AtomicView: UI bomb

AtomicView bills itself as a super-efficient multimedia manager with an interface that "combines elegance and sobriety." When I first loaded it up, I was frustrated enough with its almost total disregard for consistent UI design and controls to swear it off for a week. I've given it another run and moved its rank up to tolerable.

It does have enough pros to level out its cons, and we can call it a wash. I'm bothering to mention it here for two reasons: we've had some enthusiastic reports and some of you may find it useful as a middle-of-the-road solution between iPhoto and something more robust like Aperture or Bridge.

At 95 Euros (about $150), it doesn't come in much cheaper than the $199 Aperture 2. But it does handle more file types and if your needs are a little broader than just photography, it's a viable alternative. It lacks some of the sorting features common to other programs, but it allows for grouping, advanced boolean searching of metadata with smart folder capabilities and full screen navigation/preview with multi-monitor support. Here's the thing about the boolean search, though: as far as I can tell, there's no universal search. I can't type "pants" and pull up every item that has "pants" in any of its metadata. I have to build a search one line at a time, looking through each field of each metadata type for my keyword.

The interface itself is just foreign enough that I feel like I'm in a well-designed Linux program. It's going to be cross-platform (Mac and Windows), so it's not a big surprise that the developer's primary focus wasn't on integrating the Mac look and feel. And then I let the little things bother me ... the line height in the info view is far too high and inconsistent with other views, the path bar view in the folder navigator requires too much mousing around, there are zero helpful tooltips on the not-immediately-obvious controls, and there's a control on every preview image in every browser that lights up when you click it, but only functions when a single image is full screen.

So I get peeved for a while, but I mellow out a little when I discover features such as the fact that this interface can be crunched and compacted to any portion of my screen and will reconfigure itself to make very good use of the space with no further interaction required. And I can define my own metadata, which would be useful were this my primary, long-term media manager. And I can even create my own metadata views, dragging together fields from IPTC, EXIF, File Info, etc. to create a quick overview of exactly what I want to see. But then my double-click does nothing when it should, intuitively, do something. Open a preview, open the default application, do something!

That's as far as I'm going into my dissection. I do honestly believe that this software may be useful to users who fall into a certain category between multimedia hobbyist and dedicated media professional. Others less infatuated with consistent interface design may also find it more intriguing than I did. In my opinion, though, iPhoto could give it a pretty good run for its money, in many cases. The demo is free, so you've got 30 days to decide for yourself.