User Interface, in this context.
Check MacUpdate and/or VersionTracker, mentioned in my earlier post.
Offhand I don’t know specific comparison review sites for this software category, but could locate some with a bit of web searching.
LOL! My personal opinion as well! My, my, we’ve hit a sore spot among GC users I think. I, too, use it to do some things that I can’t do in Preview but each time I use it, or try to navigate its myriad prefs, I get frustrated and delaunch it. For instance, I often want to size some graphics to be specifically 500 or 250 px wide. After the resize is done, I can’t for the life of me get the + or - zoom in/out controls to work so it will show up at 100%. Little things like that that detract so much from an otherwise feature-rich app.
“rotate” is one of those things that is generally available on nearly every image manipulator. Unfortunately that rarely equates to “free rotate,” in which you can specify angle of rotation other than every 90°. Free rotation for some of us is rather handy. In the current context, it would be great to rotate an image a few degrees so that it closer to the usual 90° vertical. Many old photos of manuscripts don’t quite make the true 90° angle.
Thanks for mentioning that useful differentiation.
I use Aperture for photo editing.
Aperture has a Loupe for examining a portion of a photo with greater magnification. But I find this a slow and clunky UI, if I want to quickly look at a number of details in a photo in different areas, as would be the case were I looking at images, e.g., of pages in a handwritten ledger.
For a task like that, the UI of GraphicConverter in Slideshow mode (in version 6.4) is much quicker and more flexible. I can click in any area of the image and, using the scroll wheel, instantly adjust magnification. I can move back and forth among the images in the browsed folder much more quickly than in Aperture or many other photo editors.
That’s why I suggested GraphicConverter 6.4 in relation to the particular task of reviewing photos of historical documents. I’ve got some images like that, and for quick examination of small details followed by reversion to a smaller magnification, the GC 6.4 UI is useful. If you haven’t tried it, check it out. The higher the resolution of the image, the more amazing it becomes for examining detail with a flick of the Mighty Mouse scroll wheel.
I agree that many of the features of GraphicConverter seem dated. But when I need to batch process a number of images, whether converting them to a different filetype or rotating a selected group of images, there’s nothing else that does such a task so quickly and easily. Which, again, raises fundamental questions about user interfaces. Many thought the original Mac interface was simple and elegant. Was it? Is it now? Should function follow form, or form follow function?
It’s interesting to observe that in its ‘pro’ applications Apple has pretty much tossed out all the previous Human Interface guidelines. Gone are the familiar keystrokes and other modes of interacting with the application, so familiar in other Mac applications. New and different UI interfaces must be learned. I like some of them, and have become accustomed to others. I can do pretty good photo editing more quickly and easily, and will less investment in the learning curve (and expense) with Aperture than with Photoshop. One of Aperture’s strong points is non-destructive editing; the original image remains untouched.
But for rapidly moving about to examine fine details in images, the Loupe feature of Aperture sucks in comparison with the Slideshow features of GraphicConverter 6.4. I do my photo editing in Aperture. I prefer looking at (and showing off) the results in GraphicConverter. Applications are tools that I choose to accomplish my objectives. The best features in applications are those that let me accomplish my objectives most quickly and easily.
I’ve got several hammers. The best one is far from the most attractive one. But for hammering nails, it provides the best user interface through balance and heft.
No, I don’t speak for the developers of DEVONthink. I have no idea of their opinions about GraphicConverter. But I’m a heavy user of DTPO2 for research and writing. It provides an extensive collection of tools, and I use the ones that best fit my workflows, so that when I’m using it I concentrate on my objectives – letting the mechanics become almost invisible, things I don’t need to think about.
I’m glad that you found something that works for you and you like … unfortunately I don’t share the same experience. But I agree that there is need for several different tools to get the work done … when it comes to image processing my tools are: Aperture, Pixelmator, Acorn, GraphicConverter and some custom scripts.
You could index your files instead of importing them. They would remain in the Finder as you had them stored originally. However, even if you import your files, DT doesn’t store them in metadata, but as part of the “package”, all you would ever have to do is right-click on the database file, choose “Show package contents” and your files are right there.
There are different options for that. You can use the DT bookmarklet to manage importing information into DT. My personal preference for downloading pdfs is to use a folder action script. I have a folder with the action import script attached where I download PDFs intended for DT.