On October 23, 2012 Apple held a media event in San Jose, CA where they launched the iPad Mini, the new iPad (4), a new MacBook Pro 13ʺ with Retina Display, a new iMac, a new Mac Mini, and updates to iBooks and iBooks Author.

This is one of those “everyone know’s it’s there” tips… until you don’t!

For a while I had noticed that the ability to filter by star ratings, or anything else, as well as the ability to toggle between Filmstrip, Grid and List view, were missing from Aperture whenever I was in Split View view. Since I know most of the keyboard shortcuts for this, I never put too much thought into it. On the rare occasions when I needed something I couldn’t use a shortcut for, I’d switch to Browser view to get to the commands.

Notice anything missing? There are no “Sort & Filter Controls” here!

Finally today I decided this was silly, and to figure out where the controls went. I’d seen them on another installation so I knew they hadn’t been removed from the app. So where the heck were they?

It’s not under Window menu

The Window menu offers the option to hide or show the Control Bar and the Keyword Controls and the Inspector, as well as ways to toggle between various views of those UI elements. But nowhere in there was the view I was missing.[more]

IMPORTANT UPDATE — SCROLL DOWN

ApertureExpert community, I could use your help on this one.

I finally recorded again! This Live Training was another not-so-live-training, I’m sorry to say. My schedule has been a bit manic lately and finding the time to actually schedule these in advance has gotten tricky. Plus, I’m still not in love with Google Hangouts, and just may have to go back to the GoToWebinar system (assuming it’s even working OK these days).

Aperture Inspector was just updated to 1.2 today, which is a free update to all current users.

Don’t know what Aperture Inspector is? Read all about it here!

We recommended that you back up your 3rd party plug-in presets prior to the Aperture 3.4 upgrade, but of course many had already upgraded or never saw the notice. I don’t fully understand why, but I’ve been told it has something to do with “sandboxing” in how Aperture 3.4 (and Mountain Lion, perhaps?) handles 3rd party software or software that accesses other applications (i.e.

Faces isn’t a feature I talk about much, mostly because it’s virtually unusable for me. I’ve stated before that I really want Faces to be project-specific, meaning I can turn it off on projects such as concerts I shoot that have 30,000 faces in the audience! I love, love, love the concept of Faces, but in reality on a Library like mine (and I’m sure many of yours), with so many faces and so many photos, there’s a point where it becomes unusable.

A tiny little update, but sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered…

Per the installer screen: 

I know, it’s not Aperture specifically, but it’s close enough, yeah? ;-)

Unfortunately I am not on my main system so can’t confirm this myself, however multiple readers have reported losing presets in 3rd party plug-ins for Aperture, along with the plug-in registration. Registration is of course easy enough to rectify — just re-enter your serial number — but lost presets are something else entirely.

There have been many reports here of issues with Aperture crashing after the Aperture 3.4 upgrade. Some reported fixing it by reinstalling the app, while others reported it fixed by trashing the preferences.

For those of you that trashed the preferences — your fix is only temporary. You will need to reinstall the app. Just delete it and re-download from the App store.

Readers,

Can those of you experiencing the “Highlight Tone Priority” issue (discussed at length here) please report back as to whether the Aperture 3.4 update addressed the problem? Since there was an update to the RAW engine, I have high hopes that this was fixed.

Let us know in the comments please!

Aperture 3.4 has been released, with support for the new Shared Photo Stream that’s part of iOS 6, a menu command to open your library in iPhoto, and general “performance and stability improvements”.

The morning news shows that Google has acquired my favorite plug-in company, Nik Software.

The fine folks over at onOne Software have provided a 15% discount code for ApertureExpert readers! Gotta love a little discount… click on through here and use the code ApertureExpert on checkout. Schwing!