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Beta Beat: Grape, a new way to manage your Desktop clutter

by Brett Terpstra Apr 14th 2009 at 9:00AM

Grape, just released as a beta, is a new take on desktop file management. I've seen several attempts at innovative user interfaces for file management in my day, some better than others, but this is the first one I've been really excited about. In the words of the author -- Stéphane at docklandsoft.com -- "Grape is a visual and spatial way to classify and organize temporary files." I use my desktop as a sort of Inbox, saving all of my working files, PDFs of web pages and other random bits there during the day, and then tagging and bagging the collected mess once or twice a day. It's not a bad system, but I love anything that might make my life simpler and/or more interesting.

Grape takes all of the files on your desktop and puts them into a kind of three-dimensional workspace where you can pan and zoom, group files and perform various functions, including filing them to folders anywhere on your hard drive. You can zoom in and out with your scroll wheel or by holding command-space and dragging a rectangle. You can pan around the space by holding space and dragging. Once you've started organizing, you're able to create boxes and text labels to highlight groups of interest or provide highlighted areas for sorting. You can also Quick Look files, as well as choose the preview image for movies and multi-page PDF files. You can't descend into folders, but if you have a Quick Look plugin for folders, it's really easy to identify previously grouped files without jumping back to the Finder.

At this point, Grape is interesting (and fun), but lacks some much-needed functionality. Among the list of things I'd like to see: more mouse-only navigation, droppable folders, the ability to create functional drop-boxes to send files to specific folders, OpenMeta tagging (or AppleScript access to selected files for apps like Tags) and a more customizable interface (I find the default blue gradient a little overwhelming). It's a great start, though, and has really piqued my interest in more "spatial" file-management interfaces. Check out a video of Grape in action after the jump, and grab the beta here.


Grape Desktop Zooming Interface 01 from yann le coroller on Vimeo.

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Grape, just released as a beta, is a new take on desktop file management. I've seen several attempts at innovative user interfaces for file...
 

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Jason Anderson

Unless I can change it to use my Downloads folder instead of my Desktop, it's useless. My Downloads folder is where I put "Temporary" files. Not my Desktop!

It looks amazing, but is useless unless I can change to Downloads.

April 27 2009 at 5:49 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
lipids

It is really cool to see people pushing the boundaries of file management to come up with something new and fresh. I would maybe consider this a very early step in a potential finder replacement. It is however, so much easier to just use the finder. I can see all files in a folder at once, rather than hunting for a file in a messy pile. In fact, in practical scenarios, Grape really just does not seem useful at all.

April 22 2009 at 5:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MacFevre

The article says "Check out a video of Grape in action after the jump, and grab the beta here."

There is no beta, however. :( It's a "Closed" beta. You ought to correct that in the article.

April 15 2009 at 10:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
consumer_q

http://www.jazzaround.net/Organised/

"This script will simply make a folder on your desktop of documents folder with the current date and put all the data in that folder."

Quick desktop cleanup for the lazy. :-)

April 15 2009 at 1:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris Newton

In the prefs, you can leave folder names on, but you can't leave filenames on. I have lots of SWF and PHP files, none of which are easily identified by anything other than the name, making this app kinda useless. This could be useful for quick work and the groups could come in handy for me ( a group called, "delete me immediately" for instance) but without being able to read a file name without clicking on it, this feels kinda crippled.

Also, it seems you can't change the apps background... I'm not a fan of the sky blue. Final note: this isn't a replacement for the desktop, it's just an app featuring the files from the desktop.

April 14 2009 at 11:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Chris Newton's comment
frankns

Agreed ...

You are right on the money.

Not really the application for someone who works with text files.

April 14 2009 at 1:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Adrian vG

I just set the text labels to be positioned to the right, make the icons 16 by 16px and order them by date order. My desktop is just a temporary storage.

April 14 2009 at 10:26 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tom Waterhouse

Interesting...
It's like you're just sorting a messy desktop into a organised mess.

The interface looks really good fun to play around with though, probably worth a go with for that alone :)

Might work for some people but I'm more of a fan of organising items into plain ol' folders.

On a side note, why were all the AVI files demo'd flashing?

April 14 2009 at 10:01 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mathias

For me, the best way to reduce clutter on the desktop is to not put anything on it in the first place.

April 14 2009 at 9:50 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
LisaG

I prefer Hazel for this sort of thing...a great video tutorial set explaining how to use Hazel:
http://www.woopid.com/gvideos.php?gid=126

April 14 2009 at 9:35 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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