[Update: Thanks, guys; the check is in the mail. More new-camera-porn here.]

Now that you’re releasing a 24+ megapixel full-frame 35mm CMOS sensor, don’t you feel a little stupid for making some of your high-end Zeiss lenses for the Alpha line APS-C-only? I doubt you’ve actually sold many of them, given the price and scarce distribution, but still, you had to know that full-frame was a requirement for a serious player in the DSLR market, and your recent announcements show that you’re not just keeping the low end of the old Minolta lineup.

Just to be clear on this: if you put that sensor into a body that’s the equivalent of Minolta’s 7 or 9 series (pleasepleaseplease a 9!), you’ve got a customer here already waiting in line.

[Update: just received an apology for the mistake, an updated license key, and a partial refund to bring my price down to the current $39 promotion.]

[Update: I can’t currently recommend this application, for the simple reason that I made the mistake of buying it four days before the release of 9.0, and they charge $29 for the upgrade. Until March, it’s only $39 for a brand-new license, but if I want 9.0, my total cost ends up being $88, which is more than the app is worth. Worse, the updater offered me the new version without mentioning the fact that it would revert to a trial license and require new payment. Fortunately, I was able to revert to 8.5.4.]

Your file-transfer app, Interarchy, is very nice. I particularly appreciate its solid support for Amazon S3. In the latest version, the thing I like most is the fact that permissions settings for uploads are now an honest-to-gosh preference, rather than being buried in some pulldown menu.

I question your decision to make the new version look like the unholy love-child of Finder and Safari, however, especially since your Bookmarks Bar and Side Bar are only cosmetically related to their inspiration, and share none of their GUI behaviors. It looks like a duck, and it sort of quacks like a duck, but it’s really just a cartoon duck, and not worth eating.

And I haven’t the slightest idea why you thought it would be a good idea to have the first item on the Bookmarks Bar be a menu containing every URL in the user’s personal Address Book. Considering that the user can’t rearrange or remove items on the Bookmarks Bar, you’re wasting an awful lot of valuable real estate on a very marginal feature.

[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.

…just be sure to check its aim.

Now available from Amazon.

This is a remarkably useful gadget that’s paid for itself several times in the past month. What it does: connect an IDE or SATA drive via USB2 without putting it in an enclosure. It’s faster to work with the bare drive when you just need to grab some data from a failed machine or scrub a disk before reuse or service.

About six months ago, The Former Employer With Whom I Signed A Non-Disparagement Agreement decided to close their field offices and consolidate everything at the main office in Kirkland. Some folks were asked to relocate, some were laid off immediately, and a Lucky Few were asked to stay around for a while to manage the transition.

I fell into the third group, with the promise of a reasonable quantity of extra cash should I complete my tasks to their satisfaction. This cash was in fact received on schedule, so I have no immediate plans to test their tolerance for disparagement.

We said our goodbyes at the end of 2006, and I spent the first week of 2007 in Las Vegas, courtesy of a “three-free-nights” offer at the Luxor. While I was out there, Ooma, the company many former co-workers had already fled to, called me up to arrange interviews. I went in on the 10th, went back to meet the CEO on the 15th, accepted their offer on the 16th, flew home to Ohio to quickly see my family on the 19th, and started work today.

What do we do at Ooma? Can’t tell you. Ask again in (can’t tell you).