ARAMIS  The developer team consists of none other than little old me, coding away when I'm not doing that whole "day job" thing. If you're volunteering for the role of graphics designer, then you're hired! I should warn you though... The pay sucks, and the hours are lousy...

As far as the interface goes, yes it's cluttered, and there's no help for it whatsoever to even try to explain the way things work (I'm working on the help). Once you get used to it though, I think it's rather useable. GAPS stuffs a lot of functionality into few pixels. It's designed to use as much of its screen real estate as possible to show the images being viewed while still giving you some cue what keys you have mapped to what directories.

As for being un-Mac-like, granted the sorting drawer is a bit off, but that's a calculated deviation for the above reasons. If you've looked at DupeFinder or the key mapping setup, yes those could both use some help. There are pending bugs for both of those. There's a reason this isn't 1.0 yet, and there's also a reason there's no shareware nags or timeouts. I'm not the least bit offended if anyone thinks this work-in-progress isn't yet worthy of its $20 price tag. If you find it at all useful, I'll happily take bug reports or suggestions in lieu of payment.

If you do have any specific criticisms of specific parts of GAPS' interface, I'd love to hear them. Either here, via email, or in bugs filed against GAPS' bug tracker. GAPS' dev 'team' might be none other than Yours Truly, but I always try my best to implement any user requests or suggestions. There are a lot of pending bugs related to GAPS' UI that I'm getting to as I have time. GAPS is first and foremost my own image sorter, however, so frequently enough Form loses out to Functionality.

Please consider checking back in a couple of versions to see if GAPS better meets your expectations.  
(Version 0.70.3438)

ARAMIS  Sorry to disappoint, but GAPS was never intended to even touch ACDSee in terms of features. When I started writing, all I needed was a simple viewer that could deal with a huge and ever-growing collection of pictures. There wasn't anything close on the Mac, so GAPS was born.

While using Finder and/or [image editor of your choice] will give you a LOT more functionality, they don't cut it for my needs at all. If I open most of my image folders in Finder, Finder CRASHES. Not "slows down and takes a while," but "Would you like to report this to Apple" kind of crashes. Finder + [editor] can certainly do more, but it can't open and sort to 20 folders with 100,000+ images EACH.

GAPS' name sprung from an in-joke with a buddy of mine a few years ago. It's the Great American Picture(*cough*) Sorter. Granted, the abbreviated name doesn't tell you much about the product, but with other Mac OS apps like Adium, CyberDuck, or even the illustrious FireFox, descriptive names don't seem to be a big thing. The logo's a play (admittedly poorly executed -- I'm a coder, not a graphics artist) on the London Underground logo ("Mind the GAP"), plus a photographic slide thrown in so it's at least *somewhat* suggestive of what the app does. I'd certainly entertain suggestions for improvements.

I *did* shorten GAPS' version number a bit in this release. Now it's just the "version" (0.60) plus my internal build number. I usually don't increment the version number for beta releases, but the build number is an ever-increasing absolute value. It's the revision number from my Subversion repository, actually.

To address a few of the points from your original post:

1) My website: *shrugs* I kind of like it... I've been meaning to tweak the color scheme a bit though.

3) Rotate command: It's on my todo list. So are brightness adjustments.

5) Messy GUI: Anything in particular? It's meant to be sparse and stay out of the way. Granted, it's got a learning curve. I've got some improvements in the works, especially for the Preferences screen.

6) Shareware: I guess you could call it donation/betaware for the time being. I *may* consider making GAPS real shareware with a reg-code or something when I get to version 1.0. I couldn't sleep at night charging people for the current mess...

Thanks for the input in any case. Good, bad, or otherwise, it's nice to know people are at least trying out my work.  
(Version 0.50.0.3268)

MHANLY  Well done Mr. Developer

(Pertaining to your 'DETAILED' reply)  
(Version 0.60.0.3364)

ANONYMOUS  Kunvert can be used for converting .pdf to .jpg, etc.

But of course you knew that.  
(Version 0.20)

ZACHARY BEDELL  Sorry to hear about GAPS crashing! I've tried my best to make it as stable as I can.

If you have a few minutes, please do email me the stack trace from any crashes you might get. Just click on the "Report" button from the crash window and copy and paste the whole mess from the top textbox on the Crash Reporter window.

That information, along with an idea of what you were doing would go a long ways toward fixing whatever might have gone wrong.

In any case, thanks for giving GAPS a try!  
(Version 0.20)

ANONYMOUS  You do realize that images need not be saved to .pdf in OS X by default?

Making a statement that this software is useless for OS X only shows your ignorance.

There is an old saying, "Better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you are stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."  
(Version 0.20)

ZACHARY BEDELL  GAPS' non-support for PDF files is actually something of a calculated decision. If I had continued to use QuickTime for my image decode routines as I did when I first started writing GAPS, then PDF's (and animated GIF's, PICT's, and a few other formats) would have been supported. The problem: QuickTime is *slow* compared to the OpenSource OpenIL that I ended up using. QuickTime also fails to decode JPG's with even the smallest error in them whereas OpenIL will do the best it can with even the most trashed file. Finally, QuickTime has a few buffer overflow conditions in it where loading a particular malformed image will make it crash and take the host application with it. OpenIL is a bit more stable AND if there are problems, I can open up the source and fix it myself. Not so with QuickTime.

Now... All of that said, I have looked at setting up GAPS to fail-over to using QuickTime for files that OpenIL can't deal with. Since that seems like it would be a useful feature for some folks, I'll see what I can do about it for the next release.

As for the crashes... Yeah, I know. It happens... Email me the stack trace next time it does, and I'll do my best to fix it.  
(Version 0.20)

ARAMIS  Support for PDF's has been added to GAPS' 0.60 release. It can only see the first page of each PDF file, but it's a start.

If you need to see the rest of the pages, try GAPS' "Open in Preview" function.  
(Version 0.50.0.3268)