I’ve been lusting after a new MacBook Air since they were released, but have been waiting to see what the reviews said for performance. After all, it’s (just) a Core 2 Duo processor, and even at the top-end, significantly lower specced than my 2.93Ghz 15” MacBook Pro from early 2009. But the hope of course was that with a more modern graphics card, the SSD “hard drive”, and some wishful thinking, that it could still stand up as an Aperture machine.

For those of you on a large screen, such as the 27” iMac, you may feel that the mouse moves a little bit too slowly—even at the highest speed setting. I don’t notice it so much when using the Mac for day-to-day stuff, but when using Aperture, where I’m constantly mousing from edge to edge of the screen, it was becoming tedious.

I’d installed System Preferences add-ons before and never been pleased with them. Somehow, the mouse just felt “wrong”. Perhaps they had a bad acceleration curve, but they never really felt good to me. In frustration the other night I set out looking for another one, and found the perfect solution. And it’s already built into your Mac.

I ensure that all cameras — mine and my assistant’s — are perfectly synced immediately before a shoot so that I can edit them all chronologically later, without care to who shot what. That way when I’m sorting through photos of a critical moment (like the kiss at a wedding), I can step through image by image in perfect chronological order, regardless of who shot it or from what angle. This goes for multiple cameras that I may be carrying, and any other cameras under my control on the shoot. I find when compiling the best shots to tell a story, having all the photos in perfect order to be a tremendous timesaver (anyone who’s read any of my eBooks knows how much emphasis I put on having accurate and precise timestamps on my photos).

Separating my shots from their shots in Aperture 3

However if you’re on a job with an assistant/second shooter, such as a wedding, you may want to separate out their photos from yours at some point. Perhaps you want to see how many of their shots you ended up using (good way to judge how useful they were as a second shooter), or you simply want to take a critical eye to their work. Fortunately with Aperture, this is incredibly easy to do.

Eight great prizes — including two Flush Mount Albums — are part of a fantastic giveaway from MyPhotoCreations on PhotoBookGirl. For entry details, head on over to to PhotoBookGirl.com. Move quick; the contest ends on November 29th!

So many people on so many forums have been struggling for so many days on this Aperture to iLife sharing issue — some quite literally spending dozens of hours trying to solve the problem — that I thought I’d share how I personally handle this, and why this hasn’t affected me at all.

I don’t use the iLife Sharing. It’s not because I don’t like the idea—on the contrary, I think it’s brilliant. However I work with multiple computers, multiple libraries, and multiple devices. The sharing system works best if you have one Library, on one computer, use iLife on that one computer, and sync your iPad/iPod/etc to that one copy of iTunes, and so on. The system is beautiful in its simplicity.

My setup isn’t simple.

My Setup

I have an iMac that hosts my main Libraries. Even though I’ve now merged most Libraries, I do still have a couple client-specific ones that I don’t want to merge. So right there, we have a sharing problem—which library is shared? The answer is, the last one that was open. That might not always be the one you want to get to, though.

I also have a MacBook Pro that stores working Libraries as I travel. And I use the fantastic Project export feature from Aperture on the iMac to move projects over to my MacBook Pro so I can catch up on old projects while traveling (for example, I’m currently copying a managed 127GB Library across my network so I can catch up on a wedding edit and some other projects on the flights to Bangkok tomorrow). Point is, I have projects on that computer, too.

Long ago my Aperture library grew beyond what I could — or wanted to — carry around on my laptop. I keep the main library on a desktop Mac (currently a 2.8 GHz iMac 27" Core i7 w/ 8 GB RAM) and add working projects to it as I came back from jobs or travels, which of course got a lot easier in Aperture 3. But there are times when I’m away from my system and yet need to get to a photo on there. Perhaps a client needs something that I wasn’t expecting, or I want to send something to a potential client; whatever. I want to be able to get to my photos anytime, from anywhere.

Remote Access

I use MobileMe’s “Back to My Mac” feature to access my system remotely, which may not be perfect but it works well enough. These days it’s a lot more reliable than it used to be.

This is a topic that’s shown up here on this blog, on the flickr Aperture group as well as on the Apple boards, and it appears that, at least for one user, the source of the problem has been found.

The Problem

The problem has been people’s Aperture Libraries not showing up in iLife, Mail, etc—basically the Media Browser connection was broken. You can share your Aperture Library with the rest of your Mac by enabling Share previews with iLife and iWork in the Preferences:

This tip came via reader @blakecaldwell over at F-STOPPING…

As you may have heard, if you upgrade to both Aperture 3.1 and iLife ‘11, you gain all the exciting new slide show themes that Steve showed on stage for iPhoto ‘11—inside of Aperture! I’ve just installed mine, and there’s a load of new themes.

Here’s a complete list of Slideshow themes. Themes with the ** next to them are new… there’s six of ‘em!

I missed this one on the original review, and it’s a subtle but welcome improvement. The so-called “Choose an Aperture Library” dialog (yeah, I dug into the manual to see what Apple called it), which you can call up by holding down the Option key on launch, or by selecting the menu File > Switch to Library > Other/New…, has seen an overhaul.

The Stevenote ended a few hours ago, and I spent the last few hours poking around Aperture 3.1.

I’ve been working with Morten Scheel (@AFringeDweller) for a while developing some AppleScripts for the ApertureExpert community. We’ve come up with some pretty clever ones to start with, and we’re looking for more to develop. If you have any ideas, please contribute them to the new AppleScript Forum!