GAPS is a high performance image sorting and viewing utility. GAPS' primary purpose is to deal with immense collections of images and to quickly and easily display and sort them into different folders. GAPS also helps detect and delete duplicate images both automatically and with user interaction.
The Great American Picture Sorter started as one Geek's effort to get his image collection under control. At one point, my "Unsorted" folder was so large that it took my then-favorite image viewer over fifteen minutes to open up the folder. At the time I was using Windows 95 on a Pentium 133MHz machine. I decided that it was time to write something better.
GAPS' original incarnation was written in Visual Basic 6 for Windows. It was later upgraded to VisualBasic.NET and ran pretty respectably under Windows XP. Then things changed...
In late 2003, I had a life changing experience. A dear friend of mine was suddenly and unexpectedly afflicted with MacOS. At the time, I thought it was a horrible fate, and I did my best to get him the help he needed. By October, MacOS had spread, and I found that I too lusted for the clean lines and stable performance that was Panther. Before I knew it, I had ordered my first PowerBook. A pretty little G4 1GHz 15" Albook. Not long after, I found myself on eBay buying a second hand Sawtooth G4 PowerMac.
What could I do? I was hooked! Not having to reboot daily, having application react consistently in a well defined manner... How could I resist the lure of the Apple?
(And yes, tongue is firmly in cheek!)
When it came down to it, there were really only two of my old Windows applications for which I was unable to find comparable replacements. One was my trusty rusty text editor EditPlus. The other was GAPS.
I went through all the MacOS image viewers that I could find, but none of them managed to fulfill all of my requirements. The only solution then was to get to work, learn Cocoa, and port GAPS over to MacOS X. While the overall features are similar between the Mac and Windows versions of GAPS, the Mac version is definitely the more polished product. GAPS.Net (as I've come to call the Windows version) never got much further than my own computer. It was most certainly an in-house tool, and so things like its configuration interface leave much to be desired. CocoaGAPS on the other hand was quickly picked up by my dear (and still Mac infected) friend Jason, and so I had a second person's usage to consider. Jason is also a bit of a minor deity when it comes to user interface design, and so he's helped keep me honest when it comes to Apple Interface Guidelines conformance.
And so gentle user, I leave GAPS in your hands. May it serve you well!
I managed to find jEdit to replace EditPlus. It got the job done, but was a tad bloated (being written in Java). Later, I found TextMate. Once I managed to swallow my pride and decide to spend $50.00 on a lowly text editor, I found TM to be among the better editors I've used.
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