Thursday, April 13, 2006

Aperture 1.1 removes G4 iBook support

Aperture 1.0.1 ran just fine on the G4 iBook with Radeon 9550. However, the latest Aperture 1.1 update kills this support for the iBook.


This was expected, as the Aperture Compatibility Checker program also specifies that there is an absolute requirement for a minimum screen size of 1280x780. This is of course completely arbitrary, considering that if one applies the Screen Spanning Doctor to the iBook and attaches an external screen, Aperture 1.1 will launch just fine, with a minimum size of 1000x685, well within the resolution limits of the iBook's built-in screen. Furthermore, if one unplugs the external screen, Aperture 1.1 continues to work fine. Curiously, when I ran this experiment, the external screen I attached was 1360x768, which just like the iBook's 1024x768, doesn't meet the minimum 780 vertical resolution.



Even more curious is the fact that if one uses a resolution of just 640x480 on the external screen, Aperture will still load normally. Perhaps that makes sense though, as 1024x768 + 640x480 = 1093632 which is greater than 1280x780 = 998400.

Hopefully, somebody will be able to patch Aperture 1.1 to remove this arbitrary limitation. Or, perhaps Apple will finally release that 13" 1280x800 widescreen Core Duo MacBook Pro with Blu-ray drive. ;)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

What do you think of Aperture 1.1? Has it solved the issues that plagued the previous versions?

Anonymous said...

Wow, is that image the kinda stuff you do for work? How do you get that kinda shot? DSLR hooked up to a microscope, or is it dedicated digi microscopy hardware?

That looks cool.

Y (slugslugslug on NN forums)

Anonymous said...

i'm also an late 2005 ibook user with 1.5gb ram and now can't use aperture without looking for another monitor to plug, start aperture and unplug. i agree with you. very ridiculous step from apple. we just can hope for a workaround to fix this

Eug said...

saad, I haven't had a chance to play with 1.1 much. However, the speed of Aperture 1.1 with OS X 10.4.6 vs 1.0.1 with 10.4.5 does seem faster though, and RAW conversion is improved.

yonatron, that photo is taken with an Olympus BX50 microscope and an Olympus consumer point-and-shoot camera, though a dedicated lens converter from Olympus. Unfortunately, I'm using the wrong camera. My old camera broke so I'm using a newer model Olympus camera, but unfortunately there seems to be a little bit more vignetting using the newer camera. I can't wait until Aperture gets vignetting correction. Unfortunately, I'll need a new laptop too just to run Aperture 1.1 at work, much less any newer version with vignetting correction.

Anonymous said...

I am also a user of late 2005 ibook. I wasn't aware there is such a limit before I updated it. Although I tried to plug an external monitor with the help of the patch the author suggested, I still can't get Aperture working. What should I do to get it work? Is there any news on how to remove the rediculous limit?

Anonymous said...

maybe you guys are lucky with this workaround:

http://david.djsiska.cz/?p=53