Apple App Store

By upgrading to 10.6.6 OS X users get access to the new App Store. Thankfully it's not been rolled into iTunes which is now way too confusing, cluttered and altogether big and slow. App Store is fast, lean, simple and will drain my bank account faster than if I had some sort of habit.

So far the free version of SketchBook, LightCompressor and Pixelmator have made it to my applications folder. According to the hype I can now also download them to use on my other machines too. Always handy.

No getting away from it, dropping the price of some of the apps and making it so, so easy is going to put a lot of cash into the Apple coffers and hopefully that of the developers too. Don't see much from the likes of Adobe, Quark et al. Life has just moved on,  keep up. just when us Mac users were feeling un-loved in the shadow of all things iOS.

Freeway 5.5

So I did the trial period with freeway 5.5 and enjoyed the process. I'd been a Freeway 4 user and got on fine, with one exception. Building rollovers. Back in the early days with Freeway before CSS everything you built the rollovers by making two graphic objects, aligning them and then turning on/off the states in an inspector. This all worked fine if you got everything right first time and didn't try to edit (who does get it first time). However, nothing has improved in 5.5 except that if you are building in CSS mode you need to go back to non CSS to build the rollovers then back into CSS to carry on. Then they do not always work. Nothing seems to have improved.

I spent hours designing an interface to go on the master pages only to find some bits just didn't work. The errors seem to occur when you edit content time after time and even with a forced re-build it still creates dud bits of code which don't get over written on publishing. This is all very frustrating and eventually lead me to not stump up the £73 odd pounds for the upgrade. I was seduced by the £25 upgrade to RapidWeaver instead along with all its inflexibility but get a page up fast goodness

Quark & html

So Quark 8.5 is here. It's a big beast to download and fixes a few Snow Leopard issues apparently.

If Quark is so bent on being a useful web tool I just wish they would put more effort into the html pages and not in to the Flash side of the application. I'm sorry but buggy, bloated flash has had it's day and the sooner we move to html5 the better.

Quark html pages for me just cannot seem to produce what I need. Every time I try to create a rollover with a round button, looks fine on the Quark screen, when it renders on the web preview I just get a round button with a square background in a slightly lighter tone. I've been on to Quark about this, along with the 'Quark is broken' box which pops up from time to time and still under 8.5. Do they know what the rest of us know? Sadly Quark is broken.

As I write I'm downloading a trial of Softpress Freeway 5.5.  I used to use this, lapsed but am now going to try again.

 see the nasty little square corners?

Apertue 3

Aperture3 Blog notes

At £79 inc VAT I'm not sure the upgrade from V2 to V3 of Aperture is really really worth it for me. I don't have a camera with built in GPS. I can imagine the new generation of SD cards with Wi-Fi location in them work fine in the San Francisco Bay area but in a mucky field in Norfolk I doubt there are many mapped W-fi hot-spots to lock on to. GPS map tagging being the main feature of Aperture 3.

There have been so many horror stories on the internet about the perils of upgrading from version 2. Tales of corrupted databases, treacle like performance, huge memory leaks. These tales of perilous software adventures are as close as us namby-pamby's get to the fearsome tales of ancient mariners, tales of sea monsters, storms, battles, cruelty and perils of the sea. Loosing a few snaps to us is as frightening as loosing a leg would have been to a sea-faring man of yore. I digress.

If you are sensible in the approach to upgrading then things should go fine, especially now that Aperture has been upgraded to 3.03 at the time of writing.

For me the following worked, it may not work for everyone so you have been warned.

1. Rebuild the database currently in use. Option-command whilst starting
2. Back up your existing V2 database to a separate drive
3. Install Aperture 3
4. Run Software Update before starting to update to 3.03
5. Agree to having Aperture update the database to V3. This will take a long time so just let it get on with it and don't fiddle.
6. At the end of the process Aperture should have started up and all should be fine.

First things to note for me were that they have increased the size of all the interface elements by about 10% so the once Apple Pro app elegant look is now replaced by something chunky looking like Charlie aged six and 3/4 had made. This really irritates me. I assume it has been done to accommodate 17" MBP users.

There is a new RAW processing engine and any RAW files give you the option to re-process using the new version. The revised processing appears to give more punch, colour saturation, vibrancy but at the cost of increased contrast. I'd hazard a guess that these new files will print a bit too contrasty on a traditional press. look fine on screen. Indeed, the reprocessed files make the originals look positively muddy.

I can't see much real difference in the full screen mode, even though it is much trumpeted in the marketing materials.

I've just made a book with the new version for a client, indeed it is uploading as I write this. There are one or two new layouts for books, mainly incorporating the new maps GPS features. I would have liked to have seen more development on the books front. These are still real client pleaser's. Aperture 3 also incorporates the ability to quickly load plug-ins for three external book publishers products. All appear to be aimed at the wedding market.

One bug in the Books section is that if you double-click on an image in the book browser to edit it the only way back into the book is to click into another project or folder then back into the book. you can't get back directly from the edit stage.

The new quick presets for colour effects, B&W and image enhancement are useful as too are the adjustment brushes. I've just improved a sky with one. They are still not as good as the u-point technology in Nikon's NX2 however which I find even better than Photoshop for serious photo enhancement.

Faces button - I'll never use it
Facebook button - I'll never use it, I value my privacy
Flikr Button - I'll never use it, sorry but I don't give my photographs away to my 'mates' I attempt to sell them, I know it is quaint and old fashioned but it's all I know.

Slideshows looks great, I'll use that. Lots. At last Aperture has the ability to handle video files. iPhoto has done that since day one. I have buckets of video files shot on an old Fuji FinePix that I never look at since moving to Aperture.

Importing has had me scratching my head a bit. I store all my pictures on external drives and use Aperture to manage the referenced files. Gone is the great snake like bar joining the source to the destination. Now all there is a popup for the destination and it does not always work as one would expect. importing has never been Aperture's strength, even down to the only way to browse ones file system is via the columns method, no option to browse via a list view with the latest import at the top. If they can offer this in the finder why not in Aperture?

All in all Aperture is a comfortable place to spend a day working. Learn the keyboard shortcuts to make life snappier. I'd rather use Aperture to Lightroom and I'm impressed that it still seems to run generally quickly. Only applying brushes seems to slow it down a little.

Quark as a web tool

We've had web one, we've had web two, we've had social networking, FaceBroke and TwitterTwat now I've decided to bring you the ironic internet. An internet where things are ironically broken, don't work as one would expect and most definitely doesn't toe the rather bland corporate line.

This week and if I'm honest, for the last few weeks on and off as you do I've been re-vamping my web site. I spend  a fair bit of time working on sites for other people but rarely for me.

For some reason which I cannot fathom I decided my tool of choice would be Quark Xpress. It says it can do web so I gave it a try. I also set the target of not using Flash anywhere on the site. I was gladdened some weeks ago to have my susspicions about flash vindicated by none other than the great mr. Jobs him self in his town hall rant on the subject. What started off as a cute, light and fluffy way of displaying a few vector shapes on web pages has now develped into a super-sized behemoth, guaranteed to bring anything but the spritelyset of computers to it's knees at the click of a mouse. So, no flash spoken here.

I'd done some flash development in Quark and it does a pretty good job. The tools are easier to use than the officiel flash and at the ned of the day it was one of the prime reasons for splashing out on the upgrade. But now I've seen the light and won't use it. So that's my foot with a small .22 sized hole in it.

So, fire up Quark 8 and start on a web layout. At first all goes well. I used to be a dab-hand in Softpress Freeway, Quark for the web but no use in print. With Quark though I can have it all. Stlye sheets specified, an ironic design firmly planted in what little mind I still can call my own and I'm off. All goes swimmingly and I'm quickly previewing in Safari and getting pretty similar results to what I expect. However, have you noticed whenever someone uses the word however, what comes next is going to undo all of the positive stuff that came bofore. I once did some work for a big UK retailer who on the advice of a swish New York agency banned the use of the word 'but' throughout the company. No one at any level was alowed to use the word 'but'. The NY gurus said that if you use 'but' you immediately cancel everything which came before the 'but'. As we all know; a. what do the American's know about the English language? B. It was all a load of butt as the colonials are want to say.

I digress. However, if in an ideal world I was clever enough to get it right first time, make no mistakes, not change my mind etc then it would be fine. Life is not like that. I change my mind, tweak things, adjust and generally bodge my way through. Quark just doesn't accurately overwrite the files each time. Changes are not always accurately registered. Quark is not alone in this behaviour, just about every visual web editor I've ever used suffers this problem. Design once and it's fine. Muck about and it just created mess.

The abilty to create nice looking graphics, have them rendered and named PNG's all from Quark was very satisfying. Creating rollovers that didn't and code that ran to hundreds of lines for the simplest of tasks wasn't. Taking the rollovers as an example. Creating them is thankfully simple. Create a graphic, right-click on it create simple rollover job's a good un'. Test in Safari, looks good. Test in Firefox (still on the Mac, no windows malarkey yet) and it all looks horrible. Nice circular logos suddenly have nasty square borders to them not of the colour prescribed. Once the rollover has been activated it steadfastly reffuses to go back to the proper initial state graphic unless the whole page is reffreshed. The actual over-state graphic even showed up distorted. A circular button looking like a mutant egg. Go to the finder, look at the mutant egg graphic, it's round, circular as it should be.

Time to contact Quark via the web site. Managed to get hold of a real person eventually who said my troubles were that I was creating gif's not Png's. Yes, some of these did get through but were trapped. So, he thought he had done his job and signed the query off as 'user twat' or some other call-centre customer service code.

I'm starting to bore myself now. The solution, and I can't really beleive just how convoluted this is and I don't really want to admit to this but I'll come out. I had to buy a copy of Dreamweaver (had it on old computer but didn't migrate over to new iMac thinking it too klunky in the shiny iMac'y world. Having said that DW CS4 is really very good, I do like it) just to clean up and put right the Quark files into something which works. The workflow goes like this: Do the nice designs in Quark, export the pages to the html files. Open Dreamweaver pass it the pages. Remove the wonky graphics and now badly rendered position of text boxes. Re-make all the rollovers etc still using the same graphics which Quark did indeed make quite necely then clean up the long, long code, save the page and go onto the next one. This is before I've got anywhere near putting in any content. That would be just too ambitious at this stage.

No wonder I've not got my ironically retro site up and running. I've been visibly ageing in the process. What did I do to create the last site for me I hear you asking and why did I not just stick with that? I used a thing called RapidWeaver, it took me no more than a day, worked well, was enjoyable and I've created countless other sites for happy customers also with the same ease and joy. Why make life difficult when is doesn't have to be?

Having seen the videos and web iPad

Now having seen the info on Apples's site, the pictures and the video with the nice Mr. Ives I'm even more convinced. With 3G for remote connection when away from WiFi and all the other iPod loveliness this looks like it should fly out of the stores by the shelf full.

Shame there is a 60 day wait plus no indication on price points here in the UK $499 in the States will no doubt in Rip-off Britain probably relate to £400 as a starter. Which it has to be said is far better than many were forecasting, £700 was more in the region,, even though you can still pay that for the fully featured model.

Interesting also that iWork for iPad is going to be in the $10 region, not sure if this is for each module of the suite or for the full set. If all applications are deemed to be in tis price region, a precedent set by the iPod app store then will we see Photoshop for a quid and Quark for a fiver? Doubt it!

All in all, another must have product to feed us addicted chubby westerners with all things new and shiny - iBuy

iPad - iWant

iPad - iWant

After all the months of speculation the iPad is here. I would rather have gone for the name iSlate. There seem to be too many mucky jokes that could and no doubt will be made about iPads. Will I be able to rollerskate in white jeans whilst using one?

Apple once again seem to have hit the mark first time. With the recent cartel like announcements that most of the daily newspapers intend to start charging for content who wouldn't want to pay for the Torygraph and read it on their oh so slick iPad rather than on tomorrows chip wrapper. Paper is sooo last millennium  now. I really do think that if this device (and it's more clunky imitators) takes off get out of paper, quickly.

Initially I was disappointed that it runs the iPod OS rather than a fully blown version of OS X. All credit to Apple for being able to get a version of iWork up and running. Oh to have Photoshop, Quark et-al running on this device.

I was also disappointed to see that Apple were not handling the media of the event themselves as what I ended up watching by the time it crossed the Atlantic looked more like the sort of crap one would expect to see as a 'video installation' in the TV, it started well then creaked to a halt under the sheer weight of geekdom.

Once up on a time I'd always go out and buy version 1 of anything, now, I'll wait for V2. Even though there is a 13 year old in this very building who will be declaring is soo unfair that I won't go to the Apple shop in Birmingham tomorrow and get her one. No idea when they will be in the stores.

Will be interesting to see how this all develops. There are issues over the form, shame it is not more lovely than the iPod, I'm surprised that the case work didn't have more embellishment. I also don't know how the form-factor will play with consumers. At just off 10" screen and only iWork is it better to go for a MacBook or the iPad? It is still too big to pocket. I don't know. I still think that the size of the iPod touch and iPhone are right in human scale terms. The iPhone is too big for a phone but given what you get it is a small price to pay.

Will I be able to plug in a USB modem? what use is such a device if I can't really take it on the road?

Verdict. Winner, with caveats. As ever.