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Show HN: Fileloupe for Mac

16 points by kennycarruthers ↗ HN
After years of lurking on Hacker News, I figured it was time to finally contribute back. Fileloupe for Mac is a new Mac application that I've been working on for the last year. Version 1.0 was just released in the Mac App Store but Hacker News readers are welcome to download a beta version of 1.1 here:

https://kennyc.s3.amazonaws.com/Fileloupe1.1-72-Beta.zip

Fileloupe is a high-performance, incredibly fast file viewer that, I think, makes looking at photos, videos, PDFs and documents a lot better than the existing solutions. It doesn't replace Finder (or iPhoto / Lightroom), but rather sits between the two of them in my workflow. If you ever find yourself wanting to browse through the contents of a folder but a Finder window is too restrictive and launching a dozen windows in Preview or Quick Time Player doesn't make sense, then check out Fileloupe.

You can find out more information here:

http://www.fileloupe.com

Things that might be of interest to the Hacker News community:

* After working on it for a good chunk of 2014 back in Canada, I moved to Bangkok, Thailand in January to be a "digital nomad" with the goal of finishing 1.0 over here. I rented an apartment, joined a co-working space and met a bunch of other digital nomads working remotely.

* It's a Mac application and I'm an indie developer (hopefully), which tends to raise a few eyebrows these days in the world of mobile apps and web based ideas.

* I started my career by working in Silicon Valley on Be OS, followed by the first version of OS X and then spending most of my time on the T-Mobile Sidekick (aka: Danger Hiptop).

* In 2005/2006 I left Silicon Valley and traveled overland from Barcelona, Spain to Cape Town, South Africa. I'm still trying to find my way home...

If you have any questions or feedback, then please let me know. Thank you.

Kenny

12 comments

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bbrks
I have to say the website really does sell the product well. It's everything 'Preview' should be and more.

It looks very polished and is really, really fast (opened a project of ~11,000 files on my old 2010 MBP with spinning disk and it could instantly filter and search).

I congratulate you on shipping a piece of software that surpasses Apple's standards. :)

I've installed the app on all of my machines, work and personal within 10 minutes of visiting the website. Great job!

kennycarruthers
Cool, glad to hear it's working well for you. Performance was something that was a priority from day one. My email is in my profile so if you have issues or general feedback then please don't hesitate to contact me directly.
scrumper
My word this is fast!

My use case is probably not the one you intended it for, but I've pointed it (the beta) at my folders of contracts and spreadsheets to see if it can replace finder/QuickLook. So far, I'm just thrilled I can QuickLook two files side by side!

I don't really understand what dragging a folder in does though. Does that set it up as some permanent link?

What is "Staging"?

Is there any way I can get a view of a folder as a list, so I can choose which files to compare? My files generally have very long names, so these always appear truncated when in icon view.

Very good work. Will keep up with the beta for a few days's real work then buy if it remains useful. $29.99 is above impulse purchase value for me, but I certainly want to support you as an independent developer.

kennycarruthers
Thanks for the support. Using Fileloupe as a document browser is definitely a use-case that others have discovered (and one I didn't originally plan for).

Dragging a folder into Fileloupe just loads all of the files in that folder (and all sub folders). The original files are left in place and nothing is copied, duplicated or moved. If you have a folder full of documents (maybe your Dropbox folder), then you can easily drag your entire Dropbox folder into Fileloupe, filter by type (PDF, iWork, MS Office) and then easily browse just the documents you're interested in. (You can, of course, drag in as many folders as you want.)

There is currently no "list view" mode, but others have asked for one as well. I might add one down the road, but there's no immediate plan for one.

Staging is a way to "pin" a single file to the left of the viewer, allowing you to continue previewing other files while a single one stays "staged". Actions where staging is of interest:

* Finding the best photo out of a group (just keeping staging the better one).

* If you're dealing with multiple documents, you might want to keep a certain document staged while you browse through the others. (Maybe an itinerary, index, presentation, agenda, table of contents, glossary, etc...)

* Staging a document is also a quick way to open the same document in two separate viewers. This is helpful when you need to look at separate sections of the same document or movie. (Like non contiguous pages of a PDF document.)

Thanks for the kind words and offer of support. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email me directly or post here for others to see.

scrumper
Great, thanks for the reply. I commend you for staying focused on your main use case.

Only other thing - I'd like to be able to hit the "Close viewer" button with a keyboard press; not sure if Esc or Space is more appropriate.

kennycarruthers
The keyboard shortcuts are still very much influx. The Escape key used to close the viewer, but then enough other people wanted the Escape key to take them back to the grid view, so I changed it. People really seem to like to use the Escape key and the space bar which causes a lot of usability issues because their functionality gets so overloaded. (Escape is also overloaded to exit from full screen mode, while the space bar both switches from grid mode to the viewer and toggles play/pause on the media controls.)

I doubt I'll ever get a sequence of shortcuts that makes everyone happy. Maybe something like "Command-Period" might work for closing the viewer so long as the embedded PDF viewer doesn't swallow any shortcuts.

blacksmith_tb
Yosemite only, I take it?
kennycarruthers
Yes, sorry. I know there's still a decent number of people using Mavericks but with El Capitan coming out later this year it's doubtful I'll add Mavericks support.
manzoni
Hi Kenny, Fileloup looks great, but is it possible to have a test version first? 29$ is certainly not that much, but also not so little, one just spends right away. would appreciate it! thanks, manzoni
kennycarruthers
You can download a beta version of Fileloupe at the link above and take it for a spin. Note that this is a beta for version 1.1 so some features are present that haven't yet made it to the Mac App Store version. If you find that Fileloupe is of value to you, then I'd love to have your support in the Mac App Store.
manzoni
Thanks a lot! have you planned to include the possibility to add/change the infos of the file or add tags? although you say and probably do not want to change the files? i am thinking of the case of adding red tags, and then in the finder, the file have this red background.
kennycarruthers
At the moment, I'm taking a very conservative approach to adding what I would call "file manager" features. I'm not trying to create a Finder replacement and with the restrictions that the app sandbox imposes, it's very difficult (if not impossible) to even perform some operations that users might expect if they started to see Fileloupe as a file manager. That's not to say that I'm against them ("Move to Trash" might appear in v1.1) but I am being overly cautious.

With specific regards to Finder labeling and tagging, it's more likely that I'd add support for Fileloupe to be able to show labels and tags long before I added the ability to add or edit those tags.