What a lousy week. Sunday's high - United going 5 points clear against the Scousers - was sorely dented the following afternoon when a Mac user drove his Volvo into the side of my car, which had been parked in front of the house. As if I've not said some nice things about Aperture recently! Another whole day then went down the drain trying to unblock a panicking friend's email before finding that it wasn't the free antivirus or firewall that someone had installed, or some problem at the recipient's end, but her ISP blocking an innocuous letter combination in a single plain text, attachment-free message. It was one of those weeks when you never even start one of the things you'd planned to finish.

But at least the week's ending nicely, with news of a private re-enactment event down in Hampshire this weekend, and this afternoon I picked up a courtesy car so I can get down there tomorrow for the dawn assault with muskets and cannon. That should rudely awaken the locals. And though I don't use Aperture seriously, it's still good to see that today they've introduced 2.1 with a sort of dodge and burn tool.

Local adjustment was something I thought they would have introduced if they had wanted Aperture 2 to make a big splash, rather than just halt the drift away to Lightroom. But it's here now and shows one future direction for these DAM+Processing apps.

One thing to notice is that Aperture's dodge and burn has not been implemented within the main interface but in a plug-in window. This contains the sort of tools you might expect - brushes and size, feathering and strength sliders - and it looks consistent with some at least of Aperture's existing buttons. Still, when lack of modularity is supposed to be such an Aperture strength, it's odd that they've gone for a separate, modal window.

The other interesting detail is what happens once you're done and you click Save - a new TIF file is created. In other words, dodge and burn is not implemented like other adjustments as non-destructive parameters, which take up negligible disc space, but it is an old fashioned destructive tool. Oh well - better watch out for the iVolvo again.