Product Reviews

The aim of 3D-Space VFS (visual file system) is to make drilling down through multi-level file systems easier by displaying files and folders in three dimensions.

When you first launch it, you're presented with a window that displays your root level - your computer, its name and any hard disks or volumes mounted under it. However, this is a 3D view - the drive and volume icons sit on a translucent background, hovering over the desktop, with a vanishing point towards the horizon. By default, next to each drive icon is a rectangle containing the contents of the drive's top level. Mousing over any content in that level will cause it to magnify and display its name.

Navigation around the file system now becomes simplicity itself. Drag anywhere on the translucent background to pan in 3D across your file 'landscape'. Click-dragging on the background (or Alt-clicking on the transparent background) will zoom you in and out of the

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landscape. One thing we'd like to see is the ability to alter the tilt of the 'landscape' on the fly via a mouse-click modifier combination. At the moment it's only accessible via the preferences.

Double-clicking a folder will cause it to open on another floating plane, higher up in the stacking order. Since it does a lot of graphical heavy lifting, having a good video card will help, although we had no complaints using an Nvidia 7300GT in a Mac Pro.

The application's preferences are also implemented in a 3D manner: normally, the prefs window sits, reduced in size, in vanishing-point perspective in the top-left corner. Clicking on it causes it to swing gracefully into use. Here, you can set icon size, magnification, tilt, text size, level of detail and the opacity of the background. We did find the magnification settings changed to default between restarts.

There's also another set of preferences for drawers. Basically, the entire 3D-Space window can sprout a tab and become a drawer. Click on the tab and the entire window slides away off screen. The main window can also have tabs, so you can have multiple views onto the file system in the same window - something that's been requested for the Finder for some years.

The one thing missing in this release is the ability to move and copy files by dragging and dropping. If you need to do this, go back to version 1.4.2, where this feature works. It will be implemented in the 2.0 release early this summer, however - a release that we look forward to.