I’ve always had a messy desktop. No matter what I do, the Cmd+D shortcut for save-to-desktop is just too tempting. For instance, at this very instant, there are 267 items on my desktop. That’s one of the reasons why I use Desktopple to hide my desktop contents (or screenshots would look like a nightmare!). It’s why I make sure I use Shovebox whenever I can, and that’s why I’m always looking for new ways to manage my ‘desktop’.
Announced a while back (but still in private beta), Grape organises your desktop in a sort of spacial structure, kind of like objects organised on your real desktop table. You would for instance keep all your stationery in one box, keep a folder with all related files in another, and be able to quickly access all of these without much effort.
When you first launch Grape, its window covers up your almost entire screen. At first I was a little confused. What exactly is different in here rather than just a bunch of thumbnails scattered on my desktop?
Well, apparently Yann Le Coroller has thought about the design of Grape for more than a minute. First, you can manually sort stuff. Move icons around. You can even resize them using the handle at the bottom. However, it’s a lot simpler to just let Grape do all the heavylifting for you. So, after figuring out how everything works, I put it all back where it was, and challenged myself to make it organised within 3 minutes.
Did a search for ‘jpg’, dragged out a massive selection, moved them to the side. Right click » Stack organises them in a sort of grid. Drew out a white box around it and added a text frame ‘Screenshots’. Did the same for PDFs, movies, folders, and I was with a relatively neat desktop within 3 minutes.
One nice feature of Grape, is the drop zone. Whenever you add a file to the desktop, it will automatically surface around the drop zone which can be placed anywhere. Another nice feature, is you can play a video file within grape, and it will resume from where you left off the next time. Something like Quick Look.
Grape is missing a lot of features that should be included in a desktop manager. Criteria based auto-sorting (kinda like Hazel), a better theme, and perhaps the possibility of the app window to actually be the desktop. If it’s not the desktop itself, having a separate window frame to deal with (with no possibility of having your own wallpaper) seems a little obstructive and unnatural.
As it is right now, Grape is in private beta, and is a kind of buggy. The devs are hoping to release it soon (around May ’09) but I think it’ll take a little more time than that.
