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.