Nontrivial Exercises

My Path to Aperture

Chris has added forums to his cool MyAppleStuff site, and I’m helping him out as a moderator there. One of the forums is for photography and I was writing a post today in response to Wayne’s earlier decision to buy Apple’s Aperture photo editing and management app, and thought I’d share it as a brief overview of how I came to be an Aperture user.

I bought Aperture about 2 months ago and haven’t regretted it one bit. I used iPhoto previously, and then tried Adobe Lightroom when it was in the beta 4 release for about a month.
I really liked Lightroom - it was like a giant leap forward from iPhoto in terms of organization / DAM and color toning. It was like a whole new level of organizing and editing for me.

I didn’t (and still don’t) have Photoshop and had been using Gimp as needed beyond iPhoto. I had used Picasa on the PC before I got my Mac mid-last year.

I then decided to try Aperture. I put off trying it because I was afraid that once I started using the trial that I’d find that I “couldn’t” live without it, and I didn’t have $300 in the budget.

But, I finally gave in and got the 30 day trial. Sure enough, it fit like a glove into what I wanted to do. I got to the end of the trial and ended up buying it.

The one complaint I have at the moment is the lack of vignetting functionality. Lightroom has this. Obviously you can do this in Photoshop but I still don’t have that. You can export from Aperture to an external editor easily, like Gimp. The problem is that Gimp only supports 8 bit TIFF, not 16 bit TIFFs.

You’ll probably never notice the difference of 8 bit vs. 16 bit color in small prints or small online pics, but I just don’t like to lose info / data that I already have in an image, so I don’t use it.

Now, I’d like a MacBook Pro to go with my Aperture, because it just hammers my MacBook when doing editing or when I move around a lot. The anemic video chip on the MacBooks is quite frustrating when trying to do any graphics-intensive work, but they weren’t really designed to do that. Saving my pennies …

1Passwd - The Best Mac Password Manager Because of Browser Integration

It was sometime last year when I finally figured out that the value of a real password manager. I was using just a few “favorite” passwords for my various logins which were easy for me to remember but not really very secure. I knew that various browsers had integrated functions to store passwords, but I fundamentally don’t trust my passwords to be stored in the same application that sends and receives stuff over the Internet.

That’s when I found Roboform, certainly the best password management utility for PC’s. I started creating long very secure passwords that were different on each site and that were stored securely on my machine.

Once I switched to a Mac, I looked but didn’t find an equivalent password management utility. I even made a pitch to Roboform to create a Mac version, but they weren’t interested.

That’s when I found 1Passwd. Dave Teare and Roustem Karimov, who started AgileWebSolutions, have created the Roboform equivalent - or nearly so - for the Mac. After my initial frustration at the lack of something like Roboform on the Mac, I had intended to write a review of several password management and secure data storage utilities on the Mac, comparing them with each other and with Roboform.

Continue reading ‘1Passwd - The Best Mac Password Manager Because of Browser Integration’