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About Zachary
By trade, I'm a Java developer for the New York State Court system. But what I *really* love is writing apps for Mac OS. I'm stuck in a Windows world by day, but I get my fix of Mac-y goodness when I get home!
Real Name:Zachary Bedell 
Homepage:http://www.thebedells.org 
Posts:4
Last Login:5 Jun 2006 16:24
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User Reviews
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Type: Developer
Date: 5 Jun 2006 16:55

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.

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Type: Developer
Date: 15 Mar 2006 18:15

Just a quick note where it'll hopefully be seen:

GAPS does support viewing PDF's now.

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Type: Developer
Date: 13 Feb 2006 21:00

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.

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Type: Developer
Date: 13 Feb 2006 20:40

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.

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