3.0.1 a huge step dow for me

Question

Level 1

121 points

3.0.1 a huge step dow for me

After a bit of a struggle getting the 3.0 upgrade up, functioning, and actually working very well on my iMac, I was excited to see the 3.0.1 patch available this morning in software update. After installing the update I've run into nothing but trouble, these include:

* Frequent crashes while simply browsing my relatively small library
* Clicks in the browser being ignored
* Frequently observing an empty adjustment panel in the main window
* Selecting photos in the main window sometimes does nothing (i.e. the selected photo does not show in the viewer)
* Selecting a photo in the main window sometimes does not switch the adjustment panel to reflect the adjustments for the selected photo (i.e. the adjustment HUD shows the adjustments for the previously selected photo)

The release of A3 is a foregone software disaster for Apple, and I'm shocked that the product has been released — and updated — with such glaring problems. It's really an embarrassment of poor SQA and Release Management.

I've worked in commercial software development. leading very large teams, for the past 25 years, and just shake my head seeing such missteps in what is supposed to be a Pro-level application targeted to non-Engineers. The level of effort that the Aperture community has made to overcome these problems has been impressive. But this level of support should NOT be necessary.

Frustrated.

John

iMac and MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.2), 20th Anniversary Mac, 128K Mac, original Apple II

Posted on Feb 26, 2010 9:45 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Feb 27, 2010 12:10 AM in response to John Purlia

I completely agree.
Since 2 weeks I´m busy with repairing or restoring the lib because of various problems (crashing, hanging or other non proper operation).

Once restoring from time machine, once restoring from a vault was helpful. These are time consuming actions with no added value to my free time on weekends and evenings. It`s a pain in my neck to live always with the fear of loosing lots of data or have to write off a hugh amount of time invested to build up this lib.

Yesterday with the update to 3.01 I lost the connection to all my masters. The whole evening again I was busy with reading and writing to some forums in order to receive any help.

Now I managed to fix all my problems so far. I hope there is now fun coming back. So far I did not found much time to look at all the new features. The one which is the most advertised (faces) I had to shut down.

Regards

Reply

Answer 2

Jibers

Level 1

9 points

Feb 27, 2010 1:04 AM in response to John Purlia

This update is really not good for me. Now all the latest imports have completely the wrong colour once i open them although in the preview import panel they look fine. A greenish colour.
Then on the white balance adjusters the tint is fully maxed out to the right and any adjustment causes huge changes with the tiniest adjustment.

NOT GOOD!

Reply

Answer 3

Jibers

Level 1

9 points

Feb 27, 2010 1:12 AM in response to Jibers

Found a temporary fix.
Click on the gear wheel within RAW Fine Tuning and deselect Apple Camera Default. Choose colour & levels. Thats it! You can them select back to Apple Camera Default and it is ok.

Reply

Answer 4

Feb 27, 2010 10:17 AM in response to Jibers

I let the Face detection go for 36 hours detecting all the faces and since it has finished it's made a pretty big difference. Sure, I could've just turned it off but what's the point of that, it's SUPPOSED to work!
After Repairing Database, rebuilding the library and letting the faces do it's thing, it's working about as good, on a volume of 30,000 images, that I think is possible on the old laptop I'm on.
Right now I'm updating the vault, since my vault reflects the old Ap2 volume this vault update is taking a while.

On a scale of 1 to 10, my overall satisfaction with Aperture, with 10 being the highest, I'd give it between a 7 and 8, mostly based on having all the features and more I was hoping it would have. Surely there'll be 3.1 update in a few weeks that will fix all the lingering issues but for now I think it will work pretty well (for me).

Reply

Answer 5

Feb 27, 2010 1:43 PM in response to John Purlia

Wow, I installed the 3.0.1 update and I'm not seeing any of the things you report.

To be honest, as far as "after clicking it does nothing" it sounds like your machine(s) are either slow or need more ram. Your equipment description says and iMac and MacBook. Those two are definitely "not Pro-Level" imho. Regardless, if I hammer on my machine enough or have enough running that's using up most of the ram, then fire up Aperture (any version of it) I can make it act similarly to how you describe. That said, one can do that with just about all applications out there, if you put enough effort towards the process. How much ram do you have? External HD's? etc.

Reply

Answer 6

abr8838

Level 1

36 points

Feb 27, 2010 2:00 PM in response to shane zatezalo

Shane - Good points.

I have not seen any of these issues ( at least the major ones ). I have had some unexpected quits when using brushes and once when printing for the first time. Since 3.0.1. It's been solid for me.

Typically if I am using something like Final Cut or Aperture or any of the Pro-Apps, I re-start my machine before I start my session. I have used Final Cut and Motion for years and they eat up CPU cycles and page out if you don't have lot'sof RAM etc.

RAW files today are getting larger and larger and will need more and more CPU and RAM for these apps to really perform.

I do agree though, that the number of issues seen on the forums seems more than we should expect as paying customers. I also think a lot of problems though are people asking their machines to do more than it's capable of.

Reply

Answer 7

Feb 27, 2010 2:50 PM in response to John Purlia

Understand your frustrations, but I have never had most of the problems users are experiencing with Aperture 3.0.1, many people seem to paint a very grim picture of this product here on this forum, I'll often go through many of the issues here that users are experiencing and don't have that problem. Computers are very individualized things and I often say "why do they work" more than saying "why don't they work". I have been around computers my whole life 54 years making a living fixing them and never had I experienced such a good experience with a computer until I bought a Mac a few years ago. I'm so tired of Windows and all it's crap and every Mac including the iPhone updates I have ever did have always been positive. Sorry to sing the Apple tune, put I have friends looking at what Aperture can do and they are in amazement.

Reply

Answer 8

John Purlia Author

Level 1

121 points

Feb 27, 2010 3:03 PM in response to shane zatezalo

It does... nothing. As in, I click on a photo in the browser window and the click does not select that photo. If I click on it a second time (not quickly, as in a double click), the photo becomes selected and the Viewer may or may not actually change to the photo that was selected

This is not an issue of machine performance. My iMac is a Core 2 Duo running at 2.8 GHz with maxed out RAM, which is more that enough CPU for an application to register a click on an object. No other applications are running and I've been running Aperture on various machines since 1.0.

I can wait 5 minutes following the initial click and the photo is not selected or displayed. This is also not a mouse issue, as I do not have these problems with any other application.

None of these issues were present with 3.0. Nothing else has changed from one moment to the next on my Mac, with the problems occurring only in Aperture 3.0.1 and nowhere else.

You can also see another post of mine in which I've posted picture that show the Aperture window with a blank Adjustments panel. Bugs. Apple should be ashamed.

Ordinarily, I defend Apple on just about every action (I still have an Apple II with a serial number under 1,000 and bought the Mac 128K at initial launch), but the problems I and others are having with Aperture are inexcusable.

John

Reply

Answer 9

John Purlia Author

Level 1

121 points

Feb 27, 2010 3:25 PM in response to RussellOniMac

When the adjustments in the main window are not the adjustments for the photo that appears in the viewer (apparently "stuck" from a previous photo), you've got a huge problem on your hand. I actually encountered one situation wherein the adjustments in the main window and the adjustments in the adjustments HUD represented the adjustments for two different photos. That's just plain scary.

Weird thing is, once I got 3.0 up and running I was very happy. Brushes worked great, full screen and zoom worked great, and the interface was pretty snappy. All my problems began with 3.0.1. I actually tried going back to 3.0, but after doing so 3.0 exhibited the same problems I began seeing with 3.0.1, so I'm beginning to think that 3.0.1 caused one or more settings to enter some odd state.

I suppose I'll next go about trying to debug and scrub the settings. My point, though, is that as paying customers who have invested quite a bit of money in Aperture (1.x to 2.x to 3.x), the base application should be rock solid.

John

Reply

Answer 10

Heechee

Level 1

6 points

Feb 27, 2010 3:27 PM in response to John Purlia

It's annoying, yes. I want Panasonic G1 RAW support, so I will need to buy this 3.x at some point. Hopefully soon.

I tried Aperture 3.0.0 a while back, but it crashed regularly and some UI things just didn't work. I didn't do any upgrading of libraries or any such things. In the end I ended up re-installing the whole snow leopard to a new drive as I started getting kernel panics from some power management system. Now that's probably not related to Aperture 3, but right now I don't have any Aperture 3 installed in this new installation, and no kernel panics either.

I've tried Lightroom 3 beta, and it has clearly superior high ISO color noise reduction compared to Aperture 3, but unfortunately I just don't like the Lightroom UI. (I never do luminance noise reduction.)

Reply

Answer 11

Feb 27, 2010 3:36 PM in response to John Purlia

John, try the P key your looking at your images in the "Quick Preview" mode, sorry for all your troubles...

Reply

Answer 12

John Purlia Author

Level 1

121 points

Feb 27, 2010 4:03 PM in response to RussellOniMac

Hi Russell,

Nope, I'm not viewing the photos in Quick Preview mode, but I appreciate the quick diagnosis. Here's a link to a screen shot the illustrates some of the problems I'm having:

http://www.johnpurlia.com/Site/ApertureProblemsfiles/Aperture3.jpg

Note that the adjustments in the main window and the adjustments in the HUD are clearly different. As I've been playing around, Aperture seems to get into this state after I view a photo that has not been reprocessed for 3.0 style adjustments. I chose not to reprocess many of my older photos because several of the adjustments from earlier versions of Aperture (notable, spot & patch from 1.x) do not migrate cleaning while importing to 3.0.

Thanks,

John

Reply

Answer 13

wessew

Level 1

50 points

Feb 27, 2010 5:27 PM in response to John Purlia

Hi John,

I tried to duplicate your experience using unreprocessed photos from A2 and iPhoto and I was unable to get the HUD to not immediately match the settings of the Adjustments panel. In fact, changing one setting immediately resulted in changing another. Aperture 3.0.1 seems to be working fine for me. I suspect there is something else amiss here for you. Have you tried to repair permissions, repair your disc, and repair the Aperture database? If all else fails, I would pick up a copy of Diskwarrior and run it to repair your directory. Also, I have found that Aperture runs best when the database is kept on a separate, hig speed dedicated drive with plenty of space. Good luck.

Reply

Answer 14

John Purlia Author

Level 1

121 points

Feb 27, 2010 6:58 PM in response to wessew

Permissions fine, library rebuilt.

Okay, I think I have this figured out, though the process of uncovering the source of the problem has left me in a 100% crashing situation.

I walked through my entire library, one photo at a time, simply arrowing through from photo to photo verifying that the adjustments panel was changing with each new photo. One photo would consistently result in hosing up the adjustment pane and my ability to select photos.

Great! Problem one identified.

I continued browsing, then came across another photo (in the same project, actually) that — by simply selecting the photo — would crash the application 100% of the time.

Great! Problem two identified.

To correct the problem I'd like to re-import the "bad" project, which was originally imported during the rocky migration from 2.1.4 to 3.0.

Problem is, each time I try to open Aperture it attempts to open this apparently corrupt photo, which results in an instant crash.

I tried tossing out my com.apple.Aperture.plist file to change the selection, but that didn't help.

So... does anyone know how I can get Aperture to launch without auto-selecting the last selected photo?

Thanks!

John

Reply

Answer 15

RoddyC

Level 1

0 points

Feb 27, 2010 8:51 PM in response to John Purlia

Hi John

Sorry I can't help on that front but I wonder if you rebuilt the library again maybe that will reset what Aperture opens as the initial image. Not much help and I'm sure you considered it. To be honest I really wanted to thank you. I had exactly the same issues as you (not helped by some "experts" putting it down to lack of ram, etc) but didn't realise it was a specific image, as the image causing the problems was the first one selected whenever I restarted, so the fault seemed across every image.

Your suggestion it was a specific image was spot on and I generated a "new version from master" ones I found the offender and deleted the offending image and all is well. Still doesn't alter the fact Aperture 3.0 has been a disgrace. Like you, I have worked in IT development for 25 years and am appalled by the way they have released A3 & 3.0.1. It's their software that corrupted my offending image after all. I was even threatening Lightroom a few hours ago (actually downloaded the Beta) but I just don't like the interface so was loathed to go that route.

If you are still having issues log a call with Apple Support. As you purchased A3 for cash you are entitled to support for it under warranty on the phone. That's what I did with my initial A3 issues and they gave me workarounds over the phone. Hope you get it sorted. Thanks again, good call.

Roddy

Reply