Patrick's Soapbox

So Aperture 1.5 has finally landed in Software Update (and on the Aperture website).

First things first: it's a healthy update: 125MB. That's bigger than than the original application (which was only ~30MB, not including sample content). However I'm sure it's worth it. (Part of me would love to know how much data Apple will shift today, what with both this and the 10.4.8 update being released.) The splash screen shows version 1.5, build 2A82.

First launch: You'll be told you need to update your library. You'll probably want to agree to this, as your only other option is Quit. You also get asked if you want to create the high resolution JPEG previews. (Necessary, so it claims, for quicker export and drag and drop export. Possibly other things, I wasn't paying that much attention.) This will take a while. I'm sitting patiently while it says "Preparing Library for Upgrade...". Once this is complete (on my library* it took about 5 minutes), Aperture will launch, but then you'll get the "Upgrading n of y projects (x%)" sheet, the % is per project, but the progress bar is overall. Finally it validates the projects.

So, what's new? There are some new smart albums (in the Last Week, in the Last Month). Projects/folders are separated by light grey lines. The quick keyword buttons are gone (although you can add them back with shift+D), and the keyboard controls have changed (instead of 1-8, it's optn+1-8 now). Ratings are now done with cmd+ things, so increase/decrease are CMD+= and CMD+-, or CMD+0 (unrated), CMD+1-5 and CMD+9 (reject). The default toolbar no longer includes the different workspaces, but they are still there if you use them (I don't, though). Interestingly it doesn't touch the toolbar if you're upgrading from 1.1.

More as I play with it, and read about other people's experiences.

Speed does seem better, but it's also processing thumbnails (4102 to go), which seems to be using some CPU, so once that's done I'll do some more speed tests, including importing from my camera. Here's hoping for good news!

• My library consists of 16 projects and 4876 photos, on a 2.16GHz MacBook Pro 15" w/ 1GB of ram, working off the internal 100GB@7,200rpm drive.