Andrew's dashboard

Andrew replied on September 14, 2009 01:57 to the problem "Aperture does not seem to use the proxy settings" in Connected Flow:

Fraser,

I'm not personally a Mac OS X developer (at least, not outside the C++ std lib) so I may well be missing the point / making some invalid assumptions... so if I'm telling you something totally irrelevant or something you already know all about please don't take offence (:

Having looked into other applications that don't support PAC files but do support a manually set proxy, I came across some documentation that suggested to me that the method of getting the proxy from a PAC file was quite different to when it was manually set in the network preferences. Because a PAC file is just a script that lets you set a proxy based on the URL being accessed (i.e. depending on both your own and the destination host/port) there's no sensible response for a "GetProxy()" type function (without supplying a URL). Instead, the URL needs to be passed through the PAC script to determine the proxy settings.

Anyway, you may have already looked into this and I might be totally off the mark (i.e. I have no idea which API(s) you have access to for plug-ins!), but on the off-chance that the problem is a complex or non-intuitive API, I thought I'd mention this...

These links/examples might be helpful (or at the very least a better explanation than I've managed):

- http://developer.apple.com/mac/librar...
- http://developer.apple.com/mac/librar...

Andrew replied on September 10, 2009 04:32 to the question "Story not linked to dashboard" in Demotix:

I seem to be having this same problem... having only just published the story, I'm wondering if there's just a long delay on all the processing of Demotix stories/actions/etc...

Andrew started following the question "Story not linked to dashboard" in Demotix.

Andrew started following the problem "Missing storys" in Demotix.

Andrew replied on September 10, 2009 04:29 to the problem "read timeouts when making stories / uploading via www" in Demotix:

To add some more info, I was perhaps a little hasty in assuming that the time-outs indicate the submissions don't work. As it happens, the images were being uploaded (but the page would effectively then hang/time-out with the error) and the story was posted (though there was a significant delay, maybe 20 minutes? before it was shown on the website), despite the read-timeouts.

So the problem seems to be in fact in the user interface side of things (i.e. the site is possibly waiting for some process to complete before telling the user what has happened, which under heavy load takes longer than the HTTP timeout...?)

Anyway, I'm glad it works, but this seems a fairly significant interface problem!

Andrew reported a problem in Demotix on September 10, 2009 03:39:

read timeouts when making stories / uploading via www

Whenever I try to upload photos through the website (which I've since given up and switched to FTP) or post a story, the operation appears to time-out and I eventually get the following error:

The following error was encountered:

* Read Timeout

The system returned:

[No Error]

(on a squid-cache generated page, as I'm behind a proxy)

This seems to occur for operations that take some period of time, so perhaps the server-side is not responding fast enough and my connection is left hanging while the server processes... something...?

Andrew started following the idea "Streamline the upload" in Demotix.

Andrew started following the idea "Drag and drop - Pimp up my uploads." in Demotix.

Andrew started following the problem "no popup box after upload" in Demotix.

Andrew replied on September 03, 2009 01:39 to the problem "Aperture does not seem to use the proxy settings" in Connected Flow:

I too have found the problem to occur with PAC files (still — not sure if you/Apple have done anything to resolve this since the bug was reported?)

If I set the proxy manually, it works fine (which I was very pleased to discover) but I still feel the PAC file should be workable...

My pac file can be found at http://www.usyd.edu.au/proxy.pac (I'm fairly sure it's publicly accessible)

Andrew reported a problem in Connected Flow on August 10, 2009 05:00:

Images and Titles not matched properly in Group Image view

When viewing images in Darkslide in the 'Groups' view, the titles do not match up to the images in each row. Each title is one row higher than it should be, such that the Nth image has the [N+1]th title. The first image, for example, has the title of the second image.

I believe the same bug has the added effect of crashing the application when you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page in this Group Images view (presumably because you're attempting to access a title beyond the end of the data structure).

Andrew started following the question "Upload to multiple sets?" in Connected Flow.

Andrew replied on August 10, 2009 03:15 to the question "Lens Model Exif data missing when exporting from Aperture" in Connected Flow:

There seems to be a bug in Aperture where not all the EXIF data is included when exporting versions. The most notable ones are those you mentioned (i.e. lens information) but there are quite a large number left out.

Since FlickrExport uploads the exported version, this Aperture bug affects the files uploaded by FlickrExport (and would also affect any export plug-in that does not export Master images). Note that unless you make no changes at all to your images (including titles, captions, all metadata/keywords, crops, adjustments of any kind) then exporting Master images wouldn't be appropriate, so that wouldn't necessarily be a solution either.

For now, I think the best thing to do is report a bug to Apple asking them to fix the EXIF data in exported versions. Let them know which data is missing that you want resolved.

Andrew replied on July 20, 2009 17:02 to the question "Set Flickr "Title" from "Version Name" ?" in Connected Flow:

Well I'm glad I found this — I'd overlooked it in the options when I first bought Flickr Export and had been annoyed by the title not getting set from my metadata.

I personally think the Version Name is more appropriate, as this seems the logical place to title an image when using Aperture.

I get the feeling that IPTC metadata is more of a 'pro' feature in Aperture (perhaps just because I don't use them), which is why it seems the less obvious default for the unpaid (non-pro) version to me...

Andrew started following the question "Feature change request: bigger thumbnails please!" in Connected Flow.

Andrew started following the idea "FlickrExport should Import metadata back into Aperture" in Connected Flow.

Andrew asked a question in Connected Flow on July 20, 2009 16:47:

long pauses at 100% CPU when uploading many images

When uploading a very large number of photos (say 400ish) using Flickr Export 3 for Aperture, it stalls for about 30 seconds between each photo using 100% CPU. In the Activity Window, the 'Description' of the FlickrExport activity states "Updating your photoset.". This only seems to happen when uploading large sets, but happens reliably after every single image. For a recent upload, this effectively doubled the total time taken to post the images to Flickr.

The workaround is to split the uploading up into smaller batches of about 50, but this means tending to the computer to start the next batch on a regular basis.

A comment on the question "Write GPS metadata back to Apterture" in Connected Flow:

"Aperture simply doesn't allow plugins to modify the actual EXIF fields directly."

This can't be entirely true, since the Aperture plugin "Maperture" does precisely this! It lets you select the location on Google Maps and modifies the EXIF data in the original images. Perhaps Aperture has been updated to allow this since the original post was made, so hopefully this issue could now be resolved in a better way? – Andrew, on July 20, 2009 16:36