About a year ago, OSNews reported on Grape, a new way to manage your desktop. Back then, Grape was only a concept, a set of ideas without an implementation. This is different now: Grape has been turned into an actual piece of working software, and the people behind the project, Yann Le Coroller and Dockland Software‘s Stephane, gave us early access by means of a beta release. We are also giving away beta access, se be sure to read on to the end of the article to find out how you can get beta access (hint: post a comment). Update: The response has been more substantial than I anticipated, so the cut-off point is 50 comments. Twelve comments left, guys and girls, so hurry up! Update II: Sorry guys, we’re full already (that was quick)! Thanks for the enormous interest from everyone. I’ll send the invites out today! Update III: All invites have been sent out. Enjoy testing Grape, and be sure to post your findings here on OSNews. Also, report any bugs here.
What is Grape?
It’s kind of hard to put into words exactly how Grape works or what it does. The idea is that every file you throw onto your desktop turns into a preview, whether it be a document, video, or photo. You can work with these previews by resizing them, stacking them, moving them around, and grouping them by dragging boxes around them. A group of files is called a pile, and you can name these piles.
The key to Grape is zooming. You can zoom in on a pile – or any place of the desktop – via your mouse wheel. The cool thing is that the previews stay in their original size and location, so when you zoom in, a pile unravels itself, revealing more space to deal with the files it contains. Again, it’s slightly problematic to put into words, so let’s just look at a video of how the current version works:
Grape Desktop Zooming Interface 01 from yann le coroller on Vimeo.
After we ran our first article on Grape, Yann Le Coroller was contacted by Dockland Software’s Stephane to talk about turning Grape into an actual piece of software. After using the beta (which shouldn’t be called beta, according to Stephane, because it isn’t feature complete yet), I can say that he has done an amazing job. The thing that struck me the most about the current version is its excellent performance, even on my old PowerMac Dual G4-450Mhz, and we’re only at beta!
Working with Grape
Working with Grape does require a different approach to working with files on your desktop. Since all files are previews, you don’t locate individual files by name, but by their contents. For files with multiple pages, you can scroll the preview. Video files can play and pause as well, and the preview will remain paused even if you go do something else. Another cool feature is the search function, which uses “highlight-as-you-type”, making use of Spotlight technology.
Grape runs in its own window; it doesn’t actually take over your desktop. Earlier versions did take over the desktop, but Yann explained that Grape can’t yet fully “replace” the desktop, and as such, it makes more sense to run Grape in a full-screen window. In addition, clicking on a Grape “desktop” doesn’t activate the Finder, but Grape itself. This could be confusing for users.
An additional benefit to running it in a window is that if you run in a dual-screen setup, you could use one screen for Grape, and the other to house your applications. Yann explained that a preference switch might be included later to toggle between “replace desktop mode” and “window mode”.
Even when in a window, Grape houses the exact same set of files as are currently on your normal desktop. Drop a file on the Grape window, and it will appear on your desktop as well, and vice versa. For now, it does appear to be safer to drop files on the “real” desktop, as dropping files on the Grape window tends to crash the program (beta and all).
Stephane told us there’s still a lot of work to be done on Grape. For instance, the original concept contained the idea of flipping over the previews to edit file and metadata – this has not yet been implemented at this moment. They also want to add more visualisations for other types of files, like folders. Work is also done on optimising Grape’s performance.
Grape has certainly impressed me as a fresh take on the desktop paradigm, but without being too overwhelming or too complicated to get into. I could see Grape as particularly useful if it were possible to integrate it into Finder windows. This way, you could switch whatever directory in the Finder to “Grape view”, and manage the files in said directory Grapefully (I’m so going to hell for that one).
For instance, if you are working on several projects, you could store each project’s files in separate directories, and manage each of them with Grape. Instead of having a disorganised bunch of pictures, .doc files, .pdfs, and Excel worksheets in your thesis folder, you could use Grape to organise each filetype into a nice stack, zoom in on them, preview them all side-by-side, and so on, without ever opening an application.
Grape is currently a Mac OS X exclusive, and it will most likely stay that way for the foreseeable future as it depends on a boatload of Mac OS X technologies like Core Animation, Spotlight, Quick Look, and others. Grape is not open source, and it’s also not free. The full version will cost money (price not yet determined), but a free “light version” will become available in the future.
You want beta access? You get beta access!
The final release is not here yet, and the beta is closed, but I have been authorised to give away beta access to whoever I think could be valuable to the testing process. So, if you want beta access to Grape, and start playing with it today, leave a comment or send us an email [Sorry, we’re full already!], and I’ll make sure you get access. You can get support, make feature requests, and post bugs in Dockland Software’s Customer Support Community for Grape.
Grape already comes with an auto-update feature, so your beta copy will receive continuous bug fixes and improvements as time goes on.
Looks like a useful way to manage your desktop. I would like beta-access.
I’d like to try it out as well. Do you know if it works with Compiz? Since it runs as a program and not as a desktop I imagine it would.
It’s for Macs only.
…yes I too would like a beta invite. I really hope someone gets the refference i made in the title of this post
I want beta access too. And I think people who ask if it works with Compiz should not be given access for obvious reasons.
I agree.. does it work with DirectX? Please sign me up.
First, NO it won’t work with DirectX and to an earlier poster, most likely not with Compiz either. Requests like this show that you may not have read the article properly as Grape is ONLY for MAC OSX. Not Windows, Linux, BSDs etc. Admittedly I don’t know if Compiz is available on Mac or not, but the article did list the technologies that it works with.
With all that said, I’d love to try it but I don’t have a Mac so I can’t.
Edited 2009-04-17 02:24 UTC
Uh… It was a bit of a joke about the other person asking about Compbiz….
Does it work on Be?
..and I would of course like beta access.
I would like access to the beta as well.
Okay guys, I’ll process everybody’s requests tomorrow CET (it’s 00:14 here, bedtime).
Keep ‘m coming!
I’d love to be in Grape beta testing.
By the way, I do require an email address. If you have no valid email address, you’re out of luck.
I’d love to try this out
I’d love to play with this, sounds promising. Count me up too.
The video on their website looks promising. I’m definitely interested in the beta
I’m also interested in the beta
I’m in the first 50, but I didn’t receive an invite. Did I miss something?
I want a grape beta invite!
[email protected]
regards!
Looks interesting. At least is seems different.
Looks interesting, it’s a shame I don’t have a Mac though.
Considering my level of clutter this may be a new paradigm, I would definitely love to test it.
The in-place, resizeable preview is very cool, but aside from that, I fail to see the point. Why would anyone keep a bunch of unrelated photos / videos on his or her desktop? Most desktops I’ve seen are either empty (like mine), or full of links to programs (most in Windows).
Granted, the search box is a good idea in the latter case as well. I’m just wondering if the same can be achieved by a folder view on KDE4. Is the folder view searchable?
Edited 2009-04-17 00:44 UTC
I have a Mac to try it on. Thanks.
I would like to try the beta out. Thankyou
Look there, I finally registered at osnews to request a beta invite. Please? It looks real purty.
I’d love to beta-test it – and I do have a Mac
Jim
I would love to be in the beta too.
Seems like a great application.
I saw the original movie demo when the story broke last year and was quite impressed with the vision too. Glad to see a developer has taken up the challenge of building it, so add me to the beta list please.
As a user of OSX, Windows, Ubuntu and also BeOS, I have more or less given up on any real progress in UIs that force modality at every single turn. Apple used to be all about no modality, but really all the current OSes are as bad as each other but in very different respects.
Of course one should have continuous zoom control over all objects in ones possession, real or virtual. I regard a desktop as nothing more than a database of objects with windows/folders or other tools used to organize and view them by media type, name, size, content or any criteria one could think of and the OS should remember what the user wants it to remember and forget what they don’t need to keep. We currently got the exact reverse of this.
Any half decent CAD program that can view chips, machine designs, buildings, cities or whatever has capabilities that no mere mortal will ever see in current OSes but Grape gives a glimpse of that and their UIs are often quite easy to use. CPUs have had more than enough power to do this 2d/3d rendering since FPUs were integrated too, but the UI pros locked us all up in the 80s desktop theme. All we get now is endless tinkering of trivial theme issues, wobbly this, animated that.
Look forward to seeing this puppy fly!
Err, last I checked, CAD programs required an underlying OS for them to run: therefore, they can only do as much as the underlying OS, and that’s how I remember things being when I was employed writing 3D CAD software. Is there a distinct CAD system that is its own entire OS that I haven’t heard of before now? If so, I’d certainly like to know
That being said, Grape is also limited by the underlying OS: nothing in the Mac OS X GUI absolutely requires modality: the OS-provided GUI shell applications often have modality designed and implemented in them, for whatever reasons they saw fit, whether that’s because they thought it was the most correct way to apply things for what it acts on, or sheer laziness. Pages demonstrates in many cases that modality is not an absolute of the underlying OS in terms of what it is capable of doing: at best, one can only surmise that the developers of the native desktop applications that come with OS X were developed by people that couldn’t be bothered to go out of their way to make them modeless, where it may have actually made sense for them to be modeless.
I was thinking of Calma GDS and some others of the 80s. Of course there was still an OS underneath, but it was merged somewhat with the CAD command set. No other apps came with these beasties. My employer also built its own hardware just to run some CAD too, as did others. Also Lisp was often used in CAD work, it was it’s own OS if I remember right.
Anyhow the point I make is that Grape looks like an outside the box desktop replacement for Finder but not ready to replace it and likely never could, but still useful as an alternative way of browsing whatever mime types it can support. If you have a GUI kit that supports all of the file types you want to manage, then it becomes easier to prototype something like this. Perhaps Qt could too.
While current OSes allow one to change the zoom scale of window icons to some degree or almost no degree, they are too clumsy to bother with and hopelessly modal, I have given up spatial for plain detail lists, not that I ever wanted to do that. The fact that they all moved to using tons of white space for stuff like side panels just tisses me more.
One thing CAD programs do is to puts lots of tools in front of the user with quick access to tool changes, something Apple has long put down, forcing us into the one button menu bar roundtrips model better suited for …… At least we still got 2 buttons. As an engineer I miss having direct control of my objects.
This looks great! Please send me a beta invite as well.
… my regimented desktop of 32×32 icons that are arranged according to their rank and division, you damned dirty code monkeys!
More seriously though: sounds like a cool idea. Wish you luck with it. But I will reserve the right to use the tried and true.
I’ll assume the developer has built Grape on the Cocoa APIs which is fair enough.
But I’ll just mention that the Qt4.4 platform which is cross platform also includes classes or widgets that do 2d zoomable rotatable collection spaces but they come inside a window view so not Grape like. Perhaps Qt might also be capable of implementing portable desktops that look more like Grape and less like KDE or Finder.
Qt 4.5 is still quite a ways away from the Cocoa APIs. It’s nice that Cocoa interfaces were added to Qt4.5 but pretty interfaces are just the top of the iceberg of what makes up Cocoa.
You would have to be a developer of Cocoa for awhile to appreciate everything it has to offer and I admit I haven’t and have no interest to ever be limited to one platform API or its special language. I prefer to remain platform agnostic and use cross platform tools where possible. Don’t even care if they don’t conform to the platforms guidelines as long as they are self consistent.
Even with Qt having less mass than Cocoa, it still has more than enough to build cross platform desktops far more interesting than what I saw in KDE3. I am investing my energy there for now.
One example of what I am thinking about follows.
Suppose in a better designed desktop, you group select 2 or more folders that you know or believe to contain the same duplicate content or substantially the same or overlapping in file content to a very deep level. You could go find a dedupe type of app and run that to remove dupes, but shouldn’t the desktop already have ways to highlight that 2 files or folders are the same or how similar they are. Then offer the possibility to replace all redundant dupes with 1st class references. In fact multiple references to the same file should be much better managed too with tools for navigating between any instance to any other instance to same file or object. These ideas are usually built into CAD tools where all instances of an object are equal to begin with.
In the real world we use our senses to tell us alot about the objects in front of us with out having to get special tools to tell us what we can already judge with senses fairly well. We get the tools out when out senses are not precise enough. In desktops, we mostly have to use special apps for every little task because the OS can not be bothered to tell us even rudimentary things about relations of things. None of this thinking requires Cocoa to build it, maybe if you want to bling it to death.
I am reminded of that StarTrek NG episode where the shy engineer got his IQ boosted by alien influence. No longer was the Enterprise computer UI good enough for him, it became so frustrating he had to go to the Holodeck and instruct the dumb computer how to build the UI he needed in order to accomplish his immediate task. Unfortunately we can’t really do that with the desktops we have unless we can code, but that is so tedious.
Anyway I can go look at the beta now.
Gimmee a copy, this looks proper bo’ !
Beta access, please? Thanks.
Grape sure looks nice, but I believe it wouldn’t hurt to be able to turn on/off the filenames. I imagine it would be pretty hard to distinguish between two text files based on a tiny preview. Sure, you could zoom in and actually see the content, but what if you have two very similar but not identical files?
That’s what desktop/stacks should look like. I kindly ask for beta licence. Thanks!
I have already seen this and went to their page for beta but unfortunately haven’t heard from them since.
It would be great to try this new technology and maybe write a blog post about it.
I just got a Dual 1.42ghz PowerMac G4 and this would be cool.
Seems like a very interesting idea indeed. No hardware here with which to test, though I could probably emulate.
I hope files of different types can be grouped together without creating a folder.
One, as of yet unimplemented, feature of my yet-to-be-released LoonTracker ( for Haiku ) is file grouping – even naming of groups if you desire. The idea is to select various files/folders of any type, right click on the group, then click something akin to “Create Group.”
From then on the group could be manipulated as a whole in various ways. Files and folders need to be capable of being in more than one group, but I am still stuck on my choices for handling this scenario – if anyone has an idea, I’d LOVE to hear it.
On the whole it sounds interesting, a beta invite would be nice – I can always find a way to get into whatever version of MacOS I need ;-).
–The loon
EDIT: stupid me ending sentences with propositions…
Edited 2009-04-17 07:33 UTC
I would like beta access
I’d like to try out Grape, it looks very promising and interesting. Please, send me an invite at [email protected] .
I’d like to give it a try as a beta test…
This Sounds very pomising, I’d Love to have Beta Access!
Regards
Patrick
Would also love to try this out!
Even though the idea is not bad, it is still not very usefull if it is only some kind of desktop alternative.
My desktop is 99.9% of the time not visible and I am not going to minimize all applications to just go play with the stuff on the desktop.
As Thom pointed out, when they integrate this with finder windows or for windows alternatives in windows explorer, then it might be a little more usefull but I am not admiring the nice stuff on my desktop all day. Work needs to be done 😉
This looks pretty cool and i’d love to play with the beta.
i would be interested in the beta test.
Thanks
I would very much like beta access!
Nice
If its still offered, would love to try this.
Fanks…
just my luck.
+1 funny
(I was thinking the same when I opened OSNews)
Back on topic, this project does look good
I think it wouldn’t take much to implement such thing for Linux, if a team of python coders start doing it.. using gtk or the compiz plugin framework..
Depends on your definition of “much”. I don’t have too much in depth knowledge of the compiz plugin, but I know the Mac has the core image api which makes it simple to do a lot of cool image manipulation tasks.
Edited 2009-04-17 14:53 UTC
That video looks quite slick. Maybe longer-term they could combine it with some Expose-like functionality – so that you could iconify running applications and manage them the same way (E.g, drag icons to the trash to close an application, or use drag-and-drop to move multiple icons to another virtual desktop, etc).
Why is it a private beta now? I downloaded this a few days ago from their website.
This looks a lot like the Lowfat demo on Linux from a few years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkrM4ymkiDo
Its sounds to be good Idea, i tried BumpTop and realdesk too… so give me beta access …
that would be nice to find out which one is the best…
Still did not receive any invitation….
Please Mr Admin… Im waiting Sir…..
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