It seems as though the minimum system requirements are still in force in Aperture 1.5, which means that although 1.25GHz PowerBooks are supported, my dual 867GHz MDD isn’t, which is rather odd. Still, the hack for Aperture 1.1 still works on 1.5, but the offsets have (unsurprisingly) moved a little.

Using a hex editor (I found 0xed very useful), try changing the following:

0×0b548: 40 9E 00 88 -> 48 00 00 88
0×0b5e4: 40 9E 00 88 -> 48 00 00 88
0×17390: 40 9E 00 E0 -> 48 00 00 D8

The updated binary has been tested on both an 2GB MDD 867GHz PowerMac and also a 768MB 1GHz 12″ PowerBook, but note that the Info.plist file might still need tweaking to remove the minimum RAM check.

Enjoy !

Being a total Aperture convert, I’ve been amusing (?) myself over the summer trying to get 18,000 or so photos into something like a useable state, but being scattered over 4 hard drives and two computers (with no one drive having enough space for them all, of course) has been an exercise in watching progress bars moving GB of data around.

As part of all this I’m correctly tagging, naming and rating images as I get a logical group together, and many images that look good on camera, and occasionally on screen just don’t hold up in terms of sharpness when examined at 1:1, so they’re being classed as Rejects from within Aperture, meaning they effectively vanish from all normal views of my photos. They’re not gone however, and can be viewed in context with the originals or in a group that just contains all the other underachievers, which some have advocated using as an easy target for permanent deletion.

Back when I shot slide film I would indeed chuck away terribly under or over-exposed images (the pack-rat in me refused to let go of all but the most hideously blurred images) but now there is actually a point to having unprintable files lying around: photo books. The more basic books that iPhoto offers don’t appear to have this option, but in Aperture it’s trivial to assign an image to the background and choose to have it colour washed, or converted to black and white in order to use it as a background for the real images. To work as a background, the image obviously needs to be less attention grabbing than the foreground (hence the ability to apply a wash) but focus is also another useful tool, so rather than deliberately blurring a decent image why not have a look through the Rejects and see if there’s one in there that gives the page a lift ?

Of course, it’s not at all required to use an image from that time or place: sufficiently blurred and colour-muted many other images could be used – if an object in the background is a little too pronounced (say a person in an otherwise empty landscape) then simply place the foreground image over the top of the object. Re-invent the original background in a totally different way, and have the satisfaction of making a terrible photo actually add something to a project.