Fraser Speirs (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} fraserspeirs) wrote,@ 2005-12-02 20:31:00 |
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Initial Aperture Impressions
For a 1.0 version, Aperture is very, well, complete. Clearly, the development team went very deep on the problem and came up with a workflow that is really quite fantastic. I'm running it on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with a Mobility Radeon 9700 and 1Gb RAM. It's perfectly usable, although some operations can eventually bog it down. Still, perfectly acceptable considering what it's doing.
A couple of points: the little swing animation the loupe tool does at the edges of the screen can get annoying if you're on a smallish screen like this - the thing you're looking at keeps jumping around like crazy. Secondly, I've caught myself making mode errors at times. It seems that the UI is predicated on being able to "do anything from any view" such that, for example, you can open and close a stack in the filmstrip whilst louping an image in the viewer. This is all fine, but the visual design of all this sometimes makes it difficult to be certain of what will happen when you hit a keystroke - it's not always immediately clear where the focus is. I'm sure I'll get that with time.
Now, to the matter you probably want to hear about from me: Flickr. From initial digging, it is immediately obvious that there is no formal plugin API for Aperture. There is an "Aperture.app/Contents/PlugIns" directory, but that only contains some Applescripts and a "WebPlugin.viewer" bundle that shows nothing of much use when classdump'ed.
The final thing would be to somehow try and reverse-engineer the actual Aperture Library itself, such that it could be read in an external uploader application. It is very far from simple to do this. I have figured out how to enumerate all the raw master files in a library, but that tells you nothing about all the fancy adjustments you might make in Aperture before exporting a final render. Also, it seems that attempting to twiddle Aperture's Core Data files without at least some knowledge of the internals of Aperture (and probably Core Data too) is quite a risky thing to attempt.
So my conclusion is, for now: no FlickrExport for Aperture any time soon. This makes me sad because it also severely limits Aperture's appeal for me. In any case, I don't own a machine capable of running it but that time will come and it'll be a tough choice.
[Update: rdar://problem/4363427 if you're in a position to do something about it.]
For a 1.0 version, Aperture is very, well, complete. Clearly, the development team went very deep on the problem and came up with a workflow that is really quite fantastic. I'm running it on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4 with a Mobility Radeon 9700 and 1Gb RAM. It's perfectly usable, although some operations can eventually bog it down. Still, perfectly acceptable considering what it's doing.
A couple of points: the little swing animation the loupe tool does at the edges of the screen can get annoying if you're on a smallish screen like this - the thing you're looking at keeps jumping around like crazy. Secondly, I've caught myself making mode errors at times. It seems that the UI is predicated on being able to "do anything from any view" such that, for example, you can open and close a stack in the filmstrip whilst louping an image in the viewer. This is all fine, but the visual design of all this sometimes makes it difficult to be certain of what will happen when you hit a keystroke - it's not always immediately clear where the focus is. I'm sure I'll get that with time.
Now, to the matter you probably want to hear about from me: Flickr. From initial digging, it is immediately obvious that there is no formal plugin API for Aperture. There is an "Aperture.app/Contents/PlugIns" directory, but that only contains some Applescripts and a "WebPlugin.viewer" bundle that shows nothing of much use when classdump'ed.
The final thing would be to somehow try and reverse-engineer the actual Aperture Library itself, such that it could be read in an external uploader application. It is very far from simple to do this. I have figured out how to enumerate all the raw master files in a library, but that tells you nothing about all the fancy adjustments you might make in Aperture before exporting a final render. Also, it seems that attempting to twiddle Aperture's Core Data files without at least some knowledge of the internals of Aperture (and probably Core Data too) is quite a risky thing to attempt.
So my conclusion is, for now: no FlickrExport for Aperture any time soon. This makes me sad because it also severely limits Aperture's appeal for me. In any case, I don't own a machine capable of running it but that time will come and it'll be a tough choice.
[Update: rdar://problem/4363427 if you're in a position to do something about it.]
