Plug-ins
Übermind Releases iPhoto Plug-ins
2008-06-05
Übermind has released three iPhoto plug-ins to complement their Aperture plug-ins: ÜberUpload for iPhoto, iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums, and iPhoto to Archive. They are offering a promotional price until the end of June.
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Aperture: Plug-In SDK 2.1 Now Available
2008-04-22
The Aperture 2.1 SDK is now available to ADC members. This opens the flood gates to third parties who want to write plug-ins that perform adjustments like Dodge and Burn provided with Aperture.
Aperture: Adjustment Plug-Ins Starting To Appear
2008-04-20
Tiffen now has their Dfx digital filter suite available as a plug-in for Aperture 2.1:
They are offering a 15-day free trial with full availability in May.Dfx digital filter suite offers precision adjustments over its range of effects that cannot be approached by any other digital filter software. A complete edition includes the most comprehensive array today, emulating more than 1,000 varied effects and gels, from factory pre-sets or custom effects, providing total creative and technical control with the most comprehensive and user-friendly filter-effect palette today.
Digital Film Tools has Light, Ozone, and Power Stroke, three tools that appear to be available right now.
Light: Using a pre-built light and texture library that includes windows, doors, leaves and abstract patterns, you can add realistic lighting and shadow to scenes just as if you were adding a light at the time of shooting.
Ozone: Inspired by Ansel Adams' Zone System for still photography, Ozone allows you to manipulate the color of an image with incredible flexibility and accuracy using a Digital Zone System. The Digital Zone System takes the spectrum of image values and divides them into 11 discrete zones. The color, brightness, contrast and gamma of each zone can be independently adjusted until you've painted a new picture.
Power Stroke introduces a simple, interactive stroke-based interface to quickly and intuitively perform targeted adjustments. Instead of meticulously selecting regions or hand-painting masks, regions of interest are isolated by drawing a few simple brush strokes with adjustments then made only in those areas. Strokes can be assigned multiple adjustments and effects such as color correction, recoloring or desaturation, colorization of black and white images, blur, fill light for dimly lit image areas and Diffusion/Glow.
Aperture: Aperture 2.1 Released -- Adds Image-Editing Plug-Ins
2008-03-28
Apple has added image-editing plug-ins to Aperture in this free update to owners of 2.0. The first plug-in is Dodge and Burn, but may more are coming. From the Aperture Resources page:
Aperture 2 includes a powerful plug-in architecture for the seamless integration of popular third-party image editing software, such as Nik Software's Viveza and PictureCode's Noise Ninja (both available soon).
Aperture 2.1 also includes an Apple developed plug-in, Dodge & Burn, that provides tools for making selective edits of images with dodge (lighten), burn (darken), blur, sharpen, and saturation effects.
There is a new movie that shows Dodge and Burn in operation.The free Imaging Plug-in Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Aperture will be available through the Apple Developer Connection (ADC) soon. Interested developers should contact Apple at aperturedeveloper@apple.com.
This considerably opens up the the usefulness of Aperture and will create a whole ecosystem of very useful additions. I will be very interested to see the SDK when it arrives.
In addition to the plug-in, there are a host of other features added:
• Customize Default Adjustment Set. You can now specify which adjustments appear by default in the Adjustments Inspector/HUD.
• Updated Crop Tool. A simplified UI makes it easier to preserve an image’s original aspect ratio, match the aspect ratio of your display, or use one of the standard preset aspect ratios.
• Sorting in All Projects View. A contextual menu allows you to sort the All Projects view in ascending or descending date order.
• Show on Map A contextual menu allows you to choose the Show on Map by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) on an image that contains GPS
data.
• Access to Toolbar on Second Display. When using multiple displays in Full Screen mode, the Full Screen toolbar is now accessible on a second display.
• “Snapshots” book theme. This additional theme includes new “photo border” frames in which to place images.
• Flip Images. You can now flip images horizontally or vertically within Aperture.
• Vignette. The range of gamma and exposure settings available has been expanded.
• Save Books as JPEG or TIFF images. Automator workflows have been added to the PDF pop-up menu in the Print Book window to automatically generate JPEG or TIFF images from book pages.
• Update EXIF from Master. This command allows Aperture to reread EXIF from master images after they have been imported.
• 8-bit External Editor support. Preferences settings have been updated to allow you to send images to an external editor as either 8-bit or 16-bit TIFF or PSD files.
• Extended AppleScript support. The “Reveal” verb in the AppleScript dictionary has been extended to include containers such as projects and albums.
The update also includes fixes that impact a number of other areas, including import, Quick Preview, All Projects view, image adjustments, books, printing and export.To get the update (41 Mbytes), go to the Aperture Downloads page. Then check the Late Breaking News from the Help menu.
[Late updates:]
Rob Galbraith has a particularly good write-up on his site.
The catch with the plug-ins is that they work on a copy of the original image, just like round-tripping to an external application like photoshop -- they are not integrated into the RAW processing that Aperture does. This means that you have to separate your plug-in adjustment workflow from your Aperture adjustment workflow, deciding what you are going to do first, last, and in the middle.
The logic of this implementation is understandable when you consider what will happen long-term, and what Apple has control over. Apple controls its own built-in adjustments and processing so can guarantee that they will stay intact, or be enhanced (like the RAW 2.0 processing update we received recently). But the same guarantees cannot be made for third-party plug-ins, so they have to create and store the intermediate images.
The improved crop is still lacking a basic setting: Current. There is no way to scale (except by math and typing) an image that has been custom-cropped and keep the same aspect ratio. There is also no "flip" option that keeps the clip rectangle the same , but rotates it 90 degrees.
Aperture Export SDK: Missing Files
2008-02-28
For anyone who is trying to make an export plug-in for Aperture: make sure you keep a copy of your Tiger development environment backed up somewhere. I installed Leopard and the dev tools and found that my Random Wok plug-in would not compile.
It failed at this line:
in ApertureExportPlugIn.h. The PROAPIAccessing.h file is missing because it and PROPlugInBundleRegistration.h are not included in either Leopard or the ApertureSDK 1.5.5.
To fix it , I copied across the Headers folder that contains those two from a Tiger back up. The full path is /Library/Frameworks/PluginManager.framework/Versions/B/Headers. There is already a soft link for Headers that is correct. It should look like this:
It failed at this line:
#import <PluginManager/PROAPIAccessing.h>in ApertureExportPlugIn.h. The PROAPIAccessing.h file is missing because it and PROPlugInBundleRegistration.h are not included in either Leopard or the ApertureSDK 1.5.5.
To fix it , I copied across the Headers folder that contains those two from a Tiger back up. The full path is /Library/Frameworks/PluginManager.framework/Versions/B/Headers. There is already a soft link for Headers that is correct. It should look like this:
Random Wok On Aperture 2.0
2008-02-18
My Aperture export plug-in, Random Wok, runs just fine [Update: not quite; see below] with Aperture 2.0 and Leopard. The version I'm using internally has some additional features and I have recompiled it using XCode 3.0, idea being to release an update as soon as I can muster the time. My big hang-up was trying to localize the plug-in. This is a tremendous amount of work and requires lining up volunteers to do the translation and much on the management side of things. So going forward I have decided to not support localization.
Note that Aperture 2.0 no longer displays a sheet to show progress. Instead, it exports in the background and progress is shown in Aperture's tasks window. Look at the bottom of the window next to the tools to see what is happening in the background:
Clicking on the spinner shows more detail:
A new feature in Aperture 2.0 is the ability to pause activity. That plus background operation makes exporting so much nicer.
[Update: A couple of problems have appeared if Random Wok 1.0 is used with Aperture 2.0. See below]
If used with Aperture 2.0 the behavior with respect to clashes with existing files has changed. With Aperture 1.5 Aperture would never supply an existing file name. However with 2.0 it does not check, and so plug-in exports will overwrite existing files with the same version name. Export to empty folders to work around.
If used with Aperture 2.0 the behavior with respect to clashes with existing random files has changed. Random Wok 1.0 will issue a warning if random files are exported that have a name clash, as before. However with 2.0, Aperture does not think that the export has finished and will show the export continuing forever in the background. This is usually only an issue if Freeze is used and repeated exports to the same place are performed. Quit Aperture and relaunch to fix.
Note that Aperture 2.0 no longer displays a sheet to show progress. Instead, it exports in the background and progress is shown in Aperture's tasks window. Look at the bottom of the window next to the tools to see what is happening in the background:
Clicking on the spinner shows more detail:
A new feature in Aperture 2.0 is the ability to pause activity. That plus background operation makes exporting so much nicer.
[Update: A couple of problems have appeared if Random Wok 1.0 is used with Aperture 2.0. See below]
If used with Aperture 2.0 the behavior with respect to clashes with existing files has changed. With Aperture 1.5 Aperture would never supply an existing file name. However with 2.0 it does not check, and so plug-in exports will overwrite existing files with the same version name. Export to empty folders to work around.
If used with Aperture 2.0 the behavior with respect to clashes with existing random files has changed. Random Wok 1.0 will issue a warning if random files are exported that have a name clash, as before. However with 2.0, Aperture does not think that the export has finished and will show the export continuing forever in the background. This is usually only an issue if Freeze is used and repeated exports to the same place are performed. Quit Aperture and relaunch to fix.
Aperture: Übermind Releases ÜberUpload FTP Export Plug-in
2008-01-05
Übermind has added another Aperture plug-in to its line-up: ÜberUpload. It's an FTP uploader with a host of added features:
• FTP and SFTP support
• Bonjour support for auto-detecting servers on the network
• Safari-like organizable Favorites
• Finder-style browsing of remote servers with Column and Outline views
• Narrow down a list of files on remote servers with Spotlight-like search
• Permissions on uploaded images and new folders simplified
• Zip your images, individually or as one, on upload
• FTP and SFTP support
• Bonjour support for auto-detecting servers on the network
• Safari-like organizable Favorites
• Finder-style browsing of remote servers with Column and Outline views
• Narrow down a list of files on remote servers with Spotlight-like search
• Permissions on uploaded images and new folders simplified
• Zip your images, individually or as one, on upload
Aperture: How Do I Set Metadata Views Back To Defaults?
2007-12-11
The metadata view settings are kept in the user's Application Support folder. If you delete the file MetadataSets.plist, Aperture will create a new one with the default settings.
The Application Support folder in the Library which is inside the user's home folder. Aperture has its own folder. Mine looks like this:
This is also the home of many other settings for Aperture, including the keyword list, watermark images, and plug-ins. Sometimes these files are the cause of mysterious crashes on launch, so it can be a good test to rename the folder and relaunch Aperture to see if the problem goes away.
All these settings only apply to this user, note. There is another Application Support folder with an Aperture folder inside the Library on the boot disk. Here is mine:
BorderFX is here because it has an installer that put the plug-in in this central location. This gives access to the plug-in to all users of the machine. On my machine the Sample Projects folder is empty. That's because I trashed its contents after I had played with the images provided. It's worth checking to see if yours is wasting space and trashing the contents if it is.
Aperture: SmugMug Export Plug-In Available
2007-11-27
David Michael Holmes has an Aperture Export plug-in for SmugMug called ApertureToSmugMug. While that's the only one that interests me, others may find his other plug-ins for Phanfare, PBase, and ZenFolio useful.
Aperture: DNGExport Plug-in
2007-11-08
Micah Walter has released a beta Aperture plug-in that exports images as DNGs. It's a wrapper that calls Adobe's DNG Converter application, so that pretty much defines its functionality. You'll need to download the converter from Adobe as well as the plug-in.
Aperture 1.5.6 Provides Compatibility With Leopard
2007-10-26
Apple has just released an update to Aperture 1.5.6 (130MB):
Recommended for all licensed Aperture customers, the Aperture 1.5.6 Update addresses issues related to performance, improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.
Update: Later today Apple will release the Aperture Export SDK 1.5.5. This provides only minor changes. Notably there are no new APIs provided. I am seeing reports that Aperture is fast on Leopard. I'll get a chance to try it out later today or tomorrow when I have Leopard in my hands.• Resolves some minor compatibility issues with iPhoto 7.1, which organizes images by Event rather than Roll.
• Addresses issues related to metadata and sort order when sharing previews with iLife Media Browser.
• Improves reliability of queries based on Import Session.
• Addresses reliability when recovering an Aperture Library from a Vault.
Übermind Releases Aperture to Picasa Web Albums 1.3
2007-10-05
Übermind has a number of Aperture export plug-ins available. They have just updated Aperture To Picasa Web Albums to 1.3, increasing the upload speed.
Intimidated By Keywording -- Use Captions Instead
2007-10-05
Fraser Speirs, author of FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto and Aperture, is intimidated by keywording:
I made a reply in the comments that I reproduce here:I’ve never really known why I couldn’t get into it, but last night I realised: Aperture’s beautiful hierarchical keywording system paralyses some part of my brain.
Better than keywording is captioning. The problem with keywording is that there is a temptation to worry about creating consistency, planning for the future, not duplicating things etc. It’s like trying to organize a chest of drawers when you have more kinds of things than you have drawers and you know that you will have to accomodate more things in the future that you’ve never even heard of. Keywording really exists to help other people.
So caption instead. Aperture allows you to layer captions. Caption everything with “Beach trip with Brian and Jan”, then add “In the car”, “On the beach”, “In the sea”, and “Evening bonfire” as appropriate. Then caption some of those with “Down the winding path” and others with “Falling into the water”, adding “Silly face”, “Too much beer”, and “Not enough beer” to others.
Really. Don't go overboard with rigidity. The takeaway is simple: keywords are for other people; captions are for you. Ask yourself why you are applying metadata.Captions are far richer and will capture much more of what is going on. Do you really have keywords for Silly, Face, Beer, Beach, Too much, Not enough, Winding, Path, etc.? They’re not noun-bound as keywords tend to be. And there is no structure. Why should there be? No use for it. Captions are there to help you. Think of them as evidence, not proof.
Aperture: A French Aperture Site
2007-09-22
I thought I knew all the Aperture sites by now, but this recently proved not to be the case. François Couderc emailed me to let me know that he has a French-language site dedicated to Aperture. It includes tutorials, a large number of videos, plug-ins, Automator workflows, and a forum. The other French-language site I know of is Aperweb.
Extending Aperture 1.5
2007-09-10
Apple has a 32 minute seminar on extending Aperture posted on their site. It looks at Applescript, Automator, export plug-ins, and iLife integration.
Aperture: BorderFX Export Plug-In
2007-07-29
BorderFX is a new Aperture export plug-in from Reinhard Uebel. It's a beta, and it's free, but you can donate on his web site. You can leave comments on his blog as well.
BorderFX comes with an installer that appeared to freeze when I ran it, but apparently it was just waiting for my disks to spin up so it could display them, so give it a little time. The installer puts the plug-in into the system's Application Support/Aperture folder hierarchy, so it requires and Admin password, but is consequently available to all users on the machine.
The window looks like this with a preview of one of the selected images on the right:
The cog menu saves and restores the settings as presets so you can define different borders for different uses:
The Output Sizes menu can also be customized:
The main part of the controls is tabbed and has settings for the image:
And for the border:
I found the controls a little quirky. It was quite hard to get what I wanted and I never did fully figure out how everything interacted. With no scaling option it was hard to see what was happening. I could drag the image around, but I could not figure out what the horizontal yellow lines meant:
It's a beta, so I expect some rough edges. It certainly looks useful.
Übermind Releases Aperture to Picasa Web Albums
2007-07-27
Übermind continues to crank out new Aperture plug-ins. The latest release is Aperture To Picasa Web Albums. It automates the process of uploading from Aperture to Picasa.
Aperture Plugin: Integrating Localized Data Part 2
2007-06-26
Now the strings in my code and my image are localized into French as well and English, I can move on to the strings in the interface. So far the French nib is just a copy of The English nib, created when I made the French nib localization. I used nibtool to extract the strings before translation, and I use nibtool again to put the translated strings back.
To do this I fire up Terminal, cd to the French.lproj folder and use the following command line:
nibtool -w new.nib -d file.strings Random_Wok.nib
This creates a new nib file with the English strings replaced by French ones. I use the Finder to replace the old nib with the new one and I am done. Now my resources look like this:
But if I run the plug-in in French, some of the strings no longer fit:
This is unfortunately typical for English. With its huge vocabulary, English can take up as little as 50% of the space of other languages. So my nice tight interface needs adjusting.
And there is a problem with subversion. After checking all of this in I find that my repository does not contain the French files and the NoImage.tiff file is in both the localized and the main folder:
To fix this I do two subversion things: svn delete the extra TIFF and svn add the folder and its contents. Svnx could do the delete, but not the add. After a fair amount of trying things that did not consistently work, I eventually went to the command line, did a svn add of the French.lproj folder, then quit and relaunched Xcode, then finally did a commit. That worked and now everything is synchronized.
I fix the layout with IB, but don't neaten it up yet. That's because I want to run it past my translator again to make sure nothing weird has happened that I won't spot. Once the translator has OKed it, I'll peek the pixels and straighten everything.
And then there is the "Images Selected" binding. I have this set up with two display patterns, one for the number of images and one for the pluralization string. For French I have to put the second string in twice since both words gain an "s" in the plural:
When I come to add German, this will break. The German strings are "Bild ausgewählt" and "Bilder ausgewählt". There is an "er" added in the plural, not an "s". Japanese is easy: no plurals exist in the language. A better solution is to put both singular and plural strings in the strings file and do all of this in code.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
O'Reilly Podcast On Export Plug-Ins
2007-06-22
O'Reilly Digital Media has a 21 minute podcast with Richard Kerris (Apple), Micah Walter (Aperture Plugged In), and David Schloss (Aperture Users Professional Network) talking about Aperture plug-ins. You can also subscribe to the Inside Aperture podcast.
Übermind Aperture to Picasa Web Albums Beta
2007-06-18
Übermind has released a beta of the Aperture to Picasa Web Albums export plug-in. They now have several Aperture plug-ins and are looking for ideas for more.
Aperture Plugin: Integrating Localized Data Part 1
2007-06-18
Now my translators have sent back localized versions of Localizable.strings, file.strings, and images that I sent to them, I can integrate them into my project. Here is how my project is organized right now:
To localize the NoImage.tiff image, I select NoImage.tiff and get Info, then click on Make File Localizable:
This changes the image into a group and shows the targets that it is associated with:
The Resources have been rearranged like this:
Clicking on the General tab shows the languages that the image is localized for:
I'm going to add French, so I click Add Localization and select French. The French image created by Xcode is just a copy of the English image at this stage:
To get my French image in, I change its name from PasDimage.tiff to NoImage.tiff so that the code will be able to access it with the same file name and replace the current image in the French.lprog folder via the Finder. Xcode has a handy contextual menu item called Reveal File In Finder to help with this.
To Localize the strings I do the same sequence, this time putting my English Localizable.strings into the English localization as well as the French Localizable.strings file into the French localization.
I localize the nib file too, creating the localization, but just leaving it as a duplicate of the English for now. I want to see how Random Wok works in French with what I have to far. Only a few things will be French at this stage: the progress message and the missing thumbnail image will show me that things are working correctly. But how to run in French?
I go to the International preference pane and move French to the top:
Now when I run Aperture it will be French.
But when I do, I find that the NoImage image is not there. And when I run it in English it is not there either. The problem is this code:
I get the TIFF file using a path that does not take into account the localization folders (English, French). So the initWithContentsOfFile method fails and returns nil. The fix is to use -pathForResource:ofType:inDirectory with a nil directory name:
And now the image shows up correctly when I run in French or English:
Next is fixing the interface strings.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture at WWDC
2007-06-09
The Aperture Users Professional Network is having a get-together on Tuesday at WWDC. Click on the image to RSVP. I might be there.
Aperture Plugin: Instructions To Localizers
2007-06-05
When I sent the materials to my localizers I included a lot of information and some detailed instructions. The idea was to preempt any questions, delays, and mistakes. I put all the localizable files into a folder and ZIPped it for sending. Included in that package were the localized string files from Aperture itself. In that way the translators could see how Apple had expressed the terminology and maintain consistency.
The first item in the instructions was a series of screen shots of the plug-in. Several were needed to show the basic interface plus the pop-up menus popped up. The screen shots give the strings context and make it possible for localizers to work with the plug-in even if they cannot run it.
Here are the instructions I provided:
Enclosures
Enclosed is a ZIP file with a Localizable.strings file that was created by the genstrings utility. It contains all the strings that are localized in the application code. Also included is a file.strings file that has all the strings from the nib (user interface) and a TIFF image.
There is a folder for each language enclosed that contains a copy of the strings file used by Aperture. You can use this as a reference to see how Apple has translated things like Version Name. This will help consistency.
What To Do
You will need to use an editor that can handle UTF-16 encoding. TextWrangler can do this as can many others. Apple recommends this simple editor:
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Localization_Tools/ADViewer_2.1.dmg
Edit the text in the strings files to make the second string the translation. For example if I were doing a British English translation:
/* NSMenuItem : (oid:278) */
"Period" = " Period";
becomes:
/* NSMenuItem : (oid:278) */
"Period" = " Full stop";
Do not alter the comments or the other strings in the files. Be aware of the semicolon at the end of each line.
The Localizable.strings file is a slightly different format with the comment and the first string telling you what the string is used for:
/* Continue renaming after failure */
"rename-error-continue" = "Continue";
This helps distinguish some subtle differences in meaning or tense that may not be conveyed by English.
The strings may include substitutions. These are identified by a leading %. For example:
"%@ のコピー %d";
The substitutions should be left alone and just the text translated. Notice that some strings have numbers prefixing the substituted arguments. The numbers define the order of the substitutions in the first string:
/* Message in alert dialog when something fails */
"%@ Error! %@ failed!" = "%2$@ blah blim, %1$@ bloo!";
The translated message above reverses the arguments, as may be needed in some languages.
You can enter characters directly into the second string and can use Unicode by prefixing with \U. For example \U0020 is a unicode space.
In addition translations are needed for:
"No Image"
This appears in the table (as a graphic) when no thumbnail image is available for display. I will create a graphic for each language unless you want to do that. I have enclosed the graphic I currently use.
Please do translate "Random Wok". If you can!
One part of the interface has a plural that is used if more than one image is present: "3 images selected", but "1 image selected". Please provide both the singular and plural translations for this phrase. I handle the pluralizing in code, and depending on the language will have to change the way I do this.
What To Deliver
The files you deliver (Localizable.strings, file.strings, and a file containing the translation for No Image and the two forms of Images Selected) must be encoded UTF-16. Please ZIP the files together so they don't get mangled by email systems.
For technical background information see Apple's documentation:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPInternational/index.html
Specifically this page:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPInternational/Articles/
NotesForLocalizers.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000044
What Happens Next
I will take your strings files and put them into the project. For those that live in the nib, I duplicate the nib file and then will adjust the layout so that things fit. It is likely, English being such a terse language, that things will have to move somewhat. That is OK, but finding translations of similar size would be most helpful.
I will send you a beta of the plugin when it is ready so you can check that is still OK. Your comments on the beta as well as what I have done with your strings will be welcome.
There were actually some problems. I had mistakenly left a macro in my source files that contained strings that were nothing to do with my plug-in, so that was translated unnecessarily. Despite my efforts with the screen shots, not all of the meaning was clear and I had to answer some questions about some words. One of the ZIP files came back empty for unknown reasons. I also realized that the way I have implemented the pluralization of the number images selected -- providing a method to add the pluralising string "s" -- is unlikely to work in all languages. So I will need to change that.
The name itself, Random Wok turns out to be hard to translate. A Wok is literally a Chinese Pot in Japanese. So I opted for the more phonetic Randamu Wokku ランダム・ウオック. And the phrase No Image is seven characters that I am supposed to keep on one line inside a small button. So I had to request a different meaning for that.
The first item in the instructions was a series of screen shots of the plug-in. Several were needed to show the basic interface plus the pop-up menus popped up. The screen shots give the strings context and make it possible for localizers to work with the plug-in even if they cannot run it.
Here are the instructions I provided:
Enclosures
Enclosed is a ZIP file with a Localizable.strings file that was created by the genstrings utility. It contains all the strings that are localized in the application code. Also included is a file.strings file that has all the strings from the nib (user interface) and a TIFF image.
There is a folder for each language enclosed that contains a copy of the strings file used by Aperture. You can use this as a reference to see how Apple has translated things like Version Name. This will help consistency.
What To Do
You will need to use an editor that can handle UTF-16 encoding. TextWrangler can do this as can many others. Apple recommends this simple editor:
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Localization_Tools/ADViewer_2.1.dmg
Edit the text in the strings files to make the second string the translation. For example if I were doing a British English translation:
/* NSMenuItem :
"Period" = "
becomes:
/* NSMenuItem :
"Period" = "
Do not alter the comments or the other strings in the files. Be aware of the semicolon at the end of each line.
The Localizable.strings file is a slightly different format with the comment and the first string telling you what the string is used for:
/* Continue renaming after failure */
"rename-error-continue" = "Continue";
This helps distinguish some subtle differences in meaning or tense that may not be conveyed by English.
The strings may include substitutions. These are identified by a leading %. For example:
"%@ のコピー %d";
The substitutions should be left alone and just the text translated. Notice that some strings have numbers prefixing the substituted arguments. The numbers define the order of the substitutions in the first string:
/* Message in alert dialog when something fails */
"%@ Error! %@ failed!" = "%2$@ blah blim, %1$@ bloo!";
The translated message above reverses the arguments, as may be needed in some languages.
You can enter characters directly into the second string and can use Unicode by prefixing with \U. For example \U0020 is a unicode space.
In addition translations are needed for:
"No Image"
This appears in the table (as a graphic) when no thumbnail image is available for display. I will create a graphic for each language unless you want to do that. I have enclosed the graphic I currently use.
Please do translate "Random Wok". If you can!
One part of the interface has a plural that is used if more than one image is present: "3 images selected", but "1 image selected". Please provide both the singular and plural translations for this phrase. I handle the pluralizing in code, and depending on the language will have to change the way I do this.
What To Deliver
The files you deliver (Localizable.strings, file.strings, and a file containing the translation for No Image and the two forms of Images Selected) must be encoded UTF-16. Please ZIP the files together so they don't get mangled by email systems.
For technical background information see Apple's documentation:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPInternational/index.html
Specifically this page:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/BPInternational/Articles/
NotesForLocalizers.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000044
What Happens Next
I will take your strings files and put them into the project. For those that live in the nib, I duplicate the nib file and then will adjust the layout so that things fit. It is likely, English being such a terse language, that things will have to move somewhat. That is OK, but finding translations of similar size would be most helpful.
I will send you a beta of the plugin when it is ready so you can check that is still OK. Your comments on the beta as well as what I have done with your strings will be welcome.
There were actually some problems. I had mistakenly left a macro in my source files that contained strings that were nothing to do with my plug-in, so that was translated unnecessarily. Despite my efforts with the screen shots, not all of the meaning was clear and I had to answer some questions about some words. One of the ZIP files came back empty for unknown reasons. I also realized that the way I have implemented the pluralization of the number images selected -- providing a method to add the pluralising string "s" -- is unlikely to work in all languages. So I will need to change that.
The name itself, Random Wok turns out to be hard to translate. A Wok is literally a Chinese Pot in Japanese. So I opted for the more phonetic Randamu Wokku ランダム・ウオック. And the phrase No Image is seven characters that I am supposed to keep on one line inside a small button. So I had to request a different meaning for that.
Aperture Plugin: Preparing For Localization
2007-05-14
Random Wok 1.0 is currently not localized: the only language it supports is English. Before I release the 1.1 version I am going to add translations for the languages that Aperture supports: French, German, and Japanese. This requires extra files in the plugin's bundle that provide the language information.
To prepare, I replace all the messages and strings that are generated by the program and are human-readable with macros that retrieve the localized version. Code like this:
is replaced by code like this:
I use the NSLocalizedStringWithDefaultValue macro because it allows me to provide a key (exporting-images in this case) that is not the same as the string Exporting Images.... It also supports use of a specific bundle. I need that because Random Wok is a plugin and otherwise Aperture's main bundle would be used.
Once I have replaced all the strings in my code with macros, I use the terminal to run the genstrings utility on all the source files in my project:
I get this entry in the text file Localizable.strings created by genstrings for the exporting-images string above:
To provide for other languages the Localizable.strings file is duplicated and the string on the right replaced by the translation. When the plugin is run, the correct language files in the bundle are accessed and the key used in the code (exporting-images) matched with the entry in the file. Since the file is encoded UTF-16, the right hand string can contain ASCII and any unicode characters.
There are two other sources of strings that I need to worry about for localization in my plugin. First, the nib file contains all the strings used in the interface and it is currently English-only. To fix that I will need a new nib file for each language and will probably have to adjust the placement of some interface elements due to the size of the new strings. Second, I have an image that is displayed when there is no thumbnail available that says "No Image". That will have to be replaced with a new image for each language.
Apple provides a tool for helping with the translation of nibs called nibtool. Nibtool used with the -L option extracts all the strings from a nib file and sends them to stdout. The Random Wok nib file generates entries like these:
As before, a translation replaces the right hand string. Nibtool is used again to replace the strings in copies of the nib file with the translated versions.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
CocoaHeads May 10: Write An Aperture Plug-In
2007-05-06
CocoaHeads on May 10th at the Apple campus in Cupertino features John Anon giving a presentation on writing Aperture Plug-Ins. More information on Scott Stevenson's site.
Aperture Plugin Writer Needed
2007-05-06
Fotki, a photo sharing and printing site, has contacted me looking for someone who can write an Aperture export plugin for their service. If you are interested, email mail me and I will forward to Fotki. I have some travel coming up, so you will not get a response for a few days.
Aperture Plugin: Problems With Arrays and Key Presses
2007-05-05
A problem that I encountered along the way as I implemented my cache was that any change to the data always caused the array controller to load all the elements. This was exactly what I was trying to avoid with a cache, yet it was happening.
After much hair-pulling (and posting to Apple's Cocoa mailing list) I figured that the array controller believed that my array (implemented by methods in my Random_Wok class) was immutable, and therefore any observed change must mean that the entire array had changed and so need a reload. The fix was to make the array controller believe that the array was mutable. To do this I added three more methods:
These are the mutable array methods. I didn't even have to write any code for them because they are never called. They are just there so that the array controller knows that my array is mutable and so will allow updates to individual elements.
Another problem I found that was while the Page Up and Page Down keys worked on the NSTableView, the Home and End keys did not. A little odd. To fix this I subclassed NSTableView and overrode -keyDown:.
I created a custom class called BTKeydownTableView and told Interface Builder to use it instead of NSTableView. Here is the interface:
The implementation is very simple. I read the first character from the event queue and act on it:
To scroll the window to the right place I tell the view to scroll to the first or last rows, as required.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Caching Table Data
2007-05-02
Retrieving the thumbnail image and generating the text for the table is time-consuming and called very often by the array controller that is controlling the table of images. This results in very slow scrolling of my table. To solve this problem, I added caching; the idea being that repeated requests for the same data come out of memory and do so quickly.
Adding caching was relatively simple, at least to implement simply. Here is the code:
The cache needs a key to cache on. For this I turn the index number into a string and use that as the key. The cache itself is a mutable dictionary that holds dictionaries:
This stores the data I get from Aperture fine and the interface is fast again. But now I have another problem. When the random file name parameters are changed, the cached data becomes stale. So each time a change occurs, I must update the cached text:
And the cached images:
This code enumerates through the cached data replacing the cached text and thumbnail objects. Bindings take care of the table updates. -updateCachedFilenames is called whenever anything changes that could affect the file name, such as a change of alpha case:
-updateCachedImages is called when the type of image changes:
This all works well, and is how Random Wok 1.0 was released. But it still has a problem. The cache grows forever, eating memory as it goes. And as the cache grows, the time taken to update the cached data grows. What is really needed is a cache that throws away the oldest entry once it reaches a certain limit and more data is added. So that is what I implemented next.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Translations Needed
2007-05-01
My next release of Random Wok will be localized. Since Aperture supports English, French, German, and Japanese my plugin cannot successfully support any more languages than those.
Are there any readers interested in volunteering their language skills to this task? There are probably less than 20 translations needed in all, maybe 150 words total. I will provide plain text files for translation: there is no need to have XCode or any development tools.
Aperture Plugin: Improving Image Table Performance
2007-04-26
My first attempt at providing table thumbnails was to load an NSMutableArray with all the images that the user has selected when the plugin starts. Unfortunately there can be a significant delay while they are retrieved from Aperture: above a few hundred the delay becomes irritating. Once the data was in my array, access was fast and the table scrolled up and down smoothly.
To improve start-up performance I replaced my array ivar imageTable with two methods: -countOfImageTableData and -objectInImageTableDataAtIndex:. Now, through the magic of KVC the array controller instantiated in the nib will access these two methods instead of the array. In fact it was trying to do that all along, failing, and falling back to accessing the ivar directly. The idea is that by generating the data on demand, the start-up performance problem will go away and the time taken distributed across all the images as they are viewed in the table.
Here is the code for the first method:
The check for the API version exists because my code simply does not support it. There used to be a less efficient way to retrieve thumbnails that I have no intention of coding. The result of this is that the image table is blank if an old API is detected. I also log a message to that effect on initialization, so it is not a complete mystery to the user.
The second method is very simple:
The code for -textForImageAtIndex: and -thumbnailForImageAtIndex: is not simple, however. But it is straight forward. The text code gets the properties of the image from Aperture and formats it appropriately. The thumbnail code is much easier to follow:
Master images (and potentially any image) don't have thumbnails, so I have to substitute. I do that with a small TIFF image that I put into the plugin bundle that says "No Image".
How did I do? Start-up was fast, even for thousands of images, so that problem was fixed. But there were other problems. Scrolling was dog slow. Logging showed that -countOfImageTableData and -objectInImageTableDataAtIndex: were being called for practically every pixel of scrolling I was doing, retrieving the image and generating the text each time. Horrible.
So the next step was to implement caching: retaining the images and text in memory and delivering those instead of getting them from Aperture each time they are needed.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Implementing A Table Of Images
2007-04-22
At this point in the project I decided two things: that I was going to release the plugin as 1.0 in a month, and that I needed to change the interface. I had already switched from a vertical arrangement with the prefix on top, to a horizontal arrangement with the prefix on the left. The trigger for this next change was the unsatisfactory display of the example random filename and the need to distinguish between what happens to the random naming when the freeze feature is used and is not.
The final version I decided to go with features a table that shows a thumbnail, plus the image version name, the image caption, and the new random name. This is the clearest way to show what is going to happen: show it happening.
By using the propertiesWithoutThumbnailForImageAtIndex: and thumbnailForImageAtIndex: methods I can get the data I need from Aperture for each table entry. So my plan was to bind the table to an array controller and bind the array controller to an array in the Random_Wok object that contained all the thumbnails and text. Updating the thumbnails and text would cause changes to propagate through the controller to the view as needed.
So I added an array controller to the nib and called it ImageTable:
I then bound it to the model like this:
and set up like this:
The model key is imageTableData and I use the keys thumb and text to access the data for the columns. So to support the needs of the array controller I implement an array called imageTableData as an ivar in Random_Wok and fill it with dictionaries with keys thumb and text, corresponding to NSImage and NSString objects I want to display.
I set up the table view like this:
Notice that I actually used a custom class for this. More on that later. The first (image) column is set up like this:
To display the image, I drag in an image cell. The properties of the image cell is accessed via the small triangle top right:
The inspector shows it as an NSImageCell, set up this way:
Now onto the bindings. The first column is bound to the array controller and uses the thumb key to get data from the model:
The second column is set up this way:
And bound to the text key through the array controller like this:
As I discovered while attempting to bind each table column to a separate array, setting up table column bindings also automatically sets up the the table bindings. This makes it impossible to bind separate columns to separate array objects: they have to all go to one object and then use the key path to get data from separate places. This pretty much means that you need an array of dictionaries to drive a table.
To provide data for the model, I loaded all the thumbnails and text into the array during the plugin initialization. Through the bindings I was able to change the dictionary contents and have the table update automatically. This all worked fine for a small selection of images.
However if I selected 500 images, the array would take a long time to fill. Worse, this was happening before anything was displayed (since the array controller was set to prepare content), making it look like the plugin has frozen. And changes to the text caused by changing the parameters for the random file names were also very slow because they too would be performed 500 times on all the items in the array.
So another approach was needed.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Better Logging
2007-04-18
The logging I have been doing is very primitive. I call NSLog() to see what I want to see and have to manually insert and remove these calls (or mess with comments) to control what is going on. It's time for something better. Looking around, I found a handy logging class at Borkware that does much of what I want called MLog.
It implements a logging system that includes the line number and source file name with each message. This is very useful for understanding what is happening when reading the logs. The change I made to that code was to add control over the logging level.
Here are the definitions for my version of MLog.h. I implement seven levels and add the ability to revert to standard NSLog() calls, or to remove all the logging code completely:
Macros take care of inserting the correct code and extracting the file name and line number from the preprocessor. The class implements two class methods: one for actually logging messages, and one for setting the current log level. The idea of the level control is that the minimum log level can be set either by an environment variable or by code and only messages logged at that level or above will be shown.
The Implementation includes a static variable that holds the current log level:
Initialization is done in the class initializer:
It reads the environment variable MLogMinLevel and uses that to set the initial level. The logging code compares the logging level passed to the method with the current level and ignores those below the minimum:
The level setter code is very simple:
To use the logging, I add lines like this to my code:
and it provides messages that look like this that include the level, the file name and the line number:
Since I provide logging control with an environment variable, I can quite easily create build configurations that behave differently. If I go to the Project menu and select Edit Project Settings I can duplicate the current Debug and Release configurations and make two new ones:
Clicking on on the Build tab lets me set these up:
I edit the preprocessor macros to include the symbols I need to control the logging system. The Release No Logging configuration sets __BTREMOVE-LOGGING, for instance. Once set up I can change the current configuration I want to build and run from the main XCode window just by selecting it:
For this to fully work I edit the custom scripts I added to copy the executable and run Aperture, since the build names have changed and there are more of them.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Creating A Universal Binary
2007-04-15
Random Wok is only being compiled for Intel right now. I need a universal binary so that it will run on the PowerPC architecture as well. This is easy to change. I select the Random Wok target:
Then click on the Info button, and under the Architectures tab, select what I need:
That's all there is to it. Everything happens behind the scenes.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Automating Builds And Using The Debugger
2007-04-08
So far in this project all my debugging has been done with NSLog() calls since the code is pretty simple. To run my plugin each time I have been dragging the binary from the Build folder to Aperture's export plugins folder, launching Aperture, and then selecting Random Wok from the File > Export menu.
So how about debugging with the debugger? If I do a debug build, go through the same steps, and the run Aperture, my breakpoints are never hit. What is going on?
This is happening because the application, Aperture, is not being run by the debugger, and so my plugin is not being run by the debugger. To make XCode run Aperture I modified the instructions I found in a technical Q & A on Apple's developer site that shows how to handle this situation with a Web Kit plugin. In my case I create a new custom executable in the Projects folder on the left side of the XCode window and set it up this way:
Then I make sure that my build options for the debug build are set correctly: no optimization, generate all symbols, don't strip:
Now I can set breakpoints and have them hit:
I still have to copy the executable and run Aperture manually. But there is a way to fix that. I add a new run script :
And set it up like this:
The debug version is set up with a symbolic link and the release version with a copy. Here is the full text:
# clean up any previous products/symbolic links in the target folder
if [ -a "${USER_LIBRARY_DIR}/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins/Export/${FULL_PRODUCT_NAME}" ]; then
rm -Rf "${USER_LIBRARY_DIR}/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins/Export/${FULL_PRODUCT_NAME}"
fi
# Depending on the build configuration, either copy or link to the most recent product
if [ "${CONFIGURATION}" == "Debug" ]; then
# if we're debugging, add a symbolic link to the plug-in
ln -sf "${TARGET_BUILD_DIR}/${FULL_PRODUCT_NAME}" \
"${USER_LIBRARY_DIR}/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins/Export/${FULL_PRODUCT_NAME}"
elif [ "${CONFIGURATION}" == "Release" ]; then
# if we're compiling for release, just copy the plugin to the Internet Plug-ins folder
cp -Rfv "${TARGET_BUILD_DIR}/${FULL_PRODUCT_NAME}" \
"${USER_LIBRARY_DIR}/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins/Export/${FULL_PRODUCT_NAME}"
fi
Here is how the debug version looks in the Export folder:
Now when I compile and run or compile and debug, the script is run and Aperture is launched. Any breakpoints I have set work.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Frasier Spiers Talks About The Aperture Export API
2007-04-07
Late Night Cocoa has just published a podcast featuring Frasier Spiers. He talks about the Aperture export plugin API.
Aperture Plugin: Displaying The Image Count With Bindings
2007-04-05
To give some feedback to the user I want to include a display of the number of images that will be exported. I can do that by using bindings: by binding text on the window to an ivar in my Random_Wok object.
I create an ivar called imagesToProcess and an accessor to set it:
In -willBeActivated, I add some code to set it up before it is used:
And since changes in the image type (master or version) can change the number of images, I have to set it each time the export type changes:
That is all the code except for this method:
It returns "s" if imagesToProcess is more than one, otherwise an empty string. I need that in order to implement correct pluralization of my display string.
To display the image count on the window I add an NSTextField in the corner like this:
Its value is unimportant because I will be constructing it dynamically with bindings, but it helps to have a descriptive string there. I set up its bindings like this:
The Display Pattern string is what does the magic. Value1 and Value2 are bound to different key paths. The first to the value given by imagesToProcess, and the second to the plural string given by pluralImagesToProcess:
When these are substituted into the Display Pattern string, the result is what the user needs to see how many images are selected:
Because I implemented the accessors and I use them to change the value, bindings take care of doing this display updates automatically. If I select images in Aperture that include some with multiple versions of one master, the image count displayed changes when I click Master and then Version, just as it should.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Making A Customized Button
2007-04-02
The next feature I want to add is a Bagelturf badge that can be clicked to launch a browser to my home page. For that I need a graphic and some way of making a click open a URL. Since the badge won't obviously be a button, or have a button action, I want the cursor to change to a pointing hand to show that it is clickable.
After a lot of messing about with tracking rectangles I discovered that the correct way to implement the pointing hand was by using -resetCursorRects. I have to subclass NSButton and then override -resetCursorRects to define the cursor shape that I want when the cursor is inside my button.
First I drag a button in Interface Builder onto my window and select the Rounded bevel Button type. Then I create a new file and declare it as a subclass of NSButton using this code:
Then I add the implementation code:
To use the custom class in my nib file, I save those files and drag the .h file onto my nib file. This makes the nib file aware of the custom class and selects the class:
Now I can select my button and set its custom class to BTPointingHandButton:
By making a small image in Photoshop that has transparent background and saving it as a TIFF, I can have the image lay on the window background. To add the image to my XCode project I drag it onto the Resources folder and opt to copy it in.
Clicking on the image and using the inspector shows me what is there:
By dragging the image onto the button, the image is automatically set:
And finally I can add an action to File's owner via the attributes pane called bagelturfAction and hook it up to the button with control-drag. To make the action open a URL I add the action code to Random_Wok.m and use NSWorkspace's openURL method:
Done. Now if I hover over the button the cursor changes and a click launches Safari and goes to my home page.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Saving The Default Folder
2007-03-31
As currently written the plugin defaults to the same folder each time I run it. This is not convenient. There is a very good chance that I will want to go back to the same folder each time, so I added the exported file path to the defaults that are written to a read from the prefs file.
As part of doing that I changed -defaultDirectory to this code:
Here I check to see if the value read from the defaults (_defaultExportPath) is a valid folder using NSFileManager. If it is, then I use it, otherwise I use the built-in default of ~/Documents. This deals with the user moving or renaming the folder between runs.
Another change I have made is to make the Generate button do something. I decided that using the current date and time would make for a good salt value:
And here is the latest interface:
Note that since I am posting this after the plugin was released, this interface design is no longer current.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Storing The Settings Between Runs
2007-03-26
[Note: my blogging this project is some way behind the development. Random Wok 1.0 has already been released.]
An inconvenience with the current version is that it always presents blank text fields to the user. I would like to store the prefix, postfix, salt, use salt, random format, random length, and alpha case selection somewhere so that their settings are retained from one run to the next.
Implementing this turned out to be harder than I thought it would be. After reading up on NSUserDefaults and looking at several examples, it all looked straight forward enough. But something very odd happened: the values I were successfully saving and restoring between runs was being stored somewhere, but not in the com.bagelturf.Aperture.Export.Random_Wok file as I had been expecting. Not only were they not in the expected file, the expected file did not exist. It was never created.
The values I was storing were actually getting put into Aperture's own preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences. While under some circumstances this would have been the desired behavior (such as writing my own plugins for my own application), in mine it was not. I could not use most of the NSUserDefaults methods because of this side-effect.
So I created two methods: -getDefaults and -setDefaults and inside them used -persistentDomainForName: and -setPersistentDomain:forName to read and write the complete plist file as a dictionary.
Setting the defaults (that is writing the file) is done like this:
It first accesses the shared instance of user defaults and then uses the bundle identifier to retrieve the settings into a mutable dictionary. That dictionary is then updated with the latest values from the ivars, suitably encoded, and written back to the file. This allows older versions of the plugin to work with newer versions of the plist file: anything not used is simply left alone.
Reading the defaults is much more involved. The extra work comes from the need to set up the file if it does not initially exist and to manage plugin version changes. The first part is much like before, with the addition of reading the version from the plugin bundle:
Then I deal with the first run. This is indicated by an empty dictionary:
This results in a file on the disk, and a mutable variable defaultsDict with the same information. Now I am ready to deal with a change of version number:
I have nothing to do: there is only one version so far. If the version has changed, then the new version number is written to the dictionary and out to the file. Finally I am ready to set up the ivars from the dictionary values:
I call -getDefaults from the -initWithAPIManager method so the ivars are ready to go when the window is created. Then in -willBeActivated I set up the various elements of the view:
Finally in -willBeDeactivated I call -setDefaults to write the current state of the interface to the plist file.
Here is what the final com.bagelturf.Aperture.Export.Random_Wok.plist file looks like:
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Random Wok 1.0 Released
2007-03-22
Random Wok 1.0 has now been released and is available on the Downloads page. It's a Universal binary for Aperture 1.5 or later and Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later. Random Wok exports images from Aperture and gives them random names. For more information on Random Wok see its product page.
Aperture Plugin: Dealing With Duplicate Random Names
2007-03-21
Now that I am finally exporting with random file names I feel like I am on the home straight. But there is plenty more still to do: looking for problems, for instance.
There are two things that can go wrong with the export. First there could be an existing file in the folder I am exporting to. This is actually quite likely since repeated exports will create the same names for the same files unless the salt is changed. To solve that I add some code to display an alert if the rename fails. I modify the call to movePath by adding a handler. If there is an error with the rename, the handler method will be called:
To support the handler, I added two methods:
I had to incorporate a workaround for a bug: the return value of fileManager:shouldProceedAfterError is actually ignored by movePath:toPath:. NO always comes back. So I had to create an ivar to pass that value.
Although this code handles errors just fine, there is a better way of dealing with the situation of existing files with the same name as new files. I can create all the random file names and make sure that none of them exist in the folder before I even start the export. That will ensure that errors are truly exceptional (cause by hardware or other programs maybe).
Another problem I may run into is that there may be too many files for the randomness. Exporting 1000 files with three random decimal digits in the name is guaranteed to run into trouble.
So my code needs to ensure that all of the random names are unique with respect to themselves and to the destination folder. The solution is to create dictionary of existing filenames with NSNull objects. I use a dictionary for finding duplicates because they are very efficient for large numbers of images:
To that I add the files being renamed, the difference being that the files being renamed are stored with the new random name. The case-insensitive nature of the filing system means that I need another another dictionary to track file names coerced to lower case. Collisions in that dictionary mean that I have a problem.
My renaming code ignores the existing files by looking for the NSNulls and renames the rest:
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Random Wok: Heading Toward Release
2007-03-19
Behind the scenes my Aperture plugin Random Wok has been undergoing development beyond the blog entries I have been posting. I plan to release on March 22nd.
The interface has transformed somewhat, and it has gained the ability to display thumbnails:
I have been learning a great deal about bindings, KVC, NSTableView, and other aspects of Cocoa programming. Over time I will post more blog articles about its development to show how this was implemented and what I learned. There will be a 1.1 release as well since there are some non-essential features and optimizations that I want to add that will not make it into the first release.
Read more about Random Wok on the Products page or see blog articles about its development on the Cocoa pages.
The interface has transformed somewhat, and it has gained the ability to display thumbnails:
I have been learning a great deal about bindings, KVC, NSTableView, and other aspects of Cocoa programming. Over time I will post more blog articles about its development to show how this was implemented and what I learned. There will be a 1.1 release as well since there are some non-essential features and optimizations that I want to add that will not make it into the first release.
Read more about Random Wok on the Products page or see blog articles about its development on the Cocoa pages.
Aperture Plugin: Generating The Random Name and Renaming Images
2007-03-16
Now I am able to generate the random string I can rename the images after they have been exported. So for each image file I do this:
To get the image UUID, depending on the API version I call either a method that gets the image properties with or without the thumbnail. I don't need the thumbnail, so I prefer to use the one that uses least memory. To determine which API to use, I add this code to the -initiWithAPIManager method:
To generate the random string I either use the salt string or not, depending on whether the checkbox is set. Then the random string is combined with the other parts of the name and used for the rename (achieved with the movePath:toPath:handler method). I add hyphens to the name in the code above for debug purposes. In real life the format string will drop the hyphens.
This code is not very memory-friendly. Each time around the loop will allocate more memory, so I need to refactor it with better memory use.
There. Finally making random file names!
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Generating A Random String From A UUID
2007-03-12
The final part to implementing the randomness is actually making the real file names. To do that I write a method for generating a string from an NSData object using a character set and a length:
This first uses eight bytes to create a long long (64 bit) value and then uses repeated division to extract character via an index into the character set string.
Then I use that to help create the random string from the UUID and the salt:
First it makes a single string from the UUIDF and salt, then converts that to an NSData object and creates the MD5 digest of that. That is then used to generate the final string that will be used in the file name.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Creating The Example File Name
2007-03-09
There are several parameters that depend on the settings for the random string format, the alpha case, and the length. I concentrate all the decisions for these into one big ugly switch statement that starts off like this:
This sets a character set for generating the random string, and also an example string that I will use on the display. Displaying the example random string now consists of this:
I truncate the example random part by the selected string length. Anywhere that the random string parameters change, I add a call to recalculate the parameters, such as in the action code for selecting the length:
Now the dialog looks like this:
The example file name now follows the settings.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Adding Randomness
2007-03-07
To get my randomness I will use the MD5 message digest. That delivers a 128 bit number based on an input of any number of bytes. Since Mac OS X ships with MD5 functions in a dynamic library, all I have to do is to call that appropriately.
Appropriately in this case means using code that has already been written. Andreas Mayer submitted some code to the Cocoa mailing list that creates a category on NSData for MD5 and SHA1 digests. A Cocoa category is a collection of methods that extend those of an existing class. They cannot add ivars. The interface to the category AMDigest looks like this:
It declares two methods, each returning an NSData object with the digest inside. Since it is a category on NSData, the methods are used just as any other NSData methods are. The implementation code wraps some C function calls and returns a new autoreleased NSData object:
To add the methods, I create a new Objective C class called AMDigest in my XCode project and paste in the code. Left as is, this does not work, because I have not told XCode to link to the library and the function calls go unresolved. It took some work to figure out that the libcrypto.dylib file that is provided with OS X is a stub and should not be added to the project in the Frameworks and Libraries folder. All that is actually needed is to select the Random_Wok target and add this item to the build configuration:
To use the new method I also have to #import the header file that contains the interface in my Random_Wok.m file.
The plan is to concatenate the salt and the UUID of the Aperture image together and create an MD5 digest of that. I can then use 64 bits of the digest to create a random string based on the settings of the length, format, and alpha case that the user has selected.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Ending Editing
2007-03-05
I discovered a problem with the Use Salt checkbox. If the checkbox is clicked then it disables the salt string text field. When it is clicked again, the field is re-enabled, but the string it contained is gone. Looking into this further I found that if I clicked away from the text field before disabling the field, the string would stick.
What is happening is that the field editor attached to the text field is not being told to end editing. Normally that is done when focus moves to another field or control, but not in the case of disabling the control. The cure was to change the -useSalt: method like this:
That call to -endEditingFor: tells the window manager to end editing for the field and all is well.
I also fixed the name "Random_Wok" in the menu and the window title. I edited the info.plist file by changing the display name string:
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Apple's Aperture Download Page
2007-03-02
Aperture Plugin: Adding a Progress Bar
2007-03-02
So far the progress bar supplied by Aperture as my images export does nothing. I'd like it to progress according to the fraction of images that have been exported out of the total number. Since progress for Random Wok includes a final renaming step that is very fast, I can display a progress bar that goes up to 90% for the actual export and then label the last 10% "Randomizing".
To implement the progress bar I have to set up the export progress structure and then update the current values that it contains as the situation progresses. The progress structure looks like this:
To protect it against simultaneous update by multiple threads an NSLock is used. That lock has to be claimed and relinquished by any thread that wants access, so protecting against partial changes caused by context switching. The SDK comes with two methods already included: -lockProgress and -unlockProgress that lock using an NSLock ivar called _progressLock.
I set up the progress bar just before I tell Aperture to start the export. The code I add to -exportManagerShouldBeginExport looks like this:
It does some math to make the progress bar go to about 90% of its full travel when all the images have been exported, then loads up the structure before starting the export. As the export proceeds, -exportmanagerShouldWriteImageData:toRelativePath:forImageAtIndex: will be called for each image. So it is that method that hosts the following code:
In -exportManagerDidFinishExport I have an opportunity to change the progress message and handle the randomizing rename. So I add this code to the beginning of that method to switch the message and use an indeterminate style of bar:
Notice that I do some memory management here with autorelease and retain. The example code does this, and I believe that I need to do it with the way I have handled the strings too. If not, using it in my code is harmless.
And here is the resulting progress bar:
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Random Wok: Who Wants To Test It?
2007-02-27
Aperture Plugin: Preventing Illegal Path Characters
2007-02-27
Since the prefix and postscript strings will be going into a path, I also want to prevent the user from entering characters such as / and : that could cause unintended actions. There is no delegate method I can add to a text field to do this. Instead, a different class is used: a text formatter.
A text formatter can be attached to a text cell. Once attached, it can intervene in the formatting of the text to modify what the user sees. A phone number formatter would automatically add brackets and spaces as a number were entered, for instance. A formatter can also change the color and style of the text, and add and remove characters.
Since none of the supplied formatters do what I want, I will have to write my own. And to do that I have to create a new formatter class as a subclass of NSFormatter, the abstract base class that all formatters descend from.
The new formatter will be called BTValidPathElementFormatter and will prevent forward slash and colon characters from appearing, and optionally disallow leading periods and hyphens. Leading periods in file names make the file invisible in the Finder and that would almost certainly be unintended. Leading hyphens are not valid in a file name.
To create my new class in XCode I use File > New File and select Objective C class. Then I give it a name and make sure it is added to my project:
Then in the header file, I add the prototypes for the necessary methods, and add my own methods and ivars for handling the leading periods and hyphens:
The -isPartialStringValid: method allows me to figure out what was just added to the string, and then act accordingly to adjust the string and the current selection.
I need -init and -dealloc methods for my class. I use the -init method to initialize the superclass and up the default state of my ivars:
And I have to provide methods for changing the period and hyphen options:
These three methods are filled in with what is basically template code:
And finally here are the guts of the class: the code that disallows the characters. The first part sets up a character set that will be used to compare against the string in the text field. Then two easy cases are dealt with quickly:
The code uses NSRange structures to keep track of the current selection. Next, periods and hyphens and disallowed:
I'm not certain if the unichar cast is needed, but I did notice that the type returned by characterAtIndex: is of type unichar, so put it in to be on the safe side. Finally I look for the illegal characters in the text that was inserted. I can figure out what was added by comparing the previous and current selections:
And that is it for the new class. I have to make some changes in Random_Wok so that the new formatter is attached to the fields and set up correctly. I add this code to -willBeActivated:
It creates an instance of the formatter for each of the two fields that need formatting. Additionally the prefix formatter is set to reject hyphens and periods. Finally the formatters are attached to the NSCells associated with the NSTextFields using -setFormatter.
A delegate method to NSControl -control:didFailToValidatePartialString:errorDescription is called whenever the formatter returns NO. Since Random_Wok is already a delegate of the three text fields, this will be called. By coding it to beep, I can give the user audible feedback that the key press is not permitted:
And the code works. The prefix field will not accept leading periods or colons and both the prefix and postfix fields reject forward slashes and colons.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Continuous Example File Name Updates
2007-02-24
There is a problem with the current interface: the user has to type in the prefix and postfix strings and then tab away from the field to end the editing. Until that happens, the example file name does not get updated. What I want is for the text fields to update the example file name continuously with each key press.
To do this I have to set up my Random_Wok object as the delegate to the text fields. If my Random_Wok class provides a -controlTextDidChange: method, then as a delegate, the NSTextField instances will call it for each change of the text.
I set up Random_Wok as the delegate in -willBeActivated: for each of the text fields:
And provide a way to distinguish between the fields by giving them tags:
I give them numbers 0, 1, and 2. Then I code the delegate to update the appropriate string and remake and display the example string on each call:
And that works. Typing, deleting, pasting, any change to the text fields is reflected in an immediate change in the example filename.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Using Bindings To Populate The Length Pop-Up
2007-02-20
To populate the length pop-up I'm going to use bindings. Bindings allow changes in one object to automatically control another object. In this case I want the contents of the length pop-up to reflect the values I store in an array in my Random_Wok instance. Each time I change the array contents, the pop-up contents change. The advantage to this is that I don't have to write the code that populates the pop-up.
To make this work I need a third object: an array controller instance in my nib. An array controller is a pre-written, general-purpose controller that knows how to communicate with objects that expose bindings. It's like hiring a manager to run a department. Since it knows about arrays it can take a lot of work off my hands by dealing with the individual array elements for me. The array controller will mediate between changes in my data model and updates to the view.
To get an array controller instance into my nib I drag one from the controller palette to the nib file:
And I give it a name by double-clicking it: Length Popup Controller. To make the controller do anything useful I have to hook it up to a data model (an array) and a view (the pop-up). The controller then mediates between these for me.
The first thing I have to do is tell the controller what kind of object is in the array it is dealing with. "Good morning new manager, your staff consists of interns". In this case it is an array of NSMutableStrings that I will be modifying according to which string lengths I want the user to be able to choose:
Then I have to tell the array controller which array it will be dealing with. "Your interns are in that cube farm over there". To do this I bind the array controllers content array to the array of length strings in my Random_Wok object. That's an ivar called _lengthStrings:
I bind to File's Owner because that is a stand-in for my Random_Wok class. What this step does is to make the controller able to observe changes to the _lengthStrings array. The observation is incomplete at this stage -- the manager knows which cube farm to keep an eye on, but none of the interns yet know to tell the manager that anything has happened.
Next I have to tell the pop-up button that its contents will be supplied by an array controller. To do that I select the pop-up button and bind it to the array controller. The pop-up button has a binding called content that is designed for doing just this:
The controller key (arrangedObjects) is what the pop-up will observe to get its content. "Catering department, watch the manager's list of foods on his white board. Any time he changes it update the menu".
The last thing I must do is to add code to Random_Wok so that the object tells the NSArrayController that something has changed (remember that the interns in their cubes don't automatically tell the manager that their choice of foods has been updated). I code manual observer notification for this by using -willChangeValueForKey: and -didChangeValueForKey:
I need this manual method of notifying the controller that something has happened because my Random_Wok class is not Key Value Observing compliant. As a class it lacks the methods that the KVO mechanism requires to have change notifications automatically sent to observers. The array controller is KVO compliant, to the pop-up can automatically get notifications that the content array has changed.
Now the interns are saying to the manager "We will have a new list of foods in a minute -- OK, it's been updated". And the manager knows to update his whiteboard, the caterers see the new list of foods because they are watching the whiteboard, and the menu gets changed. And all along the interns don't know or care why they are creating food lists, and the caterers don't know or care where the food lists are coming from.
I try out the code and it works:
The final code for actually creating the array was more complicated than the little test I initially wrote:
This includes some extra logic to select the current length, or if not possible, use the highest length available. In this way as the user clicks around the available controls the pop-up does not keep resetting to the minimum length setting.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: A Better Way To Randomize
2007-02-18
Reading the documentation for the Aperture export plugin SDK carefully I think I have found a better way of generating random names. What I really want is a random name per image, not per image name. If the name of the image is changed, the image should still get the same pseudo-random export name. If there is some sort of identifier that is tied to the image, not changing with the name, then I should use that.
And it does exist. By using -propertiesWithoutThumbnailForImageAtIndex: I can get a dictionary of properties for each image. Among the properties available is one keyed with kExportKeyUniqueID. This is a 22 character pseudo-random identifier stored in the library file for each image master and version. Here are some examples: Nku72ZxXT1CkGAF1JoQWRQ, mQ6wSngJQH29z0+o0yldKg, Jo1HuM/bRcu3u81dVYhdqw.
I looked at several thousand UUIDs by using SQLite Database Browser to export a table from one of my Aperture libraries. Then by analyzing the character frequencies I could see roughly how random the strings are and what characters are used. I found 0-9, A-Z, a-z, + and /. That is 64 in all, so I get 6 bits from each character, or 132 bits in all. That's four more than 128, which may explain why several of the characters have abnormally high frequencies (Q especially).
I can take the UUID, feed it and the salt into a hash function to get a 64 bit number, and then generate a string to satisfy the user's needs by repeated division of the resulting long long and conversion of the remainders into characters.
So the diagram now becomes:
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Initialization Puzzle
2007-02-15
A puzzle I faced when dealing with the interface was was how to handle initialization. What can be done when?
I found that -initWithAPIManager: is called once to instantiate the plug-in and that is matched with a single call to -dealloc, as expected. But that call occurs very early in the set-up and the nib file has not even been loaded. No nib file means no outlets, so although ivars can be set up, the interface cannot. So here I just set up default values for ivars.
-settingsView loads the nib and initializes it. Once that is done, the objects in the nib are instantiated. This method is called next. But it has no balancing method to undo anything I may have set up, so I add nothing to this method.
Next, -willBeActivated is called once and paired with -willBeDeactivated which is also called once. The documentation says that these are called each time the application is made active, but this appears not to be the case. Now that the outlets are ready, this is where I set up delegates and will initialize the state of the interface elements based on the ivar values. Anything I do that needs undoing will be undone in -willBeDeactivated.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Making The Interface Work
2007-02-13
Now I need to add code to the Random_Wok class so that the interface does something. The alphaSet action is connected to the Lower/Upper/Both alpha case selection radio buttons. When the user changes the selection I get the selectedTag of the NSMatrix that holds the buttons and then update the example filename string:
The tags are set up to be 0, 1, and 2 for the three buttons via the Attributes pane of the Inspector:
And I have a typedefed enum called BTStringAlpha that encodes the values that the buttons can take.
The code for the length selection changing is a little different and took me a while to figure out. To get a number from the pop-up containing a list of number strings I need to get the integer value of the string that is the title of the selected item in the pop-up menu:
Changes to the postfix string just store the string and update the example string:
For that code to work, there must be an accessor _setPostfixString that stores the new string and releases any existing string:
If the Salt checkbox is selected I want to have the Generate button and the salt string available to the user. If not I want them grayed out. Here is the code that does that:
I use tags again for the four possible values of the string format pop-up. This time I have to update the state of the alpha buttons as well:
If Numeric is selected then the alpha buttons get grayed out, since they do not apply:
And for the purposes of debugging all of that, my example string display just shows the values that have been obtained from the interface:
This gives a display that looks like this:
Here the <1> comes from the selection of Hex, <14> is the length, and <2> shows Both.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Hooking Up The Interface
2007-02-09
Hooking up the interface to an application is confusing for beginners. I've done it enough times to think that I know how it is done, but not enough times to be sure about it. So here goes.
For the Random Wok plugin, here is the nib file that contains the user interface:
The first area of confusion is File's Owner. What the heck is that? It's a stand-in for an instance of my Random_Wok object instance. It's called File's Owner because it is an instance of the Random_Wok class that "owns" the nib file (the "file" part).
The first thing I have to do is to tell Interface Builder that File's Owner is an instance of Random_Wok. I click on File's Owner, open the Inspector (shift command I), go to the Custom Class pane, and select Random_Wok from the long list of possibilities:
It would be so nice if Interface Builder would change the name of File's owner to Random_Wok after I had done this, but alas it does not. I have heard that many changes are coming to IB, so hopefully this is one of the improvements.
The next task is to tell IB what outlets and actions File's Owner (Random_Wok) has. More confusion because File's owner is an instance in the nib file and the outlets and actions are part of the class description. So with With File's owner selected, I click the Classes button:
and in the Inspector bring up the Attributes pane:
Those outlets represent pointers from the Random_Wok object instance to the interface elements in the nib file. That's how my plug-in will control the user interface. The SDK has already created these three for me, but has not connected them to the nib file (how would it know how?).
To make the outlet connections from File's owner to the views I control drag from File's Owner to the prefix NSTextField and click connect and then repeat for the postfix NSTextField, and to the Settings View NSView. This makes the prefix text field the first view for tabbing, and the postfix text field the last view for tabbing.
Actions are methods in the Random_Wok object that are sent messages when the user interacts with the interface. Clicking on the actions button shows that there are no actions for the File's Owner (Random_Wok) class yet:
To create the actions for the Random_Wok class I click on the Add button and fill in the names for my actions:
Then hook all of them up in turn by control-dragging from each of the controls to the File's owner instance and clicking Connect:
These actions coincide with the pars of the user interface that can send messages to my code: pop-up buttons, text fields, etc. Each action I create has to be added to the Random_Wok class files as a method and declared as in this example:
Having dealt with the actions I now need more outlets. The three that are provided for me are not enough: I have to be able to control many more aspects of the interface. So one at a time I add these to Random_Wok class, selecting the correct class for each one as I go:
Once that is done, I click back on the File's Owner instance, and use the Connections pane of the Inspector to connect up each interface element with File's owner, this time control clicking on File's Owner, dragging to the interface element, and clicking connect:
Finally I add each of these as outlet declarations to Random_Wok.h by adding this code:
Now when I compile and run I get this window instead of the generic controls:
I clearly need to adjust this a bit and clean up some problems, but now it is hooked up, I will be able to start writing the code that makes it come alive.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Designing The Interface
2007-02-07
The user interface for the plugin is a single window. It's a combination of elements put there by Aperture and elements put there by the plugin. So far I have not defined an interface or hooked it up, so there has been nothing to see when the plugin is used except the Aperture elements.
In XCode the resources folder holds the user interface files:
And it is the nib file that describes the interface and contains instances of the objects it uses. Double-clicking on the nib file opens Interface Builder and shows the current Settings View:
I can remove that message, resize the window and add whatever I need to that view to implement the user controls. After some dragging and dropping, and more dragging, and more dragging, I came up with this:
It's not 100% there, but is good enough to get me to the next stage. The string format pop-up is populated with the four ways of creating the random string, but the length pop-up that follows is not. That will need to be filled dynamically by code depending on which choice of format is made.
It took me a little while to figure out how to add new items to a pop-up menu. Either drag a new one (called "Item") from the menu palette, or much more easily, just option drag an existing one.
Some of the interface elements will be disabled when they are not in use. For instance there is no letter case option if Numeric is chosen, so that will go gray. And if Salt is not selected then the Generate button and the text field will be gray and disabled.
The Example file name at the bottom will change dynamically as the user selects and types so they can see an example of the format. It will include the prefix and postfix strings in their proper positions and the random string in the middle.
I added the None strings in the text fields as placeholders in Interface Builder via the Attributes pane of the Inspector. They will appear whenever nothing is present in the field.
The next step is to join the user interface elements to the code and make them do something useful.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Random Thoughts
2007-02-06
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance" -Robert R. Coveyou
At some point in this project I will have to implement the random file names. But how to generate them? I want to give the user the ability to repeatedly create the same random names for the same images if the export is run over and over. And I want the user to be able to add more images and have the original set keep the same names. This means that I will need to use a hashing technique that transforms each image name into a random name rather than simply using a random string generator. Since complete randomness is also desired (if chosen by the user) I will need "salt" that is added to the hash that is fixed for each export but changeable between exports.
Another feature I want is to be able to control the format of the random name: its length, what characters it can contain, what it must start and end with. So I am now getting close to the point of needing to design and implement a user interface. Here is a quick diagram that shows how I think it will work. Red boxes are user input. Green boxes are code:
For testing purposes I can make a really simple hasher: one that does nothing but convert all of its settings to a readable string. That will let me examine the output file names to test the user interface. Once that is all working I can implement the hash routine for real.
I can offer a variety of random string formats. Depending on the format I will be able to generate a string of a certain length. There is an upper limit on the number of random characters I can generate for a given number of random input bits. Assuming that I have 64 bits of randomness to work with, a purely numeric random string can have up to 19 characters, an alphanumeric string with both cases only 10. I plan to offer numeric, hex, alpha, and alphanumeric, all with either uppercase, lowercase, or both cases as an option.
So far I have found two likely ways of generating the hash. One is a C routine called lookup3 that would need adapting for Objective C. That will get me up to 64 bits. The other is to use the built-in openSSL library that comes with Cocoa that will give me 128 bits.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Saving The Image Files
2007-02-04
Since my code just logs file names so far, the next thing I am going to do is change it so that it actually saves the data to disk. Initially I am going to save the files without using any randomization. Later I will implement the random naming.
The full path name to use comprises the name that I was given by -exportManagerWillbeginExportToPath: (and saved in _exportBasePath) with the file name given in the path variable in -exportManagerShouldWriteImageData:relativeToPath:forImageAtIndex:
And this works. I'm using the file names given to me by Aperture which means either the master file name or the version name depending on the user's selection on the dialog.
After some experimentation I discovered that Aperture always gives the plug-in a filename that can be written successfully. If a file already exists with the name of the image to be written, Aperture appends (1) or (2), etc. to the end of the name and gives that to the plug-in. So instead of trying to handle all the cases that Aperture is already handling for me regarding the naming, the strategy for generating random names should be to let Aperture do all the file writing with its own names and then rename the files myself when it is done. This actually makes randomizing the names easier because I will be in possession of all the information about all the files at the same time and won't have to maintain any state between naming image files.
To rename all the files at once I will have to make a copy of all the paths as I am given them. Once the exports are all done, I will generate a list of random names, and then use NSFilemanager -movePath:toPath:handler: to do the rename.
To store the names I create an NSMutableArray called _origFileNames and initialize it in the initWithAPIManager: method. Then in -exportManagerShouldWiteImageData: I add each file name to the array:
And in -exportManagerDidFinishExport I iterate through the stored filenames and do the rename:
For now I am just using a sequence of numbers 0001, 0002, etc. And I am being careful to keep the same file extension. My code is a little sloppy here with memory usage (what if this code is run with a huge number of files?) and I am not checking a lot of possible error conditions, such as existing files with the same numbered names. I will have to tackle problems like that when I write my final randomizing code.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: What Happens When I Run It??
2007-02-02
So I compiled the plugin, copied it from the Random Wok/build/Release folder to the ~/Library/Application Support/Aperture/Plug-Ins/Export folder, and fired up Aperture (with a small test library!). The plug-in appears in the Export menu along with another plug-in:
But when I select some images and run the plug-in:
That's me. I'm the vendor for this plugin, so I better fix it. After some poking around and some help from another plugin author, it turned out that the info.plist contained these lines:
and should have contained these instead:
The difference is the underscore in the name. That's a bug in the template code: most but not all uses of the plug-in name have their spaces changed to underscores.
So I fix that (and tell Apple) and run again, this time getting this dialog:
The help button works, taking me to my help page. And I can select a version preset and whether versions or masters are exported. Canceling works. Clicking Export brings up a folder dialog and lets me select a destination. Clicking Export on that dialog makes Aperture process for a little while, and then it is done. The progress bar is not functional yet, and my only output is in the console log file:
So far so good. Next I need to make the code actually save the files.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Adding Basic Code
2007-01-31
The template code in Random_Wok.m comes with some placeholders and empty methods that need to be modified slightly. By pressing control / (forward slash) I can skip to the next placeholder. The first code it finds looks like this:
I have to replace that with YES or NO depending on what behavior I want. In this case I want NO because I will not be supplying a list of presets:
I return YES for -allowsMasterExport and -allowsVersionExport because initially I don't care about the file format or contents, just the file name. For -wantsFileNamingControls I return NO. I'm going to set the name myself. For -wantsDestinationPathPrompt I return YES, since I want the user to supply that. And because the user supplies that, -destinationPath can return nil.
I do need to return a value for -defaultDirectory. I'm going to return the user's Documents folder by putting this code in:
This method is called when the user clicks the Export button. So I just tell the export manager to start the export:
When the export manager is ready to start the export it calls the -exportManagerWillBeginExportToPath: method and provides the folder path. That folder path will need the file name appended later. So I make a copy of that path in an ivar that I create:
Since I will be exporting all the images, this method always returns YES:
Confirmation comes back that the image will be exported. I don't need to know this, so I ignore it:
This method returns NO because I want to pretend that the plug-in wrote the image data somewhere. Instead I will just log what it did:
I have to tell the export manager that the export is done if the user cancels or if the export completes:
And that is it for now. What this should do is to give me a dialog that lets me select the export preset and whether I want the master or the version exported. Then I should get a dialog to select a destination folder that defaults to me Documents folder. When I click Export it will do nothing except log the image indexes and file names.
I compile it and there are no errors. A miracle! Here is the bundle in the Random Wok/build/Release folder:
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture Plugin: Setting Up The info.plist File
2007-01-30
Why write a plugin that assigns random file names? I can think of several reasons:
• It has not been done yet (always a good reason)
• There is no random file naming feature in Aperture, so it is creating new functionality
• Random file names for images posted to the web can be changed periodically. This prevents people from deep linking to them and using your bandwidth
• Random file names for images that are subsequently sorted in name order will have a random order. This is useful for creating a random image order for imports into other applications
• It removes all meaning from the file names and so makes them neutral
• The order of sequences can be hidden
On with the task. An Aperture plugin is a bundle: a folder that looks to the user like a single file. Inside that bundle goes the executable code, plus all the resources: interface elements, menus, images, strings, etc. A necessary part of the bundle is the info.plist file that contains basic information about the bundle itself.
The info.plist file in my project has already been partially set up by the XCode template. I have to edit some of what is provided: the CFBundleIdentifier string for instance.
There is a help URL that I can set that I will need to ensure is active on my site:
And there is a location that requires a UUID. That's a globally unique identifier. So I run that utility and it gives me a string:
That is it for the plist. I don't believe I have to do anything to the rest of the bundle at this stage, but next I will have to write some code to get some basic functionality out of my plugin.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
Aperture: Writing An Export Plug-in
2007-01-28
Since I have XCode 2.4.1 already installed, the first thing I have to do is to get the Software Developer Kit for Aperture 1.5.1. That is downloaded from Apple's developer web site. Once logged in it is found under Applications in the Downloads area. Since I'm an ADC member (a free, cheap Online member) I have a log-in and can access the disk image that I need. Sign up to be a member if you are not already. Doing so will subject you to a NDA, so beware. I certainly won't be giving any secrets away in writing about my attempts. Note that the documentation for the Aperture Export SDK is publicly available.
Once I have the SDK disk image I open it and install it and copy the documentation to a folder on my hard drive. The Read Me contains instructions on how to integrate the documentation into the XCode documentation viewer. It is worth following those instructions because it makes accessing it very easy.
The SDK installs a template that can be used as a starting point for writing a plugin. Creating a new project in XCode allows me to select the plug-in template:
I give it the name Random Wok and my project is created:
Random_wok.m is where most of my code will live.
I have limited tools to work with. The template contains some starter code, and the installation of the SDK installed an example plugin called SampleFTPExportPlugin. And there is the documentation, and that is it.
My understanding of the way this plugin works and what I need to do is also limited. I know that I have to set up some data in the info.plist file to describe my plugin, create and edit any interface elements I need with Interface Builder, and manage the plugin interface. As far as I can tell, the way the plugin works is that my interface is presented to the user and then everything is event-driven based on what the user clicks and what Aperture gives me. The plugin can either have Aperture write images to files or can handle the image data itself. I have to at least partially understand the dance that is required between Aperture and the plugin.
I also have to set up a number of methods so that Aperture knows what to do with my plugin. For instance -(BOOL)allowsMasterExport returns either YES or NO depending on what my plugin is capable of. The first thing to do is to fill in enough to make it compile and do roughly what I want and sprinkle some NSLog() function calls around so I can see what is happening.
The other parts of this series can be found via the Cocoa page.
ApertureToGallery is Now Free
2007-01-26
ApertureToGallery is an Aperture export plugin that takes images from Aperture and puts them into galleries created with Gallery. The latest version (0.98.4) is free and adds compatibility with the most recent release of Gallery2.
Aperture Plug-In: ApertureToGallery
2006-12-13
Apertureplugins.com has posted an Aperture plug-in that allows a direct export to Gallery. Gallery is open-source web-based photo gallery software.
Aperture 1.5: Export SDK Now Available
2006-10-25
Apple recently released an export SDK for Aperture 1.5.
What is that? It's a set of files used by programmers who want to add functionality to Aperture's exporting capabilities. Programmers use the SDK with other Apple tools to create plug ins. Once installed, they show up in the File > Export menu. The idea is that anyone who wants to export from Aperture to another application or web service can now write the necessary code to do so.
The code is currently pre-release, so it is only available to Apple developers (who are subject to non-disclosure agreements). Go to the developer site and log in to download it. However the reference documentation and the SDK overview are freely available.
What is that? It's a set of files used by programmers who want to add functionality to Aperture's exporting capabilities. Programmers use the SDK with other Apple tools to create plug ins. Once installed, they show up in the File > Export menu. The idea is that anyone who wants to export from Aperture to another application or web service can now write the necessary code to do so.
The code is currently pre-release, so it is only available to Apple developers (who are subject to non-disclosure agreements). Go to the developer site and log in to download it. However the reference documentation and the SDK overview are freely available.
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