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3D Finder Replacement For OS X
filebrowse.com — Nice looking Finder replacement. Version 1.0 Out Today.
ct2000- 692 diggs
- digg it
- autoy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+16I see it more like a very good replacement for preview, which needs some urgent update. However, what shocked me was this: "download file is only about 325 KB in size".
- DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I don't. You can move files around with this. I think that is beyond the scope of preview. I'm also not sure if this belongs in Finder, although I haven't used it yet and I might be wrong. I'm thinking this belongs more in iPhoto or Aperture.
- UncommonSense, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13How do I make her my finder? ;)
- stukdog, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3a 3D finder would look more like this finder scape
http://www.freemacware.com/finderscape/ - anonymonk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7@stukdog:
Why not post directly to the product's page?
http://www.davidahmed.com/finderscape.html - elroy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+83D Finder reminds me of Jurassic Park. "Oh, this is UNIX!"
- Kelmon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@DaffyDuck
No, you can't perform file management tasks with this application yet - I asked and was told that this is coming in version 1.5 towards the end of the year. If you wish to copy/move or delete a file/folder then you are recommended to select the desired object and then press Command + Return to select the object in Finder.
Anyway, promising product but I believe it needs updating before it is truly useful. - newbill123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I think it's like a very good replacement for icon view in the Finder. It has the architecture for being a file manager, just doesn't have the functionality yet.
Positive: Excellent keyboard navigation and icon spacing make the mouse kind of extraneous. That's a VERY good thing in my view. This may need some extra work when the file management aspects are made functional, but as a browser it's great.
Positive, with room for improvement: I really like the visual animation when you come back out of a folder. However, I'm not sure just wobbling the folder is the best choice. It grabs your attention to where you were, but it doesn't feel like a natural way folders behave. A translucent folding effect as the current folder shrinks back into place, might be better, but is purely just eye candy. The functionality of wagging the folder helps out much more than I ever imagined it would.
Negative: Very heavy dependence on previews and standard file formats. If you go into a folder with unrecognized file types (e.g. gimp xgf files) the navigation becomes uncomfortable. For the un-previewable files in a folder, I'd love to see them in a list view or table view at the top of bottom of the screen but with files you can preview in the current "icon" mode. If there is no preview, the filename, date, and other info becomes VERY important in browsing. The Finder does this poorly right now by making me swtich modes to see previewable files and file info in a list view. It'd be great to have a hybrid.
Negative, but irrelevant: This is not a substitute for the magnificence of column view. You can't quickly navigate down from the / directory to /Users/Me/Documents/MyPron/ with any speed. That doesn't seem to be the goal of what the program authors are trying to address though so I don't really hold that against them. If intended as a Finder replacement it's a need that would have to be addressed though.
Very good job. I hope the authors will be compensated for the efforts by satisfied users. I expect that other file browsers will lift parts from them without acknowledgement or compensation so I'd just like to say "Great job gang. Hope your next product is as great as this demo!" - rvuRGB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1newbill123: Thanks for the useful feedback. Regarding the "wobbling" folders: there is some reasoning behind that, actually. Miniature icons inside a folder icon are slanted left. Full-size icons are not slanted, except when you preview a file; then the icon slants to the right. Likewise, when you open a folder, its icon is shown in the upper-left corner and is slanted right. That makes sense because it looks like the folder is opened and its items are spread out. The idea is that icons rotate clockwise when you go a level deeper. The same with a song icon, which shows the album art slanted right, and the rectangle with the track number not slanted. That's because the album is not the actual file; the track is. The album is much like a parent folder. Back to the wobbling folders: when you exit a folder, it wobbles from the orientation it had when it was in the upper-left corner (slanted right), back to the normal orientation (straight). Hope it makes sense now. :-)
- asnn, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2has a lot of potential, but....
- macedes, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1wow this is great!
- ggriffit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Very cool stuff. It's a little out there, but a great proof of concept. How it handles different media is terrific! Previewing JPGs, paging through PDFs, and playing MP3s and movies is slick.
- afraydocurado, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Nice, maybe we will see some of these features in Leopard?
- Kolenka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I dunno, I tried launching this in Leopard and it crashed... ;)
- DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3Site is already dead.
- DaffyDuck, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1....
- ct2000, on 10/12/2007, -6/+4site looks OK to me :-)
- flashboy131, on 10/12/2007, -15/+4it's up
It's down
upgrade fo'shizzle- flashboy131, on 10/12/2007, -10/+6i apoligize for the uncalled for fo'shizzleness
- joebob2406, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2anyone able to post a mirror to the download?
- Ubermensch423, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4people, all you do is replace digg with duggmirror in the url
- diecastbeatdown, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4site is down, none of the caches are up (google doesnt show pictures).
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/30900
including a screencap + download. - samste, on 10/12/2007, -17/+2omglolliekthesiteisdownhowgayisthat
- ckirsch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7http://duggmirror.com/apple/3D_Finder_Replacement_For_OS_X/
- jaseem, on 10/12/2007, -6/+1awesome!
- deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9These features should really be built into OSX's Finder. Maybe Apple can snag up these developer(s) like they did with the CoverFlow guys.
- Frinkiac, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3very much needed, maybe apple should start looking at more 3rd party stuff
- ahhell, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23Uh...how is that "3D"?
- funkpucker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5ditto ... 3D is very loosely used. The folders have a shadow? The pages of a PDF animate? I don't get it...
- smhill, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Well... it is 3d technically. it uses OpenGL and if you grab and wiggle folders with stuff in them, it moves around in (though pretty limited) 3d. Not what one would expect when people say 3D.
Dunno, it could be cool one day, but not spectacular at this point. Looking forward to seeing where this goes. - StarManta, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6It's 3D-accelerated. The files pop out and animate a bit when you interact with them.
Yeah, it's not 3D in the traditional sense, but it's close - and more useful than a "real" 3D desktop would be. - hurfydurfur, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@StarManta: +digg. 3d desktop is such a bad idea. Like flip3d, at least they could have put the task name or something on the binding. Apps aren't 3d, windows aren't, apps aren't. I'd love to see someone make a good 3D interface but it's failed so many times.
Like XGL. I see people spinning the cube on youtube but then they stop day-to-day I bet. 3D cube on Desktop Manager (osx), not so useful. Flip3d not as useful as plain alt-tab previews in Vista 5728. Project Looking Glass from Sun, didn't really impress. As far as XGL offloading to the GPU, sure, I see that. But we haven't made the metaphorical leap to a real desk yet in the 2d UI. Nor should we just because we can.
Take a phone book on the present web, a paper phone book and a 3d phone book. You can type in "dry cleaner" and hit enter. You can flip through a paper book A-Z to find your dry cleaner. Or, the VRML way in 1998, you could run through a forest and over hills to find your dry cleaner's number. :P
- angelof, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I do think this will make it into Leopard. With the potential that Core Animation has, we could see a very different Finder with integrated features such as this.
- hurfydurfur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Some stuff is accelerated in OSX 10.4 It's quartz non-extreme, (lol) and the GPU does it. It throws it into a PDF-like form (though not a full pdf) and the GPU ends up doing some of the work. Throw in real vector graphics and you see why you can do things like "play a movie in the task bar(dock) even while it's minimized and see the thumbnail animated at 29.5fps" and all that eye-candy that's going on.
Shift double click a window in OSX and it shrinks slowly to the dock = interpolation just like in a game engine. But yes, I look forward to when the marketing falls off and 10.5 is _really_ 64-bit and Quartz Extreme for 2d _really_ accelerates everything with the GPU. It's yet another wait and see thing.
- hurfydurfur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Some stuff is accelerated in OSX 10.4 It's quartz non-extreme, (lol) and the GPU does it. It throws it into a PDF-like form (though not a full pdf) and the GPU ends up doing some of the work. Throw in real vector graphics and you see why you can do things like "play a movie in the task bar(dock) even while it's minimized and see the thumbnail animated at 29.5fps" and all that eye-candy that's going on.
- bradym80, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3this is stupid and inaccurate. its not a 'finder replacement' and it has very poor functionality.
marked inaccurate - JuyLe, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Digg is a really good way to kill a website ! Anyway, looks good.
- yichen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4i always think what if Apple can let developers make "modules" for Finder.
I don't like using alternative "Basic System Operating Related" applications. - gelgod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Not 3D. decent looking but not very useful. Keep trying!
- fakesman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2OK, maybe the 3d isn't well integrated, but there are 3d sort of effects when you click on and drag an image preview. And the preview image caching is great, much faster than the Finder's. I'll admit that it's not without its flaws-- it sucks that you can't double click items to open them-- but this prototype file browser adds some useful features that the Finder lacks.
- Dingle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good looking program. I always thought that a more interactive finder what always missing in OSX. Windows XP allows previewing and arranging photos and music much better. But maybe this is the missing link for macs.
- idiotkings, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Filebrowse is the most useful application I've found to sort my pictures of the Filebrowse's developer's girlfriend.
Kidding. :) Looks great. - MacNTT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm impressed with Filebrowse. I'll try it out on both machines here and I'll pretty sure that I will get it. Damn that is cool!
- mightymouse, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Costs money? That's retarded.
- orph3us, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1can't double click to open files/folders? Couldnt figure out how to make it do that :/ Not terribly useful to me
- joebob2406, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have to agree there. Why can't i double-click to open a folder?
- TechPedia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1click the label below the item.
- gharding, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Uh. How is this a replacement for Finder? It looks like an image browser. And for that, there's iPhoto.
- gaijintendo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I find iPhoto and Front Row are hge drains on my cpu and I am loathed to use them. I expected when I bought a MacBook Pro, that it would rip through these things.
I wish there was a better alternative for browsing photos.
In addition to this, if you are a graphics designer, there is no way you would keep your image library and projects in iPhoto. So once again, there is potential for this app to find a welcome home.
- gaijintendo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I find iPhoto and Front Row are hge drains on my cpu and I am loathed to use them. I expected when I bought a MacBook Pro, that it would rip through these things.
- sunchild, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I really, really need this. Last night I was futzing with the finder's clumsy "smart folders" feature to try to clean up my massive, duplicative collections of photos which have accumulated as I've installed different versions of iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom to determine which has the best workflow. While any of those three apps are great at managing photos, when it comes to sorting through their file management schemes in the finder--forget it! I need something like this.
I also need something that will allow complex filtering, like for instance: collect all .CRW, .ERF, .DNG and .JPG files over 1MB from X date onward, but not including files from directory Y, etc.- KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Take a look at Automator...it can do exactly what you're looking for.
- jeriqo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dugg for Portishead
- tomhutchinson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I was expecting to see something simmilar to the computer system in Jurrasic Park when they are trapped in the control room.
"This is UNIX! I KNOW THIS!" - inkhead, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1This thing sucks.
USE PathFinder 4.5 It will blow your mind, it's what Leopard will be like.
http://www.cocoatech.com/- Kelmon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I sure hope that Leopard doesn't go the way of PathFinder. I'm not a great fan of the Finder and hope that it's updated but I found PathFinder to be WAAAAY to complicated for it's own good. Great, I'm sure, for power users but not for the average Joe.
- fudgebrown, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1i tried it - did not capture my attention - I don't understand its functionality - and there is no 3d... just some drop shadows... DELETED.
- matman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not bad I suppose. Double-clicking the icon should open the item, not double-clicking the name. A bit slow on my PBook 1,67Ghz with 1.5GB RAM.
Also does the author not realise that the hierichial file system is dead now we have advanced search like Spotlight?
The App is worth a look though. Well done. - collywolly, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Wow. It amazes me that you Mac fanbois all go on about what an advanced dektop you have. Its only when I see articles like this that I realise tthat it only does previews of images!
KDE will give you previews of just about anything. You get condesed text on code files, you can set it to hover over music files and it will start to play, movies give you a screen shot.
Most advanced desktop in the world my arse......
Wonder how many negative diggs I can get for pointing that out...?
:)- KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4You're not going to get negative diggs just for pointing it out, you're going to get dugg down because you are wrong. You can preview photos, music and video files directly in a finder window (set it to column view, when you click on it there is a preview in the next column) without any 3rd party app. You can also preview PDF files, but only the first page shows in finder.
- collywolly, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Well the article states,
"The standard file browser on the Mac is the Finder, which can show thumbnails of image files, but shows all other files and folders as standard icons."
Anyway, we both know that the fanboy culture is what will digg me down. Talking negativley of an Apple poduct...?! - collywolly, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"You can preview photos, music and video files directly in a finder window (set it to column view, when you click on it there is a preview in the next column)"
How exactly do you get a preview of a music file "in the next column"?
I don't own a Mac so I can't go and see what you mean. I can't see how you preview a muisc file in a column. - KSUdesigner, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2OK column view...you click a folder, the contents of that folder appear in the next column. If you click on a file, information about that file will appear in the next column. Where the info is, for music there is a little quicktime slider with a play button, volume, a position slider, and forward and back buttons. Same kind of thing for video, except there's a movie on top of the slider thing. I probably lost you at "OK column view" tough, MS fanboys don't know the wonders of column view.
- thunderer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ collywolly
Here's a screenshot of column view. I don't think I could live without it.
(It's kinda large at 1242 x 462px, but otherwise it might be a bit difficult to understand by just looking at the screenshot)
http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/8696/screenshotmr6.jpg
"This screenshot uses the UNO theme and heavily customized icons. Your mileage may vary."
- uownedge, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Kind of cool, and looks really nice, but I wouldn't really call it a finder replacement. It's not quite as fast (was actually a bit too slow for my liking on my Dual G4 box -- and I use the box for 3D modeling), but over all it's a nifty idea.
- josefuertesS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Why people confuse Finder with Preview?...maybe 'cause they come from the windows world...
- uurf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Naw, this is what an actual 3d file browser would look like:
http://honeybrown.ca/Pubs/BumpTop.html - Glenn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Take a look at this little video I just made (for demonstration in a future blog entry):
http://www.glennwolsey.com/screencasts/filebrowse.mov - electronicmaji, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1call me when theres a windows version...
- sfacets, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ok... so it can do photos... how about every other format out there?
- n8236, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm sorry, but Preview is retarded, it needs so much refinement.
- cgseller, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13D? How is this a 3d finder? Why do people put incorrect titles and why do people digg it still? It is a nice preview like tool - but it's not 3d by any understanding of 3d that I have.
- rvuRGB, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Thanks to ct2000 for digging my program and to everyone else here who said kind words about it. :-)
I'd like to make clear that FileBrowse 1.0 is not supposed to be a Finder replacement. If people think of it as that, that's cool, but the current version is purely a file _browser/viewer_, not a file _manager_. Version 1.5 will add file management (and will be a free upgrade for registered users of 1.0.x).
Regarding 3D - The icons are 3D, the interface is not and doesn't pretend to be. The icons are 3D models, rendered in real-time. They all share the same perspective, with the vanishing point in the center of the screen, so each icon looks different depending on its position on the screen. (That's real 3D.) The idea is that your screen is flat, and the icons appear to "hover" slightly in front of it.
Regarding double-clicking - You don't need it, because you can single-click on the label below an icon. I know that may take some getting used to for some people, but these days most people spend more time in web browsers than in file managers, and clicking on a file/folder name is just like clicking on a link in a browser. Having said that, I _will_ probably add double-click support in the future anyway. :-)
Sorry for the site probs yesterday. We use a hosting account with a 2 TB/month bandwidth limit, or about 65 GB/day, on average. Yesterday's bandwidth was "only" about 10 GB, so the server should've handled it well... Anyway... Thanks again!
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