By Graham K. Rogers

With so much announced at the WWDC a few hours ago and already being reported by the many sources online (including Apple's own releases), there are a few quiet updates seeping through both for hardware and software. As part of the preparation for the new Retina display MacBook Pro, there are updates to both iPhoto and Aperture. The latter is a download of over 550 MB.

Reported as new in Aperture (3.3) are:

• New unified photo library for both iPhoto (v 9.3 or later) and Aperture; no import/export required; Faces, Places, slideshows, albums and web sharing work across both applications
• Support for AVCHD video has been added
• Aperture now lets you use camera-generated previews for faster browsing of RAW files immediately after import
• Highlights & Shadows tool has been updated to deliver higher-quality results and work with extended range data
• A new Auto Enhance button has been added to the Adjustments panel
• White Balance tool now includes Skin Tone and Natural Gray modes to simplify color balance
• Auto button has been added to the White Balance tool for one-click color balancing
• Set Desktop command has been added to Share menu so you can set a desktop background from within Aperture
• A new Manual option allows you to drag and drop projects to customize sort order in the Projects view
• New preference allows you to set the background brightness of the full screen browser
• Facebook, Flickr, and MobileMe albums are now displayed as thumbnails in the main window when accounts are selected in the source list
• Minor terminology changes, including "Original" instead of "Master" and "Info" instead of "Metadata"
• Source list includes a new "Recent" section, showing Last Import and recently-viewed projects
• Raw Fine Tuning is no longer displayed in the Adjustments panel by default Faces can now be named by dragging them from the Unnamed Faces browser to existing snapshots on the corkboard
• The Faces corkboard now includes a menu that allows you to set the order of face snapshots
• Newly designed monochrome source list and toolbar icons
• Addresses numerous issues related to overall performance and stability

The unified library will be useful and will save much fiddling about if there are photographs in both applications, but why on earth change the universally recognised "metadata" to the bland, "Info"?

I found the Aperture update in Software Update, but a heads-up from Michael Grothaus on TUAW had me running to the Mac App Store (where a Final Cut Pro X update was shown) but not the iPhoto update that I had expected. That may be available later (see update below).

As well as the update to Aperture, Software Update also reported a change to Airport Utility although the information panel has no details concerning the version 6.1 update which is a 22MB download.

Additional Notes

After the Aperture update had been installed, I ran Software Update again and the 630 MB iPhoto update appeared. That is being installed right now. As iTunes had still not appeared there, I checked from within that application but despite what others have reported, a panel appeared to tell me that 10.6.1 (not even 10.6.2) is the current version. Weird.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.