Frank McMahon said 24/6 at 12:58am

Find, view, organize all your photo, image, video, sound files. That pretty much sums up the entire program. It's right on the top of the page and that is what it does. I have been testing it quite a bit tonight and I can tell you its extremely fast and responsive. Importing large folder of images takes seconds and you can even drop a whole hard drive into the program and the software will let you examine and organize the entire thing.

I reviewed Aperture 2 for a magazine and this program is very similar in how it lets you lay out your thumbnails. In speed tests comparing the two, AtomicView does a more amazing job of moving quick...scrolling through thousands of thumbnails, it moves iike butter. The software apparently takes advantage of not only the GPU but dual-core CPUs. I would have to say that the tasks are much more GPU intensive, so having a great video card would be more beneficial than having multiple processors.

One advantage the software has is it can read many different file formats, so you have thumbnails of your movies, sounds and files right along side of your pictures. You can zip in and out of full screen mode in less than a second and unlike other programs I never hear any hard drive grinding going on.

Price is the only thing that gives me pause, the original $148 as well as the discount which comes out to $80. I have no doubt they have a team working on this and with limited marketing they need to make a profit to grow the software, but the price makes it more of a bigger decision than a quick $30 purchase. Still the software runs like a finely tuned race car and I was very, very impressed to say the least.

wavenumber said 24/6 at 12:14am

It looks interesting given the number of file formats supported. What's not so great is the non-standard interface. It seems everyone wants to design a new interface these days. Also, this is the kind of software one could use extra time to test. I never heard of it before today and I'm not sure I can make a decision to buy in just a day.

Espiridion said 24/6 at 1:36am

Thanks for the mini review Frank.

This is a useful program that reminds me a bit of iView.

Even with the discounted price it is expensive for MY needs.

I purchased iView when it was a $30 application. I got it again as part of Office 2008.

For people who don't have this type of programs it may be worth a look. I know that I have saved a lot of time by browsing through catalogs of thousands of media using similar software.

yves@antzero said 24/6 at 9:47am

Hello! This is Yves Schmid from AntZero. A quick reply to withtlc post : AtomicView is a Cocoa application entirely constructed on the top of OpenGL. Actually it uses many core technologies of the OS X. We don't lock up the OS at all. However we push the hardware and the software to the limit. This is something that you can change in the preferences (if you want AV to use only x CPU cores for instance) .

Regarding your problem : a deadlock in full screen mode may be challenging for the Mac OS X - this is not something we can easily resolve from our application. Of course it would be interesting to know what caused this deadlock. It can be related to a specific media file for instance. If you have any questions or problems be sure to send us an email to: antinfo[at]antzero[dot].com. Thank you for your interest.

prajna said 24/6 at 1:00pm

I am really liking the interface and speed of this apparently brand new media manager, but like others have mentioned, I am having a really hard time with the $80 price tag. Some people have mentioned no-brainer at $30, which is certainly true, but I would be very likely to jump at $50 or even $60. But $80 is just getting into another territory where I'm not sure I want to venture. This is one of those times I wish these promotions lasted for a week rather than a day. Well, I guess I have 11 hours to think about it.

jsfs said 24/6 at 9:04am

Plays anything QuickTime plays, but unfortunately that's a fairly small subset of my media library. It would be worth $20 or maybe even $30, but $80 is ridiculous.

withtlc said 24/6 at 12:48am

After demoing the application and visiting their website, you realize that this application is not designed for Mac. but using some sort of cross platform tool (at least it appears that way). The speed under which it performs is quite amazing until you realize that it locks up the OS when it gets hung, and you can't kill the job. I was in Full Screen mode (which is slick) but I couldn't kill the job, or even do a restart. I had to hold the power button down for 10 seconds. I have never seen a Mac application do that - It even ignores SIGHUP and SIGINT from the shutdown command.. so beware.. If you do demo it - try it from a non admin account - it never asked for admin password - yet somehow still locked up the computer... Too bad it froze (spinning beachball) - it was really impressive until that point..

macmiss said 24/6 at 11:19am

I used iView and would like this with all it's features, but a bit pricey for me... Maybe when the price comes down a bit, I'll get it...

uncoy said 24/6 at 9:07am

Actually, Leap does something similar (catalogueing media on your whole hard drive). But also very pricey. I got it in a bundle I think, if not here.

xanteen said 24/6 at 11:27pm

Looks promising and performed very quickly with jpegs. But, I choked on the RAW files from my D3, then crashed. No CPU hogging or freezes, though.

Absolutely no contest for the price between this and Photo Mechanic. PM is as ugly as ugly as it is stable and useful. Atomicview seems pretty as hell, but $80/150 for a beta is tough to swallow.