This is an ongoing post containing my discoveries and notes as I use Aperture on Lion. I will keep updating this as I discover more, so bookmark this post and check it regularly.
Day 1 – 21 July
I installed Lion on my backup system yesterday. I don’t want to put it on my main system for a while as there are too many potential conflicts and I don’t want to risk loosing any work. Upgrading was seamless, although I repaired permissions on my system before starting just to be on the safe side. Some Aperture related discoveries / issues that you should be aware of before starting:
a) Lion adds support for new cameras, although it’s not immediately obvious which ones they are. (The full list of supported cameras is here) It’s possible that Apple will no longer update Snow Leopard’s RAW support so you may have to upgrade at some point.
b) The default behaviour in Lion is to hide the user’s Library folder. If you need to delete Aperture’s preferences you’ll have to manually go to the Library folder by choosing Go To Folder in the finder and entering “~Library”
If you do upgrade make sure you also upgrade to the latest version of Aperture as it adds support for Lion.
Having a quick play with Aperture I’ve noticed the following:
1. Aperture now supports Lion’s full screen mode, but it’s a weird implementation of it. The animation between the two is very odd as it slides into its own screen and fades to black at the same time. It doesn’t quite work and looks a bit crap to be honest. Unfortunately, it gets worse. When switching between modes in fullscreen (i.e. between browser and image view – with the V key) there’s now a fade between the states. It’s slow and looks ridiculous and frankly makes fullscreen mode virtually unusable. I’m using an older machine right now, so maybe it’s better on my main system which is newer, but its an unnecessary animation and it looks ridiculous.
2. The swipe gesture on the mighty mouse for swiping between images no longer seems to work as it’s been taken over by the system. This is really annoying as I used this a lot.
3. Going to the “Web” section of the preferences hung Aperture. It eventually comes back, but it takes a while. In fairness, I’ve had this bug for a while, but the latest update was supposed to fix it. Obviously not.
That’s it for now. I know that might sound a bit negative, but overall, I really like Lion. There’s some really nice little features and touches throughout. As for the scrolling, I urge you to stick with the new way in Lion. It takes a bit to get used to but once you do you’ll realise that it’s actually much better and you’ll find the old way odd.
More to come!
UPDATE – Day 2 – 22′nd July
I had my first crash. I was in fullscreen mode and I inserted a card and it took a fit trying to exit the mode, then crashed. So much for the hope that Lion would stabilise fullscreen mode.
On the plus side my concerns over the transitions in between browser and single image view in fullscreen may have been unfounded. I think my machine is just a bit too slow for it – or was being blocked up by something else as I tired it again this morning and it wasn’t nearly as unbearable.
By the way, if you’ve just installed Lion spotlight may be indexing your drive, so if everything’s slowed down that’s probably why. You can tell if you see a little dot pulsing in the centre of the spotlight icon. If you click on it it will tell you if it’s indexing and how long it’s expected to take.
UPDATE – 25 July
Just a few more quick observations and tid-bits. For those of you having trouble with Aperture mis behaving since updating to Lion you should try trashing the preferences. Unfortunately, because Lion hides the users Library folder by default deleting the preferences just became a little trickier. Luckily Macworld has a handy guide with lots of different options to make it visible again.
I’ve also installed Aperture on my MacBook Air. This was a clean install on Lion from the original version 3 DVD and it installed without any issues using remote disk. I haven’t given it much of a test yet, but there were no issues installing it anyway, which is good as anyone who had the disk version may have 3.0.
I had to reregister after updating to Lion. Ignored it until now – still working. Will what’s gonna happen.
Cheers
Markus
I don’t think it’s the speed of your machine that’s causing problems with Aperture full screen on Lion. I have a Mac Pro quad-core with 9G RAM and fullscreen mode is very slow and flaky.
Give Spotlight several hours after you install Lion to index your drive. Otherwise, your Mac will be slow and flaky.
I have had massive problems with Aperture and lion with videos. The .avi videos I have are not playing correctly, and the slideshows I have which include them play them as 1 second slides….any insights..?
I am getting this as well. I did the upgrade to Aperture before installing Lion, and also did a repair permissions. My camera is a Nikon D-5000.
The videos in my aperture library appear as scrambled or static thumbnails. When I try to load them, it causes Aperture to hang for a few minutes, then nothing (no frames seen, just a black screen where the video ought to be. No audio is heard).
When I ‘show package contents’ on my aperture library, i can find the videos, and they run fine using quicktime & vlc (thank goodness they are not corrupt), though this was after I copied the aperture library from time machine to the mac as a trouble-shooting step (yes I did force aperture to find the new library by holding option while booting aperture and selecting the newly copied library).
Overall, I am VERY disappointed. I have a very large library (over 100 GB) and I don’t want to use aperture until this gets sorted out. I have lots of photos and videos waiting to be imported on my camera, but this customer does not trust Apple’s Aperture or Lion yet with his data. Says something about apple these days doesn’t it?
Try trashing your preferences and repairing permissions – I don’t think this is a widespread issue so something may have become corrupt during the upgrade process. You should also try repairing your library. (hold down command and option when starting up Aperture)
I had just this problem, and fixed it.
/var/log/system.log showed that qtkitserver was crashing every time it tried to display a video in Aperture or Quicklook. Some videos would work, but some wouldn’t.
Looking at the crash reports in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/com.apple.qtkitserver* showed that a specific Quicktime extension was to blame: 3ivx.
I removed that from /Library/Quicktime/ and rebooted. Now all is well!
Try repairing your Database by holding down command and option when starting up Aperture. Then force re-build thumbnails by selecting your corrupt thumbnails, holding down option and choosing “generate previews” from the Photos menu.
Is anyone getting problems with exporting as a psd with a colour profile attached? It seems to corrupt the file.
There are several full screen issues. Even after waiting for spotlight to do its thing the transition in and out of full screen mode is exceedingly annoying. If you use assigned spaces it is worse than annoying.
I’ve Aperture assigned to space 3. That way I can always get to aperture by using the ^3 key sequence. Prior to lion I had to exit full screen mode to swap spaces. So it should be better with Lion, right?
Wrong. When entering full screen mode that animation is telling you that Aperture is moving the application to a new space. I don’t want it in a new space, I want it in the space I’ve assigned. Why? Because now that I can swap spaces in full screen mode I’d like ^3 to bring me to Aperture. It brings be to space 3, but Aperture is no longer there. Grumble.
Then there is the sometime bug that occurs when in full screen viewer mode and I pull the mouse to the edge that is supposed to pop up the browser. Sometimes the browser pops up. Other times the browser pops up on space 3, not the space that Aperture is currently living it. Confusing? Yep.
Oh, and Thomas… I miss the pointers to blog updates you used to post on Twitter
I completely forgot about posting to twitter. I know thats a lousy excuse but I had it set up to do automatic posting on my other blogs and I forgot this was done manually – duh! – Thanks for reminding me.
@Marc: got same problem, who is going to help or has a good solution?
This sounds like a bug – I don’t think there is a solution at the moment – you’ll just have to not use fullscreen until it’s fixed. I suggest leaving feedback for Apple – they do actually listen to those forms.
@Marc: got same problem, who is going to help or has a good solution?
Want Aperture in same space, why did Apple not look at its own Aperture. This is a failure.
You should file it as a bug report – the more people who file reports the more likely a bug is to get fixed. There’s a “Leave feedback” option in the Aperture menu. You need to let Apple know that it’s a bug. I agree that their testing could be better – but let them know.
What kind of setup? Have an iMac Intel Core i3 3.06 GHz and 12 GB 1333 MHZ DDR3.
Sent a bug report to Apple, with details.
Thanks
My solution is to stop using full screen mode in Aperture. The application otherwise works fine for me in Lion.
I’ve tried to replicate the bug but It doesn’t seem to be doing it for me – so it must be limited to certain setups. If you’re sending feedback to Apple be sure to include details of your system
I have a hard time replicating the bug myself. I do what I believe to be exactly the same thing and some times the bug pops up, mostly it works more-or-less correctly (just much slower than I’d like).
I’ve left apple comments, but I don’t know if they’ll still listen to me after I ranted about the new mail *before* I found the “Use classic layout” preference item. Oops.
Thanks for this thread.. Just had a major system crash running aperture 3 on Lion. Was running it in 32bit mode too as per another forum user’s suggestion when 64 bit was dog slow. It was my first use of A3 since installing lion and attempt at image cropping hung the entire os. Could not even force quit via Cmd+Opt+Esc. Had to force system shutdown and perform disk repair.
Will try your suggestions and feedback results.
Don’t use 32bit mode on Lion. That might have worked in Snow Leopard but most of Lion is 64bit. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Thanks for the advice Thomas, but are you able to elaborate on why 32bit is detrimental? It certainly wasn’t my preference but was left with little choice when I had some plugins for itunes, and then A3 itself, rendered pretty useless on snow leopard. If it is so bad to run the application 32bit mode it would be good to know why the option to run it in this mode is even available (at the application level). Thanks for any feedback.
Lion only runs on 64bit machines – it’s my understanding (i could be wrong) that the kernel is 64bit therefore there should be no need to run AP in 32bit mode. Running in 32bit will slow Aperture down. Aperture should not have a problem in 64bit – if it is I suspect the problem is not with Aperture but elsewhere on your system. It’s possibly a ram issue. Im not sure why iTunes plug ins would mean you had to run Aperture in 32bit mode?
You should try cleaning your caches (get the Application cocktail) and repair permissions
Is there any way to deactivate apertures fullscreen animation? Its so slow.
I know, it’s really annoying. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn them off – unless anyone knows of a hack to do it.
Change your viewer background so it is darker that stock. Instead of hitting F for full screen, hit I to hide the inspector. That gives you “almost full screen mode”. Use H to pop up a HUD. You can’t anchor the HUD to a side like you can in real full screen, but you still get about 85% of the benefits without the hassles brought on in Lion.