Mac OS X
2. cocoamysql: GUI administrative tool for MySQL

A very nice overview of digital photography for OS X

TidBITS: Reality and Digital Pictures is a very practical approach aimed at people who know photography. Any article that begins by setting gamma is interesting (note that a gamma of 2.2 makes the OS X chrome look dull), especially when it continues with a very modern overview of how we perceive the visual world:

Eye vs. Camera -- To begin with, let's dispel the notion that a camera records what the eye can see. It does not and it cannot because a camera functions nothing like the eye. With a lens of normal focal length, a camera records an image with a diameter of approximately 45 degrees. It records the entire image at once and the image ends up as a print with a range of intensity from black to white of approximately one hundred to one. In contrast, the eye sees an area about 180 degrees across but it sees most of this with acuity that ranges from bad to dreadful. It sees sharply just in the central 1 to 3 degrees. To see a scene clearly, the eye must scan it and the brain must assemble the accumulated information. However, the eye rarely has time to sample more than small portions of a scene with its spot of clear vision so most of what you see has no optical source, it is an inference. Your brain infers information largely by generalizing from what it has encountered before. In doing this the eye and brain have to handle contrasts of light that exceed one million to one.

It's only recently that non-specialists have become aware of how much of our visual world is illusory, and how little data our brain has to work with. Fascinating. Think about what happens when you move into an environment that's unfamiliar, such as going from a city to a jungle. How much can the city dweller truly perceive in the jungle? Imagine transition to a setting even more different? What happens to our visual world as our brain ages and becomes less able to make reasonable interpolations of data ...

Update 12/13/05: I posted the above on scanning the article. On deeper reading "very nice" is an understatement. This is the first article I've read that convinced me I'll eventually move to processing raw images, probably to TIFF or PNG or JPEG 2000. It's the most impressive digital photography article I've ever read.