Command Shift Q

Since writing the below review, Andreas Schwarz, gBroswer’s developer, has implemented one or two of my suggestions for how gBrowser might be improved. See the end of the article for details.

Ever since OS X Tiger 10.4, the beloved Finder has come on leaps and bounds in terms of giving us a clear view of what folders and files contain. QuickLook, first in Leopard and now much quicker in Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 takes file previewing to a whole new level. But Finder still isn’t quite there in terms of quickly labelling, opening, editing, moving and managing files.

When I first began using Mac, GraphicConverter was the only game in town for batch image manipulation and sorting. Indeed GC introduced many of the concepts now more familiar in Applications like Adobe’s Photoshop and Bridge, as well as newer titles like Lightroom and Aperture. But in recent years GC’s quaint interface, which in parts harkens back to the days of Mac OS System 7, has begun to really show its age; desperately slow loading thumbnails and preview display times, its become a painfully unstable memory hog.

What we really need is something which looks like Finder and sorts like GraphicConverter with the uncluttered simplicity of QuickLook.

gBrowser
gBrowser navigates folders much as you’d expect from any thumbnail browser. What puts gBrowser way ahead of the rest, however, is its speed. It feels like Finder crossed with iPhoto, but without the slow load times or lack of shortcut keys for the everyday tasks graphic artists, designers and photographers need.

In many cases, gBrowser uses Finder shortcut keys for things like ⌘ + ⬆ go up a level, ⌘ + ⬅ go back and ⌘ + ⇐ to move to trash and so on.

You can also nominate number keys to a folder on any drive, so you can quickly move a selection to one of 10 ‘Drop locations’ with the keystroke ⌘ + ⌥ + 1-0

The main viewer pane can display as much detail about the image as you want and can hide details just as quickly.

You can sort by all the usual Finder-like properties, such as size, date created, date modified, name and so on, as well as by portrait or landscape, colour depth, file type, megapixels, label, image height and width and other EXIF data embedded in the image file itself.

Both the thumbnails and the preview image are rendered by OS X’s built-in CoreGraphics layer, so you can slide the size of the preview all the way down to 64 pixels and all the way up to 1024 pixels without having to embed a newly drawn JPEG preview into the EXIF resource fork, as you would in GraphicConverter and Adobe Bridge. This makes the whole feel of gBrowser very much quicker than you’re used to for the same day-to-day operations and it makes skipping from a one folder to the next, no matter how many large image files it contains, quick and painless.

Settings
There are two main Preference panes. The first sets up hotkeys and general application preferences, the second sets options for the currently displayed folder, or ‘collection’.

Batch Operations
The fact that there’s a whole ‘Tasks’ menu given over to just one task suggest that in the future gBrowser’s developer would like to add some of the more powerful features offered by some of the incumbent image processing apps, such as image cataloguing (index sheet) and output to HTML gallery.

What we have in the Tasks menu in the meantime, however, is a very nifty batch Find and Rename panel. This part of the application reveals the power of OS X in way only those clever clogs who aren’t afraid to delve into a bit of AppleScript and Automator Actions have previously known how to fully unleash. Indeed there are titles specifically dedicated to batch rename processes, such as Name Mangler, which don’t carry out these functions as well as gBrowser can.

As well as bundling with some handy batch rename presets, such as JPEG to .jpg, Lowercase Extension and Underscore to Space you can also define your own set of commonly used tasks based upon a set of user-definable rules—familiar to anyone who has used Finder’s expanded version of Spotlight, ⌘ + Shift + F.

Wish list
As it is, Version 2.0b11 of gBrowser is so very nearly close to being the perfect thumbnail organiser I almost feel bad for wishing it did more. But, if you’re going to be picky about it, it might be nice to see the following added at some point:

• A more Finder-like folder tree in the side-bar
• Sort selection into sub-folders
• Tighter vertical spacing between thumbnails
• Hide second monitor preview pane when application is in the background, instead of ‘always on top’ by default
• Slide-show all images in folder (and / or subfolder) starting with current selection
• Blank other monitors / hide preview selection on entering slide-show
• User definable modifier keys for Drop Location keystrokes instead of having to use ⌘ + ⌥ + 1-0
• Fullscreen thumbnail browser and rudimentary image editing such as crop and straighten might also be a welcome addition

Summary
There are a couple of bugs which could do with being ironed out—such as occasionally having to click and pause for a second before a selection can be dragged & dropped. There’s also a glitch where Select All (⌘ + A) causes the current folder to deselect and all the folders in the side-bar to be chosen instead, unless you click twice in a blank area of the thumbnail pane first, when moving to a folder in the side-bar tree.

All in all gBrowser is a fantastic donationware title from immaterialgoods.com with the exciting prospect of more improvements to its overall functionality to come. It feels very stable and is more than ready for primetime if your main need for a thumbnail navigator is quickly finding image files for editing in another program or sorting through outline and projects folders at the end of a photo shoot or brainstorming session—where lots of files get generated very quickly, without necessarily having the time to sort and save them in a more organised fashion.

Update Wed 24th Feb 2010: Myself and gBrowser’s developer Andreas Schwarz, have been in contact about the above wish list of added features and I’m delighted to report beta 12, out now, includes the following:

• Removed drag delay time in Thumbnail pane.
• Added option (on by default) to hide Image Viewer when gBrowser is in the background.
• Added option (on by default) to blank other screens when displaying slideshows.
• Added option to immediately expand folders when they are selected in the sidebar.
• Added option to make “New Slideshow in Current Folder” start from the first selected file in the Thumbnail Pane.

Andreas also adds that Fullscreen thumbnail browsing, User Definable key-combos for Drop Locations and Auto-Subfolder Sorting should be ready for version 2.1.

Now THAT is what I call attention to detail! Maybe someone should hire Andreas to work on their next project?

UPDATE Thursday 26th Feb 2010: Andreas has now implemented fullscreen thumbnails and a few other tweaks. Here’s a screen-cast:
http://commandshiftq.com/blog/2010/02/gbrowser-updated/

Getting the balance right between having something non-distracting but at the same time not too boring, as your desktop wallpaper, can be something of a real world problem.

Many Mac users spend their day staring at Photoshop and other design software. It’s important in that creative process not to let anything distract your eye, while at the same time avoiding being too bland so as to end up designing something overly sympathetic.

Avoiding glaring colours or complicated patterns without staring at the same old macro photographs of grass and soft focus sweeping curve-art that ships with OS X requires some careful consideration. Luckily there are plenty of sites that have done a bit of this hard work for you. Here’s a selection of some of the best I’ve seen. If you know of more, please post a link in the comments.

socwall.com

http://www.socwall.com – Describes itself as “a community effort to classify, rank, and distribute high resolution images for use as desktop wallpaper”. It has a very clean, fast loading interface. Good dual monitor support. An annoying float-over info box on thumbnails page is unnecessary design for design’s sake. Very nice pop-down menus to browse by genre, but this does tend to move out of your way when you least want it to. A decent sized collection of very good quality images.

interfacelift.com

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/ – Tends to attract a very high level of contributions from professional photographers and graphic artists. Good support for dual and triple screen set-ups. Per-entry facebook and twitter share buttons with artist profiles. Frustrating pop-down menus to choose the right resolution, which doesn’t always guess the maximum size of your screen correctly, making the download process a bit too long. Doesn’t open the image selected in a new tab / window. Massive selection of high quality graphics and high resolution photographs to choose from.

desktopnexus.com

http://www.desktopnexus.com/ – Good categorisation and regularly updated. RSS feed for latest submissions. User generated uploads and image hosting. Browse by tag cloud is nice. It’s a little cumbersome to click through to the actual image but there’s a nifty screen resolution detection script which automatically delivers the appropriate scale image to fit your desktop.

4walled.org

http://4walled.org/ – Allows good filtering of content, ranging from Not Safe For Work through Borderline NSFW down to Safe—although some NSFW did appear to have leaked through at the time of trying—although nothing that you wouldn’t see in a very mild lad’s mag. Looks like a fairly new site but still a fairly large collection nonetheless.

wall.alphacoders.com

http://wall.alphacoders.com/ – Plenty of fantasy artwork in the top voted section, even if it all tends to be a little too dark and gothic. Fast enough loading pages. Requires three clicks to get to the full size image, but this allows all sizes from 50×50 avatars up to 1600×1200 full size versions to be individually selected.

wallbase.net

http://wallbase.net/ – Very slick interface based around keyword search. The top 10 page tends to be mildly Not Safe For Work, but delve a little deeper and there’s plenty of generally pretty high quality fantasy artwork, super-cars, sunsets and star-fields, pastel shades and abstract 3D to get your teeth into. Features a really nice scroll to reload java script.

skins.be

http://www.skins.be/ – Claims to be “the biggest wallpaper and high quality picture portal in the world”. Specialises in celebrity models and actresses. A very pretty if a little cluttered interface with annoying float-over buttons and page footer. Huge database of high quality images but very slow loading.

nik.bot.nu

http://nik.bot.nu/browse.fu – Great fantasy artwork on this site. The interface is easy to use if a little basic looking, but here’s another site with neat scroll to reload java script I’d like to see on a lot more sites of this kind—so much quicker than constantly clicking ‘next page’.

A selection of my favourites from the above sites:

http://compfight.com/
http://www.everystockphoto.com/
http://www.facesaerch.com
http://www.feelimage.net/photo/
http://www.imagebase.davidniblack.com/main.php
http://www.photogen.com/
http://www.picbrk.com/
http://picfog.com/
http://www.picollator.com/
http://www.picsearch.com/
http://tineye.com/
http://www.xcavator.net/

There’s no doubt Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 is a far more stable Operating System than later versions of vanilla Leopard. But amid some of the “very Apple” subtle tweaks and refinements, I think there’s also legitimate concern that Apple may have stripped away, in the pursuit of stability, some of the magic dust which separated it from the competition.

In a series of articles over the coming weeks, I’m going to look at how many babies Apple have thrown away with the bathwater and look at a worrying trend in which we ordinary users are being increasingly ignored and cut out of the infinite loop, when it comes to feedback on Apple’s products.

Quicktime X
The default media player in OS X has needed an overhaul for some time. But overhaul and cripple are two very different things.

For example, previous versions of Quicktime enabled a number of handy, quick editing functions. Such as the ability to cut and paste sections of a video and audio into a blank file and export the result out in a variety of formats.

In Snow Leopard, however, any kind of editing above and beyond very basic end to end trimming must be done in iMovie, which means having to import an entire clip simply to normalise audio levels, or join two shorter videos together into one clip, or any number of basic clean-up tweaks which could be previously done in Quicktime Player alone.

Also gone is the ability to alter the aspect ratio of a clip which has been encoded incorrectly on the fly. For example, certain types of video playback, like SECAM (used in France) and NTSC (used in the USA), when converted to PAL (used in the UK) can sometimes inherit a 14:9 aspect ratio akin to watching Standard Definition 4:3 content on a 16:9 widescreen display. Quicktime used to have a number of controls which would compensate for this kind of stretching and squeezing, which have now been removed entirely.

That, in addition to this, there doesn’t appear to be any way of re-enabling these functions in iMovie, it’s hard to see why Apple might have done this, especially given the ubiquity of prosumer digital video and stills cameras which are designed around the Quicktime video format, such as the Canon G series of compacts and the Panasonic Lumix range of DSLRs.

Stealth downgrading of this kind, where users are expected to turn a blind eye to the removal of functionality because the whole thing is dressed up in a fancy new interface, is exactly the kind of own goal Apple has rightly been criticised for scoring the past and it not one likely to go down well with users who only occasionally call upon these functions, when they need to use them the most only to find they are no longer available.

It is undoubtably easer than ever before to open a video file, taken from a digital device, trim out unwanted sections and upload it to YouTube or export it into a variety of other playback formats. Quicktime X supports exporting direct to MobileMe and iTunes—the latter making it even easier than it already was to get content from the desktop and on to your iPod.

But anyone who already used Quicktime for such things as this, as opposed to some piece of freeware, is unlikely to be very happy when they find they can no longer do so depite having “upgraded” to the latest version—which begs the question why the old version of Quicktime needed changing at all, especially when so many useful aspects of it have been thrown away, rather than simply moved somewhere else, like into iMovie or iPhoto.

TweetDeck is arguably Adobe AIR’s first killer application.

When I first heard about twitter.com, I dismissed it as the emperors new instant messenger. Indeed I ranted endlessly about it, to people who weren’t really interested—going on and on about how pointless it all was.

Then I found TweetDeck and realised how utterly useful and new and, above all, transformative the whole idea of micro blogging really was.

Here’s how I have my TweetDeck set-up, but you can have yours whichever way you want…

Column A shows all tweets from users I am following. Column B shows all replies to my tweets. Column C shows live search results for all keywords mentioned across the twitter-verse. Column D shows TwitScoop.com’s minute by minute keyword trends.

The bottom panel is where you tweet, post shortened links and TwitPics

The best part about TweetDeck, is that it looks and behaves the same on Mac as it does on PC—so there’s a uniform experience across machines, for those in a multi-cultural environment. It’s also insanely stable. Indeed, I’ve yet to manage to do something which causes TweetDeck to crash—and believe me, I’ve tried.

If you’re using a computer, as opposed to Windows, try visiting mailol.net

Thanks to nickpick for putting me onto this.

Glimmer Blocker, from glimmerblocker.org stops ads before they reach your browser.

By intercepting traffic from a known block list, Glimmer Blocker can learn about new sites to avoid as it goes along.

Best of all because it doesn’t require you to hack Safari or install and add-on for Firefox, you can use the latest version of your browser of choice without having to wait for a compatible release of Glimmer Blocker to come out.

So, if you want, you can replace Safari altogether with the nightly build of its open source cousin, WebKit and still enjoy an interruption free surfing experience.

Glimmer Blocker contains six tabs in a System Preferences pane.

The first is a boiler plate with a “check for latest version” button and an activation check box.

The second shows a list, with descriptions, of each of the five default filters. Known ad networks, like RealMedia and adservinghost.com, are automatically inserted into Glimmer Blockers rules.

Many ad blockers include a list of similar features. What’s interesting about Glimmer Blocker is that, because it is a proxy server, you can program rules of your own into how certain sites are handled.

The default enhancement rules include adding a ‘Download Link’ and an ‘Auto switch to high quality’ viewing mode to YouTube.

Created by fader.co.uk, iPlayer Grabber is a neat little tool for downloading the iPhone version of BBC iPlayer content, which—unlike the browser based flash and MPEG videos for desktop computers, isn’t encrypted and locked down with DRM.

To view BBC content legally you need to hold a UK licence fee. To access BBC iPlayer you need to be within the UK—and the BBC do a good job of constantly updating the way in which they detect your IP address, to ensure this is the case.

Unfortunately this often means that for Brits living and working overseas, who’ve already paid their yearly subscription, much of the content they’ve paid for is unavailable.

Thankfully, iPlayer Grabber includes settings for HTTP proxy—so if you can find a UK based proxy, you should be able to catch up with Top Gear and Eastenders, no matter where in the world you are.

Indeed the whole array of BBC content is available on iPlayer, to a certain extent—which makes the lack of a queue in iPlayer Grabber all the more frustrating, although the author adds that this function may become available at some point and there is a work-around to this as described on the fader.co.uk blog, here.

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I got hold of a beta test version of Microsoft’s up and coming second stab at getting Windows Vista working right and was (not at all) surprised to see it’s basically more of the same, with a light spattering of yet more theft from Mac OS X.

The text-free task-bar and start menu, now boast two new applications, Stickies.. I mean Sticky Notes and Grab.. ..I mean Snipping Tool. Apart from that, nothing to see here people. Move along.