Aperture Preferences: can't access under Leopard

Thanks for that, Paul.

I note that both of your machines are Intel-based. Can anyone with a PowerPC system reproduce my problem?

Yes, pressing the keyboard shortcut has just the same effect as choosing the menu option. Bang!

Nope. This problem is Aperture-only, which is largely why I'm asking here whether anyone else with a PPC system is suffering from it. I'd like to know whether it's a bug that other users experience, or something weird about my own setup.

Hi,

I'm sorry to say that I can't post a crash log here. I don't know why, and I've been trying repeatedly ever since yesterday evening. Perhaps the problem is the length of the message, but Apple's server simply won't take it. I click Post Message and nothing happens. (I've tried multiple browsers, too.)

However, what I can say is that a person from Apple has emailed me privately, and I've sent the crash log to him along with a system profile.

Removing the preferences file was a good idea that I should have thought to try myself. However, having done it, I found that it didn't make any difference. The crashes were just the same.

I've also since discovered that the crash affects the first two items on the Presets submenu (the one just below the Preferences option) similarly. Image Export and Web Export crash in just the same way. However, the remaining three items on the Presets submenu (Slideshow etc.) open their windows normally.

It's solved!

I suddenly realised, after spending ages looking at the Aperture crash reports and doing other testing, that I'd completely forgotten to see if there was any useful Console output when Aperture crashed. So I had a look and found a very revealing line associated with each crash, saying:

"Custom ColorPicker class with name .DS_Store could not be loaded."

I wouldn't have expected colour pickers to be involved when merely opening preference windows that apparently don't use them, but removing the custom pickers seemed the obvious thing to try, and did indeed cause the crash to go away. So I narrowed down the search and have identified the culprit as the RCWebColorPicker which can be obtained from here:

http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCWebColorPicker/

I had version 1.0 installed and found that a 1.1 update had been issued, so I attempted to download it. It turns out that the link to version 1.1 is actually broken and just leads to a 'not found' page, but after a brief experiment in editing the URL, I found that the following works:

http://www.rubicode.com/Downloads/RCWebColorPicker-1.1.dmg

However, version 1.1 suffers from the same problem as 1.0 (i.e. it upsets Aperture), so I mention the above just in case anyone's interested in investigating further. Obviously I wouldn't recommend installing it at present! Source code to the picker is actually available on the site, and I'm going to email the author to let him know about the problem.

The interesting thing is that I've had this picker running fine under Tiger since last year and it hasn't caused a problem with Aperture in the past, so the problem behaviour is new to Leopard.

My thanks to everyone who offered help here, and to the Apple programmer who emailed me privately.

I'm pleased to say that the author of the colour picker has been very helpful and responsive to the issue, now that it's been tracked down. He's sent me several test builds of the picker and has now discovered the cause of the problem, with the result that the latest test build works perfectly. An official release of an update is expected very soon.