Roadster: 1/25s f/6.3 ISO400 55mm, Canon 30D, EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8

It's been a week since I went to the Los Gatos Apple store and picked up my copy of Leopard. But I'm not running it yet. I'm waiting for three things: an update to SuperDuper, some fixes for RapidWeaver, and an update to Aperture. All have some issues, or at least the potential of issues, when running under Leopard and since these are critical applications for me, I have to wait until they are ready.

The Apple discussions have reports of some odd problems with Aperture running on Leopard. Some people cannot launch the application beyond the splash screen. Others get crashes at the same point. Some can see their images, but get a crash as soon as they try to do anything with them. I've seen some problems fixed by turning off Time Machine, but others not. It's hard to distinguish one cause from another because the hardware configurations are so different. My suspicion is that graphics drivers are at least partly involved, but people have been able to fix some problems by ignoring ownership on firewire volumes. Suggestions are that Prokit and corrupted images are to blame as well.

The menu bar can vanish too. Some people have found that font duplicates were the cause. Others find that Leopard is thinking their video card is unsupported and once they get past that the menus come back. Spaces causes some odd interactions with Full screen in Aperture, but this is not specifically an Aperture issue. It interacts strangely with a number of applications. One person had problems with a color picker preventing Aperture preferences appearing. There are clearly many ways that all manner of easily forgotten additions cause problems under Leopard.

Meanwhile I've been booting into a copy of Leopard installed on another partition and playing with it there. I've already made a snapshot of my Tiger drive that I will keep for at least six months: that's my insurance in case of corruption or my own stupidity. When I do move over, I'll do all the requisite back ups and checks, clean out my fonts, remove all the non-standard preference panes and start-up items, unplug all the peripherals, etc. and then do an update install. The next step will be to test everything that's critical to make sure I don't need to revert and go forward with my fingers crossed.

Tags: Leopard, Early Adopters, Aperture, SuperDuper, Time Machine, RapidWeaver

Apple warns against using Time machine with Aperture running: "may lead to inconsistencies in the Aperture database". You can exclude items from Time Machine, but then even if this works, Aperture images will not get backed up.

I'm sticking with Tiger for a while and running Leopard off another partition to test things. One problem with doing this I have found is the Spotlight indexes are incompatible: each reboot will cause Spotlight to reindex all my drives.

Tags: Aperture, Backing Up, Time Machine, Leopard