Easily check for App Store updates in iTunes

finermac:

Instead of mousing to the ‘Check For Updates’ text button at the bottom of the Apps section of iTunes 10, you can simply hit ⌘-R to run the check.

Strangely, I cannot find this command anywhere iTunes’ menu system besides the main app menu, but that’s for checking on iTunes updates, not app updates. Plus, ⌘-R is set for the Store > Reload Page command, but then, only when you’re in the store; it’s grayed out when viewing your apps.

The times I had to manually hit the refresh button!

Great tip.

iTunes user interface changes

As every year Apple changed the UI of iTunes upon release of the new major version.

While I wasn’t very fond of last years revision, I really like what they have done this time, even if some of it still needs some work:

 
Immediately after the first screenshot of iTunes 10’s window was shown during the demo, there was an outcry among users, that Apple arranged the ‘traffic lights’ (buttons for close, maximise, minimise) vertically.
Yes it’s unusual, and Apple ignores their own interface guidelines here, but I like it, because it saves some space; and should I ever get tired of it; there’s already a “fix” that brings back the old look.

The redesign of the capacity gauge for iDevices looks absolutely gorgeous in my opinion.

Apple’s choice to bring back the blue-ish graphite look for the application has me wondering, but it does make for a clean look.

The interface does still need some polish, though. The sync button is but one example of impurities in the UI.

What’s more important — and far more annoying — is the new way album art is being displayed. Having been touted as revolutionary and useful by Steve Jobs during the keynote, I will admit that I like the idea, but the execution is far from perfect:
No matter how big or small you set the cover image to be, if the album title is slightly too long, it’ll be cut off. The only way to remedy this, is to widen the column, sacrificing a lot a screen real estate for grey-ish space.
Placing the album title atop the album art would allow for a much more efficient use of space.

All things considered this update brings a few welcome features to iTunes, gives it a great new UI and some welcome performance improvements.
I don’t like the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach Apple has been taking with iTunes for years now, but this update makes the feature overload bearable and more usable for me. 

Solution for my iTunes-Aperture problem

Yesterday I posted about the dilemma of having multiple Aperture libraries and synchronisation with the iPhone through iTunes.
The solution was obvious, but unfortunately the process requires many manual steps (perhaps I can use Automator to alleviate this problem):

1. Install iPhoto and create an iPhoto library.
2. Advise iTunes to synchronise with iPhoto.
3. Optional: Choose between synchronising all events from iPhoto or just selected ones.
4. Select pictures from an event in Aperture that you want on the iPhone and create an Album (name aptly).
5. Select all pictures from the album and export* to a folder, name folder according to the album name.
6. Drag the newly created folder into iPhoto, an event will be created, named like the folder.
7. Sync you iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad using iTunes.

I opted for using events, not albums in iPhoto and there are good reasons for this: iPhoto will do the sorting work (by date) and events on the iPhone are sorted by date, while albums are not.

In order not to have wallpapers get lost amidst all the other events, I changed the date of the images inside it to a point far in the future.

* I chose to export the work copies to JPEG with a high quality setting but a maximum height/width setting of 1440px. For this I duplicated and modified one of Apertures built-in export settings. That way I get image files on the iPhone 4 that I can zoom into.

On a side note; I switched to using Aperture 3’s built-in backup system, in favour of using TimeMachine to backup my library files. Again, it demands for a few clicks more on my side, but I find it to be more flexible.

Aperture 3, iTunes and multiple libraries

I’ve been happily using Aperture 3 for a couple of months now and everything worked fine for some time. A few weeks ago I decided to split up my one giant (~80GB) database file into smaller ones, to reduce the load on the CPU and RAM and the load times.

While this house cleaning had the positive effects I had hoped for, it also has a snag; you cannot synchronise the iPhone with multiple Aperture libraries through iTunes — or iPhoto libraries for that matter.

Since I do like to have wallpapers for the iPhone, a selection of my favourite LOLcat pics — don’t judge me — and quite a few photos with me at all times, I’ll have to find a workaround.

Rejoining the Aperture libraries is out of the question, which means that I’m going to install iPhoto again and use it to synchronise pictures to my iPhone. It means I’m going to have to export all photos that I want on the device to iPhoto first, but maybe this separation isn’t such a bad idea.