Aperture Mini Review With Screenshots
Update: Please check the end of the article for answers to all the questions posted so far.
Update 2: I posted another entry on iPhoto import, and a small look inside the file.
Well, here’s a quick take on Aperture. There will be far more eloquent reviews than this, but I had someone actually leave a comment saying they were looking forward to the screen shots.. that got me off my butt to try it out.
Note in all of these screens that the toolbar at the top of the window is showing text. It defaulted to a clean, no text look, but I flipped it to icon and text to learn the buttons faster.
After installing Aperture, and launch, there is a splash screen, then you are greeted with this screen:
The main working screen looks like this (click for a large version):
Note that there is two views for showing your pictures – icon view as above, and a listing view shown below:
Adjusting pictures badges them (notice the icon in the lower right corner).
All of the editing modules have an undo button on them, it is the little arrow on the top right of this picture:
Web Galleries are pretty cool, far more professional looking than the iPhoto themes. Here is the editor for them:
Aperture currently comes with a few nice gallery designs:
Those themes seem to have settings for the different items about a picture you can show:
Finally, I leave you with a link to the output of the web gallery function in Aperture. These are some pictures of a snow storm we had in the portland area in 2004.
Ok.. that’s it for now. If you’d like to see a screenshot of something else, please leave a comment.
My thoughts for tonight on Aperture: it’s a solid piece of work. No crashes, no issues, the app runs smoothly and pretty quickly on my work dual 2Gh G5 with 2 gigs of RAM. It has all the nice touches that Apple apps are know for, things fade in and out, slide around on the window, and move up and down.
I would compare it to the iPhoto I’ve always wanted and been willing to pay for. My only problem right now, for me and for Jennifer is that it won’t install on any of our personal machines (a 12″ PowerBook, about a year and 1/2 old, and an original 20″ iMac). I am tempted to try to copy it over to the iMac manually to see if it will launch once it’s there.
Dang, I wish Apple had intel dual core PowerBooks out already. 
Questions Answered
Ok, here we go, with some questions answered:
Justin wrote “Did it import your iPhoto Library?”. Yes, it did today. I let it go in the background while working, and imported my 8233 photos in about 2 1/2 hours. (Firewire target mode on the 12″ PowerBook and importing them that way). I will work on another weblog entry tonight that describes that.
Jonathan asked about my attempt at installing it on my 12″ PowerBook. Yes, I tried, but the installer said I had an unsupported configuration. I believe it said the same thing as the compatibility checker app, that I don’t have 1 GB of memory, and my video card isn’t supported.
Van Mardian asked a question on the jpeg level for the web gallery, and if those are changeable on a picture by picture basis.From what I’ve seen no, but a picture is worth a thousand words:
“munky” asked twice if it is a universal binary. Nope, PowerPC only. That being said, I would have been shocked if it was a universal binary, and that would have lead me to believe that pro machines were going Intel in January. There is no reason for Apple to spend any resources right now getting a 1.0 universal, given there are no pro, customer available machines released yet.
That being said, from my snooping around in the App package, it looks like it would be pretty easy to get it to be a universal binary. The application itself looks to be writing in Cocoa. (No surprise there I expect).
Erik and Ian comment that the web gallery XHMTL doesn’t validate (121 and 131 errors).. I suppose this is bad, but when you are pushing to get a product out, this is one of those bugs that you can very easily say “hey, let’s defer this until another time”. The themes are in the application package, so it should be easily updated or fixed.
Fraser Speirs asks if there is any evidence that it has a plug-in architecture for exporting. None as far as I can tell. I’ve poked around inside the app package, and there is a “PlugIns” directory that has some AppleScripts for emailing photos, and a WebPlugin.viewer directory. But it seems too small to do anything like the web export stuff I talked about earlier.
I would expect this application though to, at some point, get similar treatment to Apple’s other pro apps, and some sort of API made available, or the file format documented.
Stevve asked if keywords set in iPhoto are retained after the import. Yes they are. It seems like it read everything from iPhoto, keywords, ratings, the multiple copies of the pictures if you’ve edited them.
That’s it for now. Please check back maybe tonight, but most likely tomorrow for a new post on the iPhoto import, which went really really well. Aperture was still really fast in loading and showing all 8233 photos. Far superior to iPhoto.
Thank you for visiting and leaving your comments. I normally get about 200 visitors a day, today I have had almost 10,000. Crazy. Thanks again.
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