I have a need to start working on an Aperture Edit plugin for personal reasons. For the next two years I will be working towards an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore Maryland. During this experience I will be taking lots of pictures, and developing a long term documentary project. However, in addition to my traditional work, I will be adding a component to my exhibition and thesis that has to do with the visualization of my images.

You can read more about this at the website I have set up to document my project at Entropy Art.

Using an Aperture Edit plugin to manage my digital image processing makes perfect sense to me. I can create a suite of routines, have them be customizable in any way I want, and have them directly integrated with Aperture. This will keep my workflow simple and will keep all of my images and thesis work in one place.
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Part 4 of this series is going to introduce the implementation file for our Aperture plugin. If you are new to Xcode, Cocoa, and Objective-C programming you may want to have a look at some of the really great tutorials over at CocoaDevCentral. Here you will find everything you need to get started using Xcode.

An implementation file in Objective-C is labeled with a .m extension. These are the files in Objective-C that tell the program what to do. For our purposes, we need to concern ourselves with the implementation file that was generated for us when we selected the Aperture Plugin Template. This file has been filled with all of the necessary code to get your plugin up and running. The Apple developers have even added in a few placeholders, which we can easily fill in order to get our plugin working.

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Today we are going to cover the Info.plist file. This is one of the first files you will need to edit in order to make your Aperture plugin work properly. Every Cocoa application contains an Info.plist file. This file, written in standard XML, is responsible for holding some basic information about the application, or in our case, the plugin.

Plist files are pretty easy to understand once you take a close look. Since they are written in XML they contain tags between brackets like these < >. Each tag is eventually followed up by a closing tag in the same way HTML is written.

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Setting up an Aperture Plugin is pretty easy. As I have written about in the past, you can, in about 10 minutes or so, have a plugin built and installed and running in Aperture. The plugin wont do much, but it will at least export images.

This is not to say however, that all you need to do is click “Build.” There is a little more to it than that, but not much.
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Back in February I wrote a post about my initial experiences with the Aperture SDK. At that point I had accomplished the basics. I downloaded and installed the SDK, I read through the template, and after editing a few of the template’s place holders I had built a plugin. Of course the plugin did nothing more than send exported images to my desktop, but it worked.
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For the last few days I have been trying to build my first bona fide Aperture plugin. The effort began pretty simply, I ran into a few hiccups along the way, but now I have actually created a plugin that works, and well, it does a very nice job of… you guessed it, exporting images from within Aperture.

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If you have had a chance to check out the forums section on this site, you may have noticed that I have begun to play around with the idea of making a plugin for backing up Aperture to DVD using Toast.

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