[Update: Grrr. Aperture won’t let you updateor create GPS EXIF tags, and the only tool that currently works around the problem only supports interactively tagging images one at a time in Google Earth. Worse, not only do you have to update the Sqlite database directly, you have to update the XML files that are used if the database ever has to be rebuilt.]

I’ve played with Aperture in the past, but been put off by the terrible performance and frequent crashes. Coming back from Japan, though, I decided to give the latest version a good workout, and loaded it up with more than a thousand image files (which represented about 850 distinct photos, thanks to the RAW+JPEG mode on my DSLR).

On a MacBook with a 2GHz Core Duo and 2GB of RAM, there’s a definite wait-just-a-moment quality to every action I take, but it’s not long enough to be annoying, except when it causes me to overshoot on the straighten command. The fans quickly crank up to full speed as it builds up a backlog of adjustments to finalize, but background tasks don’t have any noticeable impact on the GUI response.

My biggest annoyance is the lack of a proper Curves tool. I’m used to handling exposure adjustments the Photoshop way, and having to split my attention between Levels, Exposure, Brightness, Contrast, and Highlights & Shadows is a learning experience. I think I’ve managed so far, and my Pantone Huey calibrates the screen well enough to make things look good.

I have three significant wishes: finer-grain control over what metadata is included in an export, real boolean searches, and the ability to batch-import metadata from an external source. Specifically, I want to run my geotagger across the original JPEG images, then extract those tags and add them to the managed copies that are already in Aperture’s database. Aperture is scriptable, so I can do it, but I hate writing AppleScripts. I could have geotagged them first, but for some reason MacOS X 10.4.11 lost the ability to mount my Sony GPS-CS1 as a flash drive, and I didn’t have a Windows machine handy to grab the logs. [Sony didn’t quite meet the USB mass-storage spec with this device; when it was released, it wouldn’t work on PowerPC-based Macs at all, and even now it won’t mount on an Asus EEE]

For the simple case of negating a keyword in a search, there’s a technique that mostly works: the IPTC Keywords field is constantly updated to contain a comma-separated list of the keywords you’ve set, and it has a “does not contain” search option. This works as long as none of your keywords is a substring of any other.

I’ll probably just write a metadata-scrubber in Perl. That will let me do things that application support will never do, like optionally fuzz the timestamps and GPS coordinates if I think precise data is too personal. The default will simply be to sanitize the keyword list; I don’t mind revealing that a picture is tagged “Japan, Hakone, Pirate Ship”, but the “hot malaysian babes” tag is personal.

Uh-huh, yeah, sure:

From: News@InsideApple.Apple.com
Subject: Leopard. Easy to install. Just say go.

So advanced, it practically installs itself.
...

When you switch between open applications by clicking their icon on the dock or using Command-Tab, Spaces switches you to the space where that application has an open window.

If that application has windows open in more than one space, it alternates between them. So, if spaces 1 and 3 contain open Finder windows, and spaces 2 and 4 contain open Terminal windows, switching back and forth between the two will show you all four spaces in a consistent, predictable order.

Except when it doesn’t. Currently, I’ve got a set of windows Spaced out where repeatedly pressing Command-Tab takes me on a very peculiar tour: 1, 5, 2, 4, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 4, 2, 4, 1, 4, 2, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 2, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 2, 5, 1, 4, …

Wish list for Spaces:

• visual indication of current space (background color, etc)
• named spaces (#3 is less useful than "build monkeys")
• ability to isolate desktop icons to a single space
• consistent switching

[Update: I killed it! I added a second Terminal window to one of my spaces and started rapidly hitting Command-Tab to see if it changed the behavior, and after a few cycles, Spaces went kablooie. I lost Spaces, Dashboard, Dock, Exposé, and Command-Tab. Fortunately I landed in a space that had a Terminal window, because “Force Quit” doesn’t include an option to restart the Dock (which is the parent app for all of the above).]

[update: Blech: Safari now constructs synthetic italics for fonts that not only don’t have them, but shouldn’t, such as kanji. Just like IE! Oooooh, smell the bug-compatibility!]

Blech: The excessive translucency really sucks in the Dock and the menubar. I’ve got application icons that are invisible, and a multi-colored menubar that varies between mostly-functional and useless. UI visibility should not depend on the user’s choice of background screen.

Woo-hoo: The behavior of Software Update is a significant improvement; previously, it was possible to keep working while binaries and libraries were changing on disk, which had some nasty failure modes. Now, if an update is going to do something like that, the machine logs you out before replacing everything.

Blech: existing WPA/802.1X configurations are not preserved correctly, and the new dialogs are goofy and glitchy. I’m still not sure I’ve got it fixed, or that I’ll be able to repeat it on a dozen other machines. The “strongly-recommended” keychain update didn’t help in the slightest.

Partial Woo-hoo: Spaces works. It behaves in odd, unexpected ways, however, and will definitely take some getting used to.

Blech: the Finder is a mess.

Woo-hoo: adjustable desktop icon grid.

Um, okay: the Finder’s built-in smart folders have potential, but why does the “All Images” search sort the porn to the top?

Blech: why is “Bluetooth Sharing” turned on by default?

Blech: why was my previous firewall setting replaced by “Allow all incoming connections”?

Woo-hoo: Japanese and J-E dictionaries integrated; the search capabilities aren’t as comprehensive as JEdict, but it’s not based on the free Edict data. I don’t know how good Shogakukan’s dictionaries are, but just having a second opinion is often useful.

[yes, this is a test machine; nothing I actually rely on will be upgraded for weeks]

PS: It’s probably coincidence that one of the backlights on the LCD panel started to fail after the upgrade…

PPS: why does the wireless fail to authenticate (WPA2, EAP-TTLS) when I log in (showing connected but with a self-assigned IP address), but succeed immediately if I run “sudo ifconfig en1 down” (note: just down; it brings it back up on its own)?

This should never happen on a Mac: “reboot in single user and type several cryptic commands if you can’t log in after upgrading to Leopard”. It will give months of ammunition to the paid Ubuntu shills, and even let some Windows users feel good about themselves (“see! see! I told you the grass wasn’t green over there!”).

Changing how user passwords are stored: good. Forgetting that they used to be stored another way in a previous release: bad.

As usual, when my copy arrives, I’ll install onto a test machine and let it bake for a few weeks. My primary machine won’t get upgraded until we finish moving the company into a new building and I get back from my upcoming vacation in Japan.

Heh.

It’s not fair, of course, but it’s not staged, either.

My opinion of the talent working the Genius Bar at Apple stores has been… less than wholly positive. Tonight an old co-worker from my Synopsys days turned up as the New Genius In Town.

I’ll feel a lot better about taking one of our MacBook Pros down there for service now.

Quite by accident, I just noticed that a number of Apple-supplied Dashboard widgets on my MacBook were running under Rosetta. Specifically, Flight Tracker, People, Phone Book, Translation, and Unit Converter; the others with plugins had universal binaries.

I did use the Migration Assistant to preserve everything from my old PowerBook, but that shouldn’t have overwritten system-supplied widgets that were already present on the target machine. But maybe it did. Or else my MacBook shipped with some PowerPC cruft that hasn’t been caught in the last four OS updates.

An interesting note is that the PowerPC-only version of the Unit Converter widget is only localized for English and Japanese, while the universal version adds about a dozen more, despite the Info.plist file claiming that they’re both version 1.2.1.