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.
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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
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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
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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
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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 ;-)
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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).
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This looks a lot like the Lowfat demo on Linux from a few years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkrM4ymkiDo
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