Before upgrading to Aperture 2.0, I used to experience application crashes. Aperture would crash or quit unexpectedly whenever I open the preferences pane to change library. It would also crash whenever I execute any of the 3rd-party export plug-in commands.

I thought upgrading to 2.0 would stabilize the software and prevent the crashes. But the problem was still there even after the upgrade. And then I also thought my installation of 3rd-party export plug-ins had been faulty and was causing the problem. So, one of the things I did was to delete them. Still, it did not solve the issue. Whenever I go to the preferences pane to change library, Aperture would still crash.

Out of utter frustration, I decided to cleanly delete and uninstall Aperture, and cleanly reinstall the whole thing. Maybe, just maybe, the problem will go away with a fresh install, which is usually the case with most problematic software. After wasting a whole day, the crashing problem was still there. It didn't go away. I was stumped. I then decided to do a "shout-out" on the net.

I posted a message in Apple's discussion board (which, in hindsight, is something that I should have done right right away), to find out if anyone out there had experienced the same baffling issue. In summary, I asked: "Aperture unexpectedly quits when I execute certain commands. Any idea what's going on?" I wasn't really expecting an answer, but an answer did come. And it came fast. In a matter of minutes, a reply from a certain Neal Sheeran came in: "I had the same issue and here is what fixed it for me: Go to ~/Library/Color Pickers and remove any "non-standard" color pickers in your system. I had installed two and when I deleted them, my Export crashes went away."

In his post, he also added: "I don't understand the relationship between color pickers and Exporting in Aperture, but it worked for me."

There, somebody gave me an answer. It wasn't the kind of answer I was expecting. But what am I supposed to do? Of course, check if Neal is right. I previously installed a small application called Tangerine Color Picker, but for the life of me, I wouldn't have guessed that this was the one causing the problem. A small, seemingly harmless 3rd-party software can crash a major Apple pro software? I just didn't get it. Using AppZapper, I cleanly banished Tangerine Color Picker from my computer. And for good measure, I restarted my Mac. And guess what? Neal was right, Tangerine Color Picker was indeed the culprit. Gone are the crashes!

I love Tangerine Color Picker, and I was so sorry to let it go.

Tangerine Color Picker served me well, and it was really useful to me. In my photography and design works, it allowed me an easy way to pick and transplant the right colors from one to another. Tangerine is a "color workflow for creative professionals" that "effortlessly transfer and use color schemes" to other applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Xcode, Motion, Pages, among others. Actually, it works with just about any application. True to what they wrote in their site, I can have the color I want, when I want it, and how I want it.

But, it didn't play nice with Aperture.

I love Tangerine Color Picker so much that I began missing it the moment I deleted it. I wanted it back. I decided to get in touch with Douglas Mann, Managing Director of Rightside Response Pty Ltd, the company behind Tangerine Color Picker.

The response was quick. Douglas Mann confirmed the issue: "The Tangerine Color Picker was the cause of the problem."

And then, he elaborated: "The reason was Apple had changed the default implementation of the -(NSImage *)provideNewButtonImage method which returns the toolbar icon that is displayed in the Color Panel. Interestingly the issue only occurred in Apple's Pro Apps and not elsewhere. Furthermore, Apple has removed the following statement The default implementation looks in the color picker’s bundle for a TIFF file named after the color picker’s class, with the extension “.tiff”. from their documentation. We simply missed minor changes in the documentation and only knew about the issue when customers began informing us of Aperture and other Pro Apps crashing. There were other color picker developers who were also caught out by this change."

So that explains it. And, the good news is, the engineers of Tangerine did something about the problem. They corrected it. Mann said: "We no longer rely on Apple's default implementation of the provideNewButtonImage method. A very simple fix, only 3 lines of code."

As of today, version 1.1 of Tangerine Color Picker, which is publicly available, is the one crashing Aperture. According to Mann, the new 1.2 version, currently in beta, is about to come out. "After hearing from beta testers," he said, "hopefully it will be available by mid-March." This new version solves the crash problem. It no longer affects Aperture and the other Apple pro applications.

Mann added: "There are a number of improvements to Tangerine in this (upcoming) release, many of them to aid integration with Leopard (OSX 10.5). We have brought our Actions Libraries up-to-date with support for Adobe's CS3 line of products, this includes a beta Actions Library for InDesign CS3. Finally, we have rectified issues with the Color Picker and general stability issues." Likewise, the new version will include a few features requested by customers "which include HSB Controls for modifying swatches and dockable Palette Window."

If you use the current version of Tangerine Color Picker, and some operations of Aperture (both 1.5 and 2.0), particularly when executing export commands, leads to unexpected quits, delete or uninstall it and wait for the new version to come out soon that solves the issue.

I reinstalled all my 3rd-party plug-ins and all of them are working. I can also now change my Aperture Library any time I want.

And as for Neal Sheeran, he earned a very well-deserved "star" button that I awarded him in Apple's discussion board.