Press ‘p’ whilst in the Aperture browser and you will find that ‘Quick Preview’ is displayed underneath the picture.

With this on, try skipping through pictures and check the speed difference. As soon as you want to slow down again and begin working on the images, press ‘p’ to toggle quick preview mode off.

I downloaded the demo about 2 minutes after it was released and not being one for impulse decisions, about 2 minutes later I decided that I will move my workflow from Lightroom to Aperture! Within those 2 minutes I discovered that the performance, tools, integration and overall feature set will suit me more. Lightroom is a great application and I have nothing but respect for it but when I used Aperture to very quickly add images to my gallery then access the photos from Pages, I realised I had already saved a lot of time compared to the equivalent Adobe workflow. A few more tests along these lines and I was confident that Aperture is the way forward!

When I have finished ruining the sample photos, I am going to look at importing my 8,000 images as referenced files. I plan to keep all the original images on my external drive and the library file on my Macbook Pro. This gives the benefit of being able to access the library when travelling but also saves HDD space which is starting to get quite low! When I originally moved to Lightroom, I lost all the keywording I had done on the PC but luckily I manage the files in a logical way which helps me find the images I need. I know there are a lot of rubbish images in my library so I may take this opportunity to tidy things up a bit. From there I will decide if I am going to keyword everything again. At some stage in the near future, Aidy and I are going to design a keyword tree for the images on Encaptured. I will recreate this tree in Aperture and ensure that I use it as I go so that when I get round to uploading images, everything is cohesive.

I’ll report on my progress as I get round to each part of the transition as I am sure there will be other users out there that may make the same move. With any luck, my experiences will provide some guidance!

Finally, iLife 08 and iWork08 have been released. I have iWork 07 and it is an excellent suite so I iwll certainly be upgrading soon. With the introduction of an Apple spreadsheet app and Microsoft Office compatibility, it’s a bit of a no brainer!

My task for today was moving all of my 250GB of files from my old Windows backup onto a new HDD so that I could reformat the old drive for the MAC. Sounds easy but each time I tried to do the 16 hour Firewire->USB2 transfer, it would stop with an error. I have now manually copied across the files and folders but to ensure nothing was lost I needed to find a way of comparing the two directories.

Filemerge – Small app… big help

I was very lucky to be hunting around the computer and come across this great application that I think was installed with the Apple Xcode tools. It very easily allows you to compare two text documents and luckily…even two directories. What a gem! You get two lists that are colour coded showing the differences.

Icing on the cake

I found another great addition use for this tool, it can actually merge the two directories or files together. This very simple tool has a lot of power which is why I have made a note here for myself in he future!

As soon as I saw the new iMac G5 last week, it was very tempting to actually go ahead and buy one, after all, it does everything and a lot more. For a regular use computer, there would be no additional accessories required (well… maybe a TV tuner!). The specs and features are way above anything that the usual programming and web browsing might throw at it. The all in one design and new software make it very desirable. The built in iSight and remote control are just extra bonuses on top of an already well presented bit of kit. It seemed that it would be the ideal stop-gap before the Intel PowerMacs were released…. until today! I mean… who wouldn’t want a PowerMac with 4 processor cores running? The processing power of the new PowerMacs is nearly pornographic in it’s appeal. For the rest of the year, I will have to walk around telling myself to believe myself about not wanting one just yet… but I do! I cant imagine how the Intel based Macs could top the performance of these beasts. It can only be described as REAL power.

The new Powerbooks have seen some nice enhancements aswell such as new displays and longer lasting batteries. Perhaps this is to make them better suited for working with Apple’s new software aimed at photographers. Aperture is a completely RAW based workflow, editing and printing tool. Is this software alone enough justification for a new PowerMac quad? Maybe… the recommended system specs are a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 or faster, 2GB of RAM, a powerful graphics card and 5GB of disk space just for the application, templates, and tutorial. I am thinking that it must be good!

My quest for a code editor was a bit more challenging in that I had found a number of candidates that looked promising. I wanted all of the usual things that people would want in an editor; Syntax highlighting being the most obvious and important. Other features I hoped to find were FTP access to my sites, tabs for each window and support for various filetypes. From the few I tried, the one that immediately had me saying ‘Wow, how much does this cost?’ was jEdit, an open source project!

jEdit supports over 130 filetypes as standard but new ones can be added easily if you need more! Initially it lacked a couple of features I would have liked but I soon discovered the plugin manager where there are hundreds of available upgrades. I installed a tabs plugin, an ftp access plugin, an autocomplete plugin a code beautifier plugin, a plugin that will make a webpage of code from any given selection… all my requirements and more!! At some stage I plan to experiment with the subversion integration it offers. Being a Java application I was initially very skeptical. My past experience tells me that they load and run as fast a fat man in treacle. In this case I was pleasantly surprised. Whether its the Mac platform or just the 7 years of development on jEdit, it ran just like any other application. I would like to test it on my PC (Have to love Java for that!) but I am not allowed to turn it on yet! If it runs ok on there, I will be very happy as that will give some consistency accross my platforms. If you want to see for yourself what jEdit can do, check the Features page on the website. You should probably check the active community site aswell.

The only niggling issue I have at this stage is the highlighting colours… just not what I am used to. Luckily, all I need to do is change the XML file and I can have any colours I want.