Ah tiens, je n’ai pas été juste avec moi ni Apple, car je râlais ici du manque de réactivité des développeurs de Cupertino. Mais j’avais négligé leur capacité à réagir, surtout quand j’écris un billet, forcément lu par Steve Jobs, donc aux conséquences immédiates.

On peut rêver, non ?

Oh, I was unfair, both with me and Apple, because I was bitching, here, about the lack of reactivity of Cupertino’s developers. But I didn’t take into account their ability to move fast, especially when I write a blog entry, as usual read by Steve Jobs, which leads to immediate action.

I can dream, can't I?

Tags: Aperture, Apple, , RAW, Canon, EOS

A friend of mine just bought a wonderful Canon EOS 7D camera and can’t use it with Aperture 2 yet. Not because Aperture 2 would need an update (it still needs a major update, in my opinion, because it needs to gain more power and functions), but because it uses Mac OS X’s libraries to recognize various file formats, such as specific RAW formats used by various cameras. That’s because it’s handled by the system that you can preview everything right in the Finder. Handy.

Strangely, it seems Canon has slightly changed the RAW format they use on this new camera. Enough to prevent from using it right now.

And Apple still has not released an update for the latest image formats. It sucks. Big time. Shooting in JPEG is far less useful, if you need to make adjustments later, than RAW.

While looking for a release date for an update that would allow to handle Canon EOS 7D RAW format, I found this Q&A that I found quite hilarious in its concise.

Q : Does Aperture 2 upgrade version support Canon EOS 7D RAW?
Best Answer: nope

Come on, Apple engineers, how hard and long can it be to release RAW format updates at the same time as new cameras? Don’t tell me that Canon doesn’t publish their data format long time in advance, to make sure their new models will be usable by photographers the day they are made available.

There is even a Photoshop plug-in that allows importing them. And Aperture 2 can’t handle that? I’m so disappointed.

Come on, update Mac OS X and, while you’re at it, release Aperture 3! The product review is from august 2008. It’s too old, for a software in this area, where things move fast. And Adobe too, for once.

We should all go to the Aperture feedback page at Apple’s and tell them we want support for the latest cameras file format, not months after, but right now.

And that we need to have an Aperture 3 that will blow us away and rip the bad thoughts of switching to Lightroom out of our brains, too.

Tags: Aperture, Apple, , RAW, Canon, EOS

While searching for solution on how to use my old Canon CanoScan LiDE 35 scanner on Snow Leopard, I've found an interesting blog, full of neat tricks for Mac users.

The author suggests a few more steps I've followed, but it's still not working properly and I can't figure out why.

I can use it by launching GraphicConverter, for example. And using it's TWAIN drivers, it works quite well.

But it's a pain in the ass, to make a simple copy of stuff. I often need to xerox things. And the CanoScan Toolbox X was very useful for that. Just pushing a button on the front of the scanner and boom, it's scanned and printed. Easy and fast.

But now, it doesn't work anymore. When I press the button, CanoScan launches. And nothing happens. If I bring the application to the front and press the Application windows shortcut, the CanoScan main (and onlyà) window pops up, from the bottom of my screen. Remining me how stupid and ugly it is of them not to use the standard Mac OS X windows, by the way.

So I click on this window to activate it. And it disappears at the bottom of the screen instantaneously.

And since there are no shortcuts to access the settings, for example, I can't do anything.

I've tried removing all the preferences I could find, thinking maybe the position of the window could be reset this way, but to no avail.

Ok, now I can't use the "COPY" function anymore. I have to scan the documents then print them. It's long and painful.

I'm fed up with this and with trying for hour to de-install, re-install, log out, log in and so on.

I googled some more and discovered at MacUpdate that a much more recent version of CanoScan software was available. What's wrong with Canon ? They offer the download of version 4.5.1.2 on the page, while MacUpdate links to CanoScan 5.0.1.3 !

Anyway, I've installed it and now the window is accesible and everythin works.

EXCEPT scanning.

When I press the COPY button, CanoScan launches, the ugly window appears. But nothing happens.

If I click the COPY icon, the settings window appears :

When I click on the lower right COPY button again… I've got this error message :

But the driver must be installed and working, since GraphicConverter allows me to pick it :

And the scanning works very well.

I've canceled the COPY and clicked on the SETTINGS button of the main window, to check.

But the pop-up menu for Scanner is blank and inactive. And the OK button is inactive too.

Ok, I thought it was the end of a painful day, but it's still not. You know what? I have the feeling I'm on windoze…

Any help? Anyone?

Tags: Canon, Mac OS X, driver, scanner