Archive for September 6, 2008

Saturday, September 6, 2008

How to Report a Bug in a Mac OS X Application

Steven Frank:

Bugs happen. It’s a fact of life. Although you may not be in the mood at the exact moment they strike, the best possible thing you can do is file a bug report with the developer. You may not get an immediate solution, but you will provide extremely valuable forensic information that should help the developer fix the problem over the long term. Here’s how to report a bug effectively.

Digital-Image Color Spaces

Jeffrey Friedl (of regular expressions fame) has a great article about color spaces, color profiles, and color management. I particularly like page 2, which lets you test your Web browser’s support for embedded color profiles.

I found his article while searching for the answer to a color problem on my MacBook Pro. My photos looked OK in Aperture’s Viewer and in Photoshop Elements, but in Aperture’s Full Screen mode and in other color-managed applications such as Preview and Safari, they appeared super-saturated. The solution was to open ColorSync Utility and set my external display as the default display device. Now the photos look correct, and they’re consistent from application to application. Although Apple classifies this as an Aperture issue, it seems to me to be an OS-level problem—and a longstanding one judging by the date on the support page. There are lots of threads in Apple’s discussion groups from other people who’ve encountered it.