I wish that Uncle Steve in Cupertino accepted letters from good
little Macheads in the manner of Santa Claus. There's a Digital Hub
application I'd sure like to have for Christmas.
I've been extra good this year, buying a new Titanium PowerBook G4 for
myself and a second PowerBook for my wife, being evangelical about the
Mac everywhere I go, and making the required hajj to The Apple Store
(in Tampa, while on winter vacation) to worship at the altar (or at
least the Mac Genius bar) in person. Surely I'm written up in Uncle
Steve's "nice" list somewhere...
The app I want is a natural extension of the iTunes/iPhoto variety -
in fact it is sort of iPhoto from a different perspective (though it
would certainly compliment the existing iPhoto application nicely). I
know exactly what I want it to do. Here's the feature list:
The basic concept is for a program to organize all sorts of graphics
on my Mac, as iPhoto does for digital photographs. Like most of us with
a graphics bent (and doesn't that describe a big chunk of all Mac
users, to one extent or another?) I have a cornucopia of clip art,
logos, and pictures all over my hard drives and archived on dozens of
CD-ROMs.
Can I ever find exactly what I want when I want it? Nooooooooo.
That's where the New Killer Digital Hub App (call it iClip for now)
comes in.
The first time you run iClip, it offers you a list of common
graphics formats including EPS, PDF, GIF, JPEG, PICT, Flash, and TIF,
as well as less common ones used for special purposes or primarily on
the Windows side like WMF, BMP, and PCX. It also looks at my hard drive
and sees what sorts of common graphics applications I have installed
(Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, ImageReady, and so forth) and makes
note of these in the list as well. From that list, I can select which
types of files I want iClip to organize for me.
Once I've made my selections, iClip (in an iTunes-like fashion)
searches my mounted drives (in the background) for files with those
formats. It creates a database of the attributes (size, format,
creation/modification date, name, location, color depth, resolution) of
all of those files and creates thumbnail images of them.
When iClip is finished, it has collected a searchable database
(iPhoto style) of all the graphics files on my drive. After this, it
will periodically sweep the drive (again, in the background) to update
the database, deleting files no longer present and adding new ones it
encounters. I can also insert any CD-ROM or other removable media while
iClip is open and have the contents automatically added to the
database.
Now that I have this resource, iClip lets me go further with the
organization. I can code any and all of the files with keywords to
indicate the contents in any manner I find useful. I can also create
albums - subsets of the files - by drag-and-drop. These functions work
much as iPhoto does, but with a wider variety of image types. In fact,
iClip serves as a "superset" of iPhoto, in that any picture archived by
iPhoto's database is automatically added to the iClip database as
well.
Now I can find any graphic I need by keyword, format, album, or any
other criteria using a powerful search engine. (Gee, I wonder where
Apple can find one of those?) It doesn't matter where the graphic
resides - on my drive, on a server, on a removable disk, or in my
iDisk. iClip will find it and bring it to me. (For removables and
servers, it will prompt me to connect to the server or insert the
proper removable disk.)
Want more? If you are connected to the Internet, iClip will (at your
command) search an ever-growing database of free clip art that Apple
will make available online (as it does with some AppleWorks graphics
now). That makes signing up for iTools even more attractive, doesn't
it?
Apple will also make the specs for the database available open
source, allowing anyone with a clip art library to make an
iClip-compatible database of that art accessible online. Need a graphic
of a submarine? Click the Open Search button and find dozens all over
the Web for free or for sale. The ones for sale can be purchased right
from the iClip program, with Apple taking a small commission for
brokering the sale.
iClip itself can save any selected album or series of albums as a
searchable iClip-compatible database file which, when placed on your
Web server, acts as an interface to search and obtain the graphic files
so shared. If you already have those files on a server somewhere, iClip
can search and create an online database of them for you over the
Internet.
But iClip goes even further to make my life easier. At the click of
a mouse, I can open any selected graphic (or any set of graphics) in
any graphics program I wish. iClip has made a list of the programs I
have and knows what formats they will accept. I select a graphic, click
on a dropdown list, choose "Photoshop," and any compatible graphic is
opened in that application for editing.
Better yet, Apple could buy or license Lemke Software's
GraphicConverter engine and have iClip default to opening a selected
graphic document inside iClip itself if no other app is selected as the
default for editing that graphic format. That way, another click and a
simple set of controls could allow a selected graphic to be translated
into another format automatically.
Finally, iClip would come bundled with plug-ins created for Quark
XPress, PageMaker, InDesign,
AppleWorks, Word, and other programs. The plug-ins allow iClip to be
called up from within those programs to search for graphics which would
then - at my command - be inserted into my documents. If simple
conversion, cropping, or resizing is needed, I could do it right within
iClip (or within any program iClip connects itself to, like Photoshop)
before insertion.
This is the killer app for anyone who works with graphics, whether
they use it to help create an occasional greeting card, a weekly church
bulletin in AppleWorks, a personal or small-business Web site, or a
professional-level publication. There is nothing in it that is
technically impossible. Indeed, it is an extension of what iTunes and
iPhoto already can do.
Please, Sant, uh, Uncle Steve! Put this one under our trees for
Christmas!
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
