Mac OS X 3D File Browser

A user writes "A development team at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana has released a 3-dimensional file browser called 3DOSX as a test of the feasibility of the technology. This program uses OpenGL to render a file system as a series of floating 'platters' interconnected by semi-translucent beams of light." I tried this on my old PowerBook G3/400, first from the source and then from the disk image, and then realized I don't have the required OpenGL-accelerated video card. Doofus am I! Be not like me! (However, it does work, albeit very slowly, on a new iBook/600). J adds: Nice and fast on an old G4/500 with a Radeon.

Screen Shots

[cjhuitt]

It looks interesting, that's for certain. I don't know that I would want to use it all the time yet, at least because I couldn't drag-and-drop a file between platters.

For those who are curious what it looks like, I took a couple of screenshots. At the risk of slashdotting my school's server, they are here:

Platters View [iastate.edu].

A welcome return of Labels [iastate.edu].

The Get Info [iastate.edu] window.

Erm, right...

[Fweeky]

So, for 100x the CPU and memory usage, I can see fewer of my files at once, and do less with them, and have them represented in a totally unintuitive and unfamiliar way?

Right, that's very good. What next? Text editors with words represented as different coloured 11 dimensional hypercubes? :)

Thanks for the feedback guys

[Have Blue]

I am one of the people who wrote 3DOSX (UIUC MacWarriors [uiuc.edu]). In response to everything posted so far:

• Drag-and-drop support was the #1 feature that didn't make it in time for this release. We are currently deciding whether to continue to work on this (say, for an updated release at MacHack). We would add dragging, more file management functionality like renaming, and themes (support is ready, theme creation tools are not).
• If you are having performance problems: Make sure that the window is small enough that the dock, and any other translucent windows you may have open, do not overlap the GL context. Also, if you have less than 16MB of VRAM, reduce the window size (preferences) and relaunch the app. OS X appears to fall back to software rendering if the hardware is inadequate.

Thanks for the comments!

Revenge of the Pie menu...

[earthy]

It is very interesting to see the fairly old technology of Pie menus [piemenu.com] implemented yet again. Somehow, one would think that there should be a lot more implementations,
given that pie menus show up again and again...