Category Archives: Software

OS X Yosemite

OS X

Solid.

Yosemite has had a long beta test period with several iterations, so the risk of major issues with the latest release of OS X should be low. That said, iOS8’s poor start, with 8.0.1 actually disabling the ability to make calls (unpardonable), suggests that just because a beta test period is long, there’s nothing to stop Apple making jarring errors in ‘fixit’ releases, especially under the management of a CEO who seems reluctant to ruthlessly punish basic errors through dismissal, in marked contrast to the style of his predecessor.

I first upgraded my 2014 MacBook Air to Yosemite and the only issue encountered was that the first download failed, maybe attributable to overloaded servers at Apple. I burned the download to a USB flash drive using the Terminal utility, so as not to have to depend on downloads for each of the many Macs in the home. In this way all I need is the flash drive to install the OS. My first reactions were:

  • Blah, crude, flat, children’s crayon-like look to colors in apps (icons, buttons, etc.). Not an improvement.
  • Faster than Mavericks – either the placebo effect at work or just the result of a clean install.
  • No issues with LR 5, PS CS 5 (I do not use CC by design) or color printing.
  • Had to upgrade to new CarbonCopyCloner ($20) for backups. A much improved interface makes it worthwhile.
  • Have told FaceTime prefs in the FaceTime app to accept phone calls via the iPhone – have yet to test.
  • Continuity is excellent – shows where your other Apple devices are in, say, Safari, and allows you to click the link. Ingenious.
  • Geekbench and wifi speeds are unchanged.
  • Had to download a Java script fix, which Yosemite reminds you to do, for Safari.

So after an untroubled experience with the MBA, I decided to install Yosemite on my classic Mac Pro from the copy saved on the flash drive, albeit with some trepidation as a few users of these older machine (mine is a 2009, much upgraded) have reported problems.

In the event there were no issues when testing with both single (a 3.46GHz W3690 Xeon CPU) and dual CPU (both the stock dual 2.26GHz Nehalems and speedier 3.06GHz X5675 Westmeres) processors and processor trays installed. The Nvidia GTX680 GPU has three monitors attached. Two use DVI and the third uses DP. My Mac Pro is updated to 802.11ac wifi and Bluetooth 4.0 – look here to do this – and the BT 4.0 update, which is required if you want to receive phone calls from a nearby iPhone. I use a Logitech USB microphone, speakers and a wired keyboard and mouse. I also had to update the Nvidia web drivers for my GTX680 GPU – now on v. 343.01.01f01 – an easy download from Nvidia’s site with no issues.

For reference, my Mac Pro boots the OS from an SSD installed on an Apricorn PCIe card, not from a drive in one of the regular internal drive slots. This allows the SSD to run at its full SATA 3 speed, rather than at the slower SATA 2 speed to which the regular slots are constrained, simultaneously freeing up a regular drive slot. More on how this is done appears here.

Will OS X be dumbed down to the level of iOS? This has been a real concern for a while but the direction Yosemite is taking suggests this is not the case. With iOS 8.1 the level of integration between the two operating systems is meaningfullly enhanced – AirDrop, Continuity, Handoff, Instant Hotspot all work brilliantly – yet there is no intimation of OS X becoming dumbed down. This is encouraging.

Apple kills Aperture

Lightroom

Hardly surprising.


Or not ….

Apple has announced it has ceased development of Aperture.

Any Aperture user must have noticed how poorly supported Apple’s flagship photo processing app was – now or earlier. I migrated from Aperture to Lightroom six years ago and that was no fun. I hate to think what can go wrong today. My change to Adobe was not motivated by features but by Aperture’s simply awful speed in every task imaginable, not to mention incredible file size bloat. Unless you had the latest CPUs, GPUs and disk drives, you were going to have to watch beachballs. By contrast, LR makes very low demands on hardware – it did back then and with many great enhancements over the past few years, continues to be undemanding. The Highlight and Shadow sliders introduced in LR4 alone would have any rational user abandoning Aperture.


What passes for file structure in Aperture – a blithering mess.

The sad part of this is that Adobe loses a competitor, though if pushed I would guess that Aperture had less than 5% of the Lightroom market. With the number of PC and Mac users roughly equal and Apeture running on Macs only, that makes for a 75% LR market share if Aperture had even 50% of the Mac market. Factor in the poor product support, a lack of timely development – especially with RAW support for new cameras (how hard can that be?) – a falling feature set compared with LR and a parent more interested in selling cell phones, and the writing was plainly on the wall. I have sympathy for all those great photographers heavily invested in Aperture who will now spend aeons converting to something else, rather than spending time taking pictures. And that conversion, I am prepared to bet, will be high risk and whether overlay files for RAW images will even be properly preserved is unknown at this time.

The bigger concern is how long will LR remain with a stand-alone option? You want to trust Adobe? A company which cannot run its cloud securely and cannot even safeguard the code to Photoshop from thieves – their crown jewel? Not to mention your credit card data.

Perfect Effects 8

Lightroom, Photographs

Free software, impressively engineered.


Click the image for the download.

onOne Software is offering its Perfect Effects application, usually $100, free for a limited time. You can download it by clicking the above image.

I did so and it installs as a plug-in in PS CS5, LR 5.4 and Aperture, becoming immediately available in LR which is my default processing application.

The engineering could not be better. Export a file from within LR’s Develop module and you get a simple display with a large number of effects to choose from. Save the file and it is saved as a ‘.psd’ copy in your LR catalog, adjacent to the original. I especially like the ‘Glow’ effect when subtle hints of age are called for in an image, and you can easily modulate the glow amount with a slider. Selective application of effects is also possible. A nice tool for the working photographer.

Here’s how the application’s display appears:

And here are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ images:


Before Special Effects ‘glow’.


With Special Effects ‘glow’.

ImageWell

Software

A CAD app.

ImageWell is a $20 lightweight CAD app which I have been using for ages to upload images to this blog. It stores the path for the image which is simply dragged and dropped on the app, resized with a couple of key strokes, one more click adds the drop shadow, and off she goes to the server.

But this small app offers far more than image upload. With a very undemanding learning curve you can create charts and technical drawings of remarkable sophistication. Case in point my 12 year old son had to prepare an earthquake evacuation drawing as part of an earthquake awareness class. Now while this is somewhat reminiscent in utility value to those ‘nuclear safety’ newsreels of the cold war, which showed children hiding under desks for protection from Ivan, the project was a lot of fun and he emerged an ImageWell expert. With a minimum of tuition he was able to produce this:

This took him about an hour, including learning time.

Adding text to images is equally simple. Drag and drop the image, insert a text box and you are done.

ImageWell is highly recommended for Mac OS X users and bloggers, and will also do nicely for all but complex CAD projects. If you are making technical instruction manuals, it’s hard to beat photographs annotated with text using ImageWell.

Lightroom 5.3

Lightroom, Photographs

Fixes a frustrating bug in OS X Mavericks.

Each major release of an operating system from Apple brings with it renewed fears that the ceaseless dumbing down of the user interface will bring with it new horrors, more disabled third party software and much time wasted on remedies. Indeed, since OS Leopard, 4 releases ago, I cannot think of any ‘enhancements’ in subsequent versions of the OS which have moved the needle on my satisfaction scale – with the possible exception of the addition of the frequently frustrating AppStore in Snow Leopard – and the loss of the excellent Rosetta emulator and additions of such primal idiocies like LaunchPad leave one scratching his head along “What were they thinking of?” lines. After breathing a sigh of relief once the ever more massive upgrade is completed and the anomalies sorted, the best one can say of recent OS X releases after the pain and wasted time required for installation is “Thank goodness nothing is broken”. For Hackintosh aficionados the problem is far greater, as every major OS release – and some minor – has brought with it massive upgrade headaches, one factor which contributed to my migration from that excellent breed to a used Mac Pro.

For most photographers Adobe is the vendor of choice for photo processing apps and their recent track record of upgrades puts even Apple’s shambolic performance to shame. Minor changes since PS CS3 have added little value, and the recent move of CS to a Cloud model means that you have to keep making monthly rent payments for the privilege of using Adobe’s PS until the undertaker comes along, or lose access to your catalog. Sure, CS6 is backward compatible for now, but would you like to bet how long that continues? Then there’s the small matter of Adobe losing a big chunk of its Photoshop code to hackers the other month, along with 10, 30, 100 or 500 million customers’ credit cards, depending which of their press releases you care to believe. Let’s at least hope that the code thieves come out with a better, cheaper product.

That said, Adobe has done an excellent job of keeping Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom (which uses the same RAW decoder) current with regard to the many new cameras coming to market, and their latest LR release adds many. If you own LR, which can still mercifully be run locally from your machine with no rent payments due to keep the software active, you can continue to use LR as your catalog/point of entry application for your files, round-tripping to your locally installed CS3/4/5/6 with no rent due to Adobe. Anything later than CS2 runs on Intel Macs without Rosetta.

The only significant bug I have noted in moving to OS Mavericks is that Lightroom lost the very useful feature of showing file counts in the Metadata panel. Now, mercifully, Adobe has fixed what Apple broke by issuing LR 5.3 which restores count data, as shown below:



LR5.2 metadata in Mavericks.


LR5.3 – counts restored.

I find this data very useful for tracking my activity levels. If I find them dropping I tell myself it’s time to get up, grab a camera and get out more.


A break from Xmas shopping. Union Square SF, GX7, 17/1.8 Zuiko MFT.