Filed under: Software, Productivity
Beta Beat: Grape, a new way to manage your Desktop clutter
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tom said 9:35AM on 4-14-2009
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
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Mathias said 9:50AM on 4-14-2009
For me, the best way to reduce clutter on the desktop is to not put anything on it in the first place.
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Tom Waterhouse said 10:01AM on 4-14-2009
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?
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Think Adrian said 10:26AM on 4-14-2009
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.
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Chris Newton said 11:38AM on 4-14-2009
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.
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frankns said 1:19PM on 4-14-2009
Agreed ...
You are right on the money.
Not really the application for someone who works with text files.
consumer_q said 1:32AM on 4-15-2009
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. :-)
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MacFevre said 10:38AM on 4-15-2009
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.
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lipids said 5:24PM on 4-22-2009
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.
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Jason Anderson said 5:54PM on 4-27-2009
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.
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