Product Reviews

Leap is a file manager from the same stable as the Yep PDF management application. Indeed, it borrows a lot from that app in terms of features and interface design. Leap is made for organising files with tags or keywords rather than in a hierarchy of folders. It drills down through complex file systems to find particular files or groups of files very quickly and easily.

Of course, that means that your files have to be tagged already, which is where Leap does something very clever. It assumes from the start that all your existing folder and file names can be treated as tags, which means that your file system is already tagged and ready to use from the moment you first launch the application.

Within moments we were able to drill down to a folder full of sub-folders and many dozens of Word documents, and extract all the .gif images stored

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in them. Spotlight could have done the same task but it would have taken twice as long and required considerably more thought. In contrast Leap's intuitive design makes complex searches effortless. What's more, Spotlight does not display the files so well. Neither does it offer a loupe tool for flicking through them to identify their exact contents, nor display a bookmarks bar for easy access to the same search criteria in future.

Leap has an optional tagging field that sits on the right edge of your screen - you simply drag files into it to tag them. Tags can also be added from within Leap itself or in the Spotlight comments field of any file's info pane. Put another way, Leap integrates very well with your existing setup, making use of any tags that you've already applied.

That said, if you are going to start depending on tags to navigate your files you have to commit to adding them not only to all new files created from now on but also, over time, to your old files. Some might see this as a price worth paying to get the most from applications like Leap but others might regard it as too much of a burden.

Leap's About window says that the application is your new Finder - and that's not an exaggeration. It could indeed prove to be your new Finder if your brain is up to abandoning the folder hierarchy concept that we're all so used to. We suspect that most people will end up using it alongside the Finder.