This was going to be a report on the Apple Pro Series seminar in London last Wednesday and the epic journey involved in getting there (let’s just say the rail network and the Tube weren’t playing nicely), but then Aperture 2.1 came out...

Other posts have gone through some of the new features and bugfixes in 2.1, so I’m going to talk about a couple of items of interest to me - the new AppleScript functions (and their connotations) and the speed of Aperture updates since February.

AppleScript

For those of you who have no experience of AppleScript, it is a programming language which looks quite similar to English, for example:

tell application “Finder”
open file "System:Users:home:Desktop:test.jpg"
end tell

AppleScript basically gives programmers a way to control other applications, allowing them to put together complex workflows. Aperture has had an AppleScript Dictionary (the list of commands you can use with an application) since version 1.0, with new commands being added with each new release. AppleScripts are usually written and run from Script Editor (found in Applications/AppleScript) but can also be run from within other applications, and from a special ‘Script Menu’ that can be added to the OS X menu bar.

Aperture 2.0.1 added some new AppleScript commands which have been expanded out even further with 2.1.

Move and Duplicate - these two commands allow you to add Versions to specific Albums and Projects, or to move them from place to place.
On the face of it this isn’t anything ground-breaking, we can do all that ourselves manually, but it opens up the possibility of quite sophisticated import functions - think of the Import>Folders into a Project command in Aperture and imagine that you can choose how many levels down in the folder structure to import, or being able to pick only images with specific extensions etc.
Another example would be the possibility to sort Versions into different Projects depending on their metadata - sort of like Smart Albums but actually moving the images around the Library depending on the results.

Import and Export - these commands have existed for a long time in Aperture, allowing you to import images and export Versions and Masters. In 2.1 this is expanded out to include entire Projects.

Reveal - this was introduced in 2.0.1 and allows you to reveal a specific Version in Aperture in it’s home Project. One use of this is when you find a Version in an Album somewhere and are not sure which Project it belongs to. You could open up the metadata pane and look for the containing Project in the ‘General’ view, but the following script will open up the correct Project and select the Version there:

tell application "Aperture"
activate
set tSelection to the selection
reveal tSelection
end tell

This is something I’ve been after for a long time, not so much for showing the image but for things like automatically stamping metadata and adjustments onto specific images by making a script that selects an image, uses interface scripting (GUI Scripting, to be precise) to click the Metadata>Lift Adjustments menu item, then select a series of Versions, clicking Metadata>Stamp with each one.

So 2.0.1’s command was a promising start, but only a start. I’d actually started writing out an enhancement request asking that it be expanded out to include Albums, Projects and Folders when 2.1 came out on Friday with that exact functionality added, along with the ability to reveal multiple Versions at once (provided they are in the same Project). Woohoo!

That finishes my quick round-up of the new scripting features in 2.1, and bring me neatly on to the other topic...

Release Schedules

Software is never finished. It’s something of a cliché within developer circles, but there’s a lot of truth in it, at least for any app that’s still being actively supported. In the same way most photographers with personal projects find it very hard to say ‘OK, this project is done, I’m not going to sneak out and take another couple of photos of lighthouses to add to the collection, it’s really finished! Honest.’

The practical implications with large/complex applications such as Aperture is that release dates don’t happen when the software is ‘finished’ because there’s always another bugfix or another little tweak or new feature that someone wants to add.
Releases happen when someone makes the decision to ship the software in the state that it’s in, balancing the trade-off between potential bugs/missing features and actually getting something out there to bring in some money, or to soothe growing qualms in the market due to long periods since previous releases.

Anyway, with all this in mind it’s an interesting exercise to look at the progress of Aperture 2.

Feb 12th - Aperture 2.0
Mar 3rd - Aperture 2.0.1
Mar 20th - Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 2.0
Mar 26th - Security Update 2008-002 v1.1 (Leopard) (included bugfixes for printing problems in Aperture)
Mar 28th - Aperture 2.1

That averages almost an update a week! Now, the cynical mind could say that Aperture 2.0 was released a bit earlier than it should have been, another view is that you have to take a stand at some point and ship the product. It’s also worth remembering that 2.0.1 and 2.1 weren’t simple bugfix releases, we’ve had several new features added such as the new AppleScript commands, flip adjustment brick, tweaked crop functions, ‘show on map’ being added to contextual menus, the ability to re-read EXIF data from Masters (making GPS tagging much easier), the ability to add bricks to the adjustment pane on a permanent basis (finally!) and, last but definitely not least - the dodge and burn plug-in.

I think the idea that Aperture is a second-class citizen at Apple has been well and truly quashed. This constant trickle of releases both shows a firm commitment on Apple’s part and is marketing genius - barely a week has gone by without Aperture being mentioned in on the various photo news sites.

It does make me wonder what the rest of 2008 is going to bring us!

Ian