iPhoto 9.2.1 to Aperture 3.2.1 - it doesn't actually work

Apple promotes Aperture's seamless import of iPhoto content.

I've been skeptical, but I gave it a try on a plane flight. I added 21 images to a brand new iPhoto 9.2.1 Library and I created albums and events. I then gave descriptions to images and to both albums and events. Then I imported the images into Aperture.

The iPhoto.Events became Aperture.Projects. The iPhoto.Albums became Aperture.Albums. iPhoto.Folders became Aperture.Folders.

Eventually. At first the iPhoto.Albums were missing. They showed up minutes later on reopening Aperture. This took so long it feels like a bug.

Image metadata seems to have been preserved - titles, captions, etc. I've written about this previously for iPhoto, Aperture and Picasa Web Albums.

That's the end of the good news. All of the descriptions I added to Albums/Events were lost. Aperture Projects/Albums can't have annotations. So that description you wrote in iPhoto about the family reunion? It's toast.

Aperture's iPhoto import is feeble - and Apple's marketing of Aperture's iPhoto import is deceptive.

Apple does stuff like this though. I'm not surprised they did a crappy job on iPhoto import.

What's truly weird however, is that nobody besides me seems to care. That means Apple isn't going to fix this.

There are times when I know I live in the Twilight Zone. This is one of those times.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11 10/2010
• iPhoto '08: don't embed metadata in JPEG originals 12/2007
• Stuck in Apple's photo management Limbo 5/2011 - still stuck today
• Apple Aperture: iPhoto replacement?: 10/2005 - seven years later, it's still not a full replacement
• Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums

How to cancel or reschedule an Apple Genius Bar Reservation

I don't think you can currently cancel or reschedule a Genius Bar Reservation from Apple's GB reservation site.

If you have iOS though, you can cancel or reschedule using Apple's Apple Store.app. It's not obvious how ...

1. Tap Stores
2. Find store where you have reservation.
3. Click Store then Genius Bar. From here you can create a new appointment, or cancel or reschedule an existing appointment.

I don't think there's an Apple Store.app equivalent for the desktop, so, like iMessenger, this is strictly an iOS service.

OS X opens Aperture every time I start

Every time I logged into my Lion machine, Aperture started up.

I checked the Login items option on my user account. Nothing there.

Then I figured it was a bug with OS X 10.7 Lion resume. I deleted all the saved states, including Aperture's (Delete Specific Application Saved States from Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Resume).

Didn't help.

Finally, something clued me. This wasn't a new Lion problem, it was the old 'launch Aperture when iPhone connected' bug. Same thing can happen with iPhoto or Image Capture or Preview or "Auto Importer". This particular machine is connected to a USB hub that had some iPhones attached.

I don't know the proper place to control this peculiar OS X behavior, but I do know it can be controlled through Image Capture. I opened that app, and clicked on the iPhones icons on the left side. For each one I set 'Connecting this iPhone' to 'No application'.

Problem solved.

10.7 Lion: Automation and AppleScript

Surprise! Via Macintouch we learn that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion has Automation features.

It is weird that Apple's official Automation documentation is hosted on macosxautomation.com which is "not hosted by Apple". Even though it's seemingly an Apple site (with a broken icon on page 1).

Even weirder for all of us who figured AppleScript and Automator were dead, is that Lion has a lot of AS/Automator features. Some show up on Apple's Lion Features page, but many do not. Given rumors about Apple's new focus on textbooks and iPads, it's noteworthy that Automator has many new ePub support features.

Apple is eccentric.

WordPress doesn't have a built-in table editor

The WordPress visual editor doesn't include tables. Neither does Blogger of course, nor, for that matter, MarsEdit.

FrontPage had terrific table support in 1995. WindowsLive Writer has decent support now. Otherwise, web tables doesn't get a lot of love. RapidWeaverdoesn't do tables. Sandvoxisn't any better and neither is Apple's abandoned iWeb.

SeaMonkey inherits the table technology built into Netscape Composer in the 1990s. TextEdit does tables (!) and (unlike Pages) will export HTML. It's hardly a web page editor though.

DreamWeaver does tables - and costs $400 (though I qualify for the $150 teacher edition).

It's too bad. HTML tables are really brilliant. I'm guessing implementation is very expensive especially when tables are combined with CSS; the market doesn't support this level of complexity.

Parental Controls on iOS and OS X: what we do now

A year or two ago I wrote about how Google and Apple have both failed Parental controls. Since then things have not gottenmuch better.

In response to a comment on an old post, this is the compromise I use for the children's accounts on iOS and OS X.

1. Google is blocked. I find Bing searches easier to track and control because it doesn't use https.
2. Children get our family Google Apps domain email through mail.app IMAP, not through Gmail.
3. Children access our family Calendars from their iPhones, not from the desktop. (I could use iCal on the desktop, but iCal is one of the worst pieces of software garbage ever produced.)
4. A 'Family and Learning' account can be accessed at any time. It has very limited net access, has WorldBook, has apps, iTunes, etc.
5. Each child has their own account. Parental control is set to 'automatic'  with a few domains specifically allowed. I was never able to get domain specific filtering to work. After they are on the computer I review their browser history with them. They could of course delete specific browser pages, but I don't believe they have (the computer is very visible and public). I stopped reviewing log files because Apple's log file review UI is almost as crappy as iCal.
6. Because iOS apps have so many back doors to webkit, particularly via ads, we don't use any 'free' apps. Safari is disabled. For now we allow iTunes despite the content it provides -- the boys are getting older.

This works for us, but Apple's Parental Control support is lazy and incompetent. They simply don't care.

Android/Google, as best I can tell, are worse. Note that Google Gmail explicitly states all US users must be 14 or over (COPPA partly, but really this is a Google copout). i don't think Android OS includes any default parental controls.

I don't know how Windows 7 does. I suspect it's a bit better. I can't find anything about parental controls in Metro/Windows Mobile.

See also:

• Back to the future: OS X Parental Controls, DVD Encyclopedias, and MacKiev 9/2011
• Steve Jobs hates me: Viewing Mac OS X Lion Parental Control logs 8/2011
• OS X Parental Controls Review - State of the art in OS X 10.5 and 10.6 6/2011
• Parental controls: Apple and Google joint fail 6/2010

Manipulating JSON data in a traditional relational database (Microsoft Access, FileMaker Pro, Converters)

While I wait to see if Pinboard can fix their Google Reader JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) import, and while I consider Google Reader Share JSON import into WordPress, I'm also exploring JSON import/export tools. If, for example, I could import JSON into FileMaker Pro or other data management tool I might be able to manipulate the archive and produce a more useful WordPress import.

StackOverflow and its kin have a good set of references on this topic. Note that CSV can manage only very simple JSON; we really want native importers similar to what Microsoft Access tried with XML [1]. I suspect one approach might be to convert JSON to XML then use Microsoft Access 2010 import.

Incidentally, this topic veered off unexpectedly into something that's actually relevant to my work life and a Strata conference I'm attending in a few weeks.

As of today here are some of my pointers ...

• What is “JSON” and what does it have to do with distributed computing? « DivConq: great reference (see below for DivConq series on Access)
• JSON - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: I liked the comparison to XML [1]
• JSON.org: points to libraries
• 18.2. json — JSON encoder and decoder — Python v2.7.2 documentation: If I have to use a programming library to manipulate Google Reader json files my choices are probably Python or Javascript and I prefer Python.
• conversion - Convert JSON format to CSV format (for MS Excel) - Stack Overflow: JavaScript
• convert from json to csv using python - Stack Overflow
• Download JSON data and convert it to CSV using Python - Stack Overflow
• python - Convert JSON to CSV - Stack Overflow
• javascript - Python - convert csv file to JSON - Stack Overflow

For me this DivConq series was particularly useful because it placed JSON nosql processing in a familiar context - Microsoft Access.

• What is “JSON” and what does it have to do with distributed computing? « DivConq: best single reference for my purposes
• Export a Microsoft Access Database to JSON (Northwind Example) « DivConq
• Why Cassandra « DivConq
• Installing and Running the Cassandra Database « DivConq
• Migrate a Relational Database Structure into a NoSQL Cassandra Structure (Part I) « DivConq
• Migrate a Relational Database into Cassandra (Part II – Northwind Planning) « DivConq
• Migrate a Relational Database into Cassandra (Part III – Northwind Conversion) « DivConq
• Migrate a Relational Database into Cassandra (Part IV – Northwind Import) « DivConq

Maybe I should start using Apache Cassandra to manipulate my Google Reader JSON archive and prepare it for WordPress processing. For example ... Cassandra Development Environment in Mac OS Snow Leopard « BigDiver.

[1] I doubt JSON has truly significant advantages over XML as a data interchange format (see JSON Example and wikipedia xml/json). Alas, nobody asked me. Fashion is more powerful than geeks imagine.