Apple Says I Love You with a Bouquet of Software Upgrades

It’s Valentine’s day this week and Apple reminds us it loves us with significant software upgrades to OS X, Aperture, and Apple TV.

First off was OS X 10.5.2. This is jammed packed with bug (oops, “unintended features”) fixes, plus a few new features and enhancements.

This upgrade is huge, and one with the lot tops out at 343MB. However most users will only require the smaller 180MB upgrade.

As usual with Apple, installation was a breeze, and two restarts occurred as is normal with OS X updates nowadays. The first time I logged in though, the Wacom driver crashed. I remember this happening on other occasions and a further reboot got it working fine. Be aware that after the upgrade is finished, another update to Leopard’s graphic drivers will be available from Software Update.

Here are my initial thoughts on a few of the new features:

Stacks are now a little more functional with:
- List view. This creates a cascading view just like Windows’ Start menu. Unfortunately, if a list doesn’t fit on your screen, it scrolls. This makes it not as useful as the grid view for creating an application launcher. But what it does mean is you can navigate through folder hierarchies without having to go to Finder -which is useful. It’s a shame Grid view doesn’t let you navigate folders.
- Folder icon. Now the Dock icon for your stack can be either a folder icon or a stack icon. I prefer the Stack icon.
- Updated background in Grid view. For the life of me, I can’t see any difference to the previous background.

Desktop
- Menu bar translucency can now be turned off. I tried turning it off and decided I liked it more when it’s on. But a lot of folks will welcome this addition.
- The translucency of menus has been decreased. Although Apple says “slightly,” it looks “almost totally” to me and is now only detectable when the menu covers an area with high contrast.

Time Machine
- A status icon is now displayed in the menu bar. Yayy!! Now you can, in an instant, see the most likely cause of your Mac suddenly slowing down. A nice touch too, when Time Machine is backing up, the clock in the TM menu bar icon runs backwards.

My only ongoing concern is Safari is still just as unstable. It freezes on me virtually every day, requiring a Force Quit, and still did so today after the upgrade. It also appears slower after this update. Pages seem to take longer before they display.

A lot of little—and some not so little things—are yet to be fixed. For instance, the Parental Controls’ content filtering is more cumbersome than it was in Tiger, but overall, this takes Leopard one step closer to maturation, which will probably come around 10.5.4.

Aperture 2.0
The next major release, and one that came sooner than expected, was Aperture.

Although not a photographer of any credibility, as a design student I take zillions of photos so am looking to go beyond iPhoto. It’s probably a contest between Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom. If it’s on dollars only, it’s a no brainer: Lightroom wins by a country mile, with the student price of Lightroom half that of Aperture.

So I had a quick look at Aperture 2 to see if it could tempt me.

My first experience wasn’t positive, with Aperture rejecting the first iPhoto library I tried to import. I have two libraries, one for personal photos and one for my design studies and work. With the latter, Aperture said it was an old version, earlier than 6.06, despite my having just opened it a few minutes earlier in iPhoto 7.

So to test Aperture I had to use my personal library, which is 12.8GB and has around 5200 images in it. This took an unacceptable and ridiculously long time to import into Aperture. 3.5 hours! For all that time Aperture was running near 100% CPU usage on my Core 2 Duo. It’s totally unacceptable to have my computer neutered for that long. Basically, the process involved importing the images, creating thumbnails, and then creating previews as well.

Even though I’m not a pro photographer, I’m sure we share one common primary wish for photo library software: that cataloging should be as quick and painless as possible.

Tagging existing photos was fairly easy, but unlike iPhoto, Aperture does not support repetitive imports from a source. Thus if you import only some photos from a source, after the import you have to go back into the import process to import other images from the source.

In iPhoto it imports and then stays in the import screen waiting for you to select more images to import.

Personally, I like this way of working because it makes cataloging part of the import process which saves double-handling of images. Otherwise it’s just too easy to import now and come back to the cataloging later (which I’m sure the pros would never do), which ends up accumulating and becoming a big job.

The image adjustments tools are very good and I did like them, as they do allow much control over the image.

However, since playing with Lightcrafts’ superb LightZone, which offers excellent adjustment tools and defaults, I find it hard to get excited by other apps’ adjustment controls. Testing Aperture, it took five minutes of fiddling with its Highlights & Shadows sliders to, almost but not quite, achieve what I could do in one click on LightZone’s Relight button.

Aperture 2.0 is going to make its existing users very happy, but I’ll wait to see how LightRoom 2.0 compares before I hand over the hard-earned.

Apple TV 2.0
The last present from Apple to say “We love you” was the upgrade of Apple TV. Not having an Apple TV, I couldn’t test it.

However, I’m sure it’s going to go a long way way in cementing the relationship between Apple and its Apple TV users.

So, a good week for Apple’s users, but of course the most anticipated software release is still to come, that being the iPhone SDK which Steve has promised by the end of February.