!(alignright naked)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/aperture.png! So, after much neglect on my part, I have resurrected the nascent photographer in my heart. I made the plunge and upgraded from the it-was-working-for-me “iPhoto”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ to the what’s-new-and-how-is-it-better
“Aperture”:http://www.apple.com/aperture/. I started with the free 30-day trial, and after the month was up, I had to have it.

The RAW workflow, the non-destructive editing process, the UI, the adjustment controls, and the metadata are light years ahead of iPhoto. Sure, I’m not a professional photographer, but I still sweat the details. I tag all my photos with each person’s name, I can now add location information (city, state, country), and best of all, the source-list organization of projects, folders and albums is _far_ superior to iPhoto’s one-level deep hierarchy. Add on the wonderful “Core Image”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/ powered imaging pipeline with user-definable export settings for size, format, metadata, and I have found the perfect photo-cataloguing, photo-finishing application.

The real beauty of Aperture shines with my new AppleScript that takes advantage of its export settings to create JPGs from RAW images for output to “sensory output photos”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/. The AppleScript handles export of 3 sizes (1920×1280 px, 600×400 px, and 100×100 px thumbnail). Because the actual RAW photo is not truly 3 by 2 pixel for pixel, I export to a size just larger than each of these, and then use Image Events to crop. The picture quality compared to before really is quite stunning. Now the colors pop, as compared to the old web album pictures, generated with a combination of iPhoto, Photoshop, Image Events, and—shudder—”ImageMagick”:http://www.imagemagick.org/. Take a look at these before and after.

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Metadata is really starting to come into its own in terms of how Apple, Mac OS X, and its developers both see, use, and manipulate it. Aperture feeds into this by allowing the input of custom metadata, alerting me to when a picture has been put into one of my custom web albums. While not in your face, the “data about data” is always lurking in the background, allowing me to find pictures with a familiar face or taken on a specific date.

p.s. If you’ve made it this far, please take a look at my new all-time favorite picture: “Fingers”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/lightning/fingers.jpg.

The weekend after a big exam is always most enjoyable. I have a chance to catch up on email, projects, and best of all, play with my (new) computer. The “MacBook Pro”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ is lightning quick: I setup “MySQL”:http://www.mysql.com/ and “PHP”:http://www.php.net/ to allow me to develop web stuff locally, and in using “phpMyAdmin”:http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ to peruse my databases, the query times were astonishing. Of course, my old 600 MHz iBook did the trick, but with two Intel cores running at 2 GHz, wow!

There have been some reports of display and sound issues. On the first, some have noticed a band of slight darkness near the bottom of the display. I have no such problem. In fact, this display and brightness is absolutely gorgeous. There are not enough superlatives to bestow onto my new computer to do it justice. With every new portable computer I have owned, the display has been brighter and brighter, and up until the MBP(MacBook Pro), there were still instances where it was not bright enough. That is, it did not match desktop LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) displays in their quality or light output. The MBP now claims to be as bright as any desktop LCD monitor, and I find this to be completely accurate.

On the second issue reported, “the sound problem”:http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=286970, I have become aware of it, but only after explicitly listening for it. Apparently, the sound, which is of a whining or high-pitched character, originates from the power supply. The sound is intermittent, but hardly noticeable.

To further test my new computer, I put it through the paces of running my custom-made AppleScript to resize photos from iPhoto and output them for my web site “photo gallery”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/. This entails resizing to two different sizes and applying an unsharp mask filter to counteract the softening that occurs when down-sizing an image. With the iBook, this was a slow, arduous process. The MBP, however, performed swimmingly. Even though Photoshop CS was running under emulation via “Rosetta”:http://www.apple.com/rosetta/ (Apple’s PowerPC binary translation engine), it was still faster than my old iBook.

To round out this mini-review of sorts, I should mention the other goodies Apple gave MacBook Pro owners: built-in iSight camera, MagSafe power connector, Front Row and remote control. For the first, I have found the iSight to be of superior quality to the older, bigger iSights. Next, the MagSafe magnetic power connector is sturdy and works just as advertised: it pulls out when enough force is applied. As an example, just the other day, I was pulling my computer forward on my desk and the plug was stuck behind my desk, yet the MagSafe adaptor disconnected. Nifty. Finally, Front Row, which gives users a full-screen interface into their movies and DVDs, music and photos, is handy and fun to sit back and browse. I have found meda on my computer to which I was completely oblivious before running Front Row. Naturally, the IR remote will be nice during “Keynote”:http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/ presentations.

Go check out the “unpacking pictures”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/macbook-pro-unboxing/ I shot of my MacBook Pro.

For the last few months since starting medical school, I had a number of pictures that I wanted to post to my “online gallery”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/ but could never find the time to rename, keyword, sort, and process. Well, I found the time today. Go check them out!

I have pictures from the day after my three-day cross-country drive in moving to Washington, DC. We visited the various monuments, and all the pictures are replete with the requisite “Red, White, and Blue”:http://www.usflag.org/. In addition, I have a few pics I snapped at a Nationals baseball game and a med student frisbee game a few weeks ago. Enjoy!