My new app - Aperture Assistant

[Ian Wood]

Hi all,

Some of you may remember the help I got on the list a few months ago  
regarding finding dupes from long lists...

Finally, you can see the app this was for as it's now in public beta  
testing:

http://aperture-assistant.com

Aperture Assistant is an automation helper for Apple's Aperture  
program, which allows the user to set up complex workflows by building  
drag-n-drop flowcharts.


On to Rev stuff.

This is by far my most complex app so far, and a LOT of thanks go out  
to all the people on this list. Due to the large number of functions  
(some of which get used elsewhere) it's mostly based on a series of  
library stacks for the heavy lifting:

apertureLib does all the interaction with Aperture, in many cases via  
AppleScript but also with a lot of direct access to the SQLite3 DB for  
faster access to data, and to data that Aperture's dictionary doesn't  
reveal. It's running at ~2,400 lines of code split between 95  
handlers, most of which have to split depending on the version of  
Aperture that's running.

There's a visuals library that currently just fades stacks in and out  
nicely using a repeat and the blendlevel, but that's only 20 lines or  
so.

Next is a little logging library which keeps a timed log whenever it's  
called to help with speed optimisations by finding the chokepoints,  
there's also a second log which can be added to and eventually shown  
to the end user with some formatting, showing exactly what happened at  
each step of the flowchart.

Then there's a Burn Folder library which copies a 'template' OS X Burn  
Folder out of the app package into the regular Finder and adds files  
to it until it would be full, then copies the template folder again.

Finally, a library for adding image files and text to Keynote  
presentations, but this one is really rough around the edges,  
currently using GUI scripting to move things around on each slide.

If anyone's interested in the log, burn and Keynote libraries I can  
stick them up on RevOnline with a few comments to get people started.

Special thanks go to Ken Ray for his XML library and Trevor DeVore for  
the QT external, although it's not used in this app. Scott Rossi will  
find the main prgoress indicator looks... 'familiar'. ;-) And of  
course Runrev!


Now to go do some more screengrabs and videocasts...

Ian

P.S. The 'export snapshot from object' function came in really handy  
when generating a lot of the documentation images on the website.