Leap
I’m trying to decide whether I like Leap or not. On the one hand, the Finder has been overdue for a major overhaul for years. On the other, it may not be major enough.
A lot of what Leap tries to do has been in the back of my mind for quite a while. I keep imagining a completely new, spatially oriented Finder where affinity between objects (whether they be folders, files, images, music, whatever) is conveyed through spatial proximity. This would require a really good three dimensional representation and goes so far down a new path that “Finder” is by no means adequate to describe it. Check out the navigational properties of frog design’s gelfrog prototype for an example.
There’s a pretty big gap between Leap and the gelfrog. Even so, it’s a small, possibly stumbling step in the right direction. I like a lot of what it has to offer: The idea that folders are, really, no longer a useful way to store information. The loupe (or “magnifying glass”) is often handy. And the basic concept of simply letting me choose a few key, relevant data points and the computer “just finding it” is great.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of really big flaws with Leap. It relies heavily on tagging. That is, I need to diligently apply context tags (such as “taxes,” “to-do” or “personal”) to my files. The fact of the matter is, I’m just not good at this (and, it turns out, most people aren’t—systems that rely on categorization are highly specialized—imagine how useful Google would be if it relied on people accurately categorizing documents). This, unfortunately, leads to some issues:
- If you don’t tag things, Leap tends to return an awful lot of irrelevant stuff. Hmm. Seems a bit like Google in that regard…
- If you do tag things, you need to be consistent.
- The natural extension of an application like this would be a collaborative environment, and that means every user needs to tag documents consistently. It’s just not going to happen.
- Tags are often not preserved when files “move around.”
Alright, so that last point, explained: Let’s say you use some kind of content repository (as we do here). When documents get put into the repository (we use Seapine SCM for technical documents, and Confluence for less technical ones) they lose all that fun metadata. Unfortunately, that means when I “check out” documents to my home directory so I have a working copy… oops, all the tags are gone.
The other problem I noticed with Leap is that it becomes painfully slow when connecting to a remote server. Not an issue if you just plan to use it on your laptop, but where it really could shine—searching the gigabytes of information on our central server—it just isn’t up to the task. I tried, several times… but in nearly every case, I was able to use the Finder to get where I needed to go before Leap did the job.
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