

Show HN: Space Gremlin, my christmas project just accepted for the Mac App Store - seanalltogether
http://www.spacegremlinapp.com/

======
seanalltogether
Some technical info.

I'm using a technique called Squarified Treemaps outlined here:
<http://www.win.tue.nl/~vanwijk/stm.pdf> The algorithm is tuned for speed
right now but I really want to get it parallelised in a future update. I spent
a lot of time getting the visualization as readable as possible.

Submitting to the app store is still a worrying process. You've got everything
ready to go and you're excited to be done developing and then you sit for 15
days wondering if you'll be rejected or not. But overall I'm really happy not
to have to build my own payment system.

------
ugh
Here is what I noticed, feel free to take any of this however serious you want
to:

The app feels like a proper Mac application. I like its look, similar apps
tend to look much worse. (Except for, I’m sorry, the icon.)

I don’t like the keyboard shortcut for zooming out, backspace just feels wrong
and always seems to be so far away from my fingers. Other shortcuts are
missing altogether.

Since your users won’t be typing anything you could use keyboard shortcuts
without modifiers across the board. I would use + and - for zooming in and
out, command+arrow for moving through the history and the arrow keys for
moving the selection. (At the moment the arrow keys just do nothing.) You
should also throw in shortcuts for showing files or folders in the Finder and
for moving files or folders to the Trash. (Are there any good reasons why it
is currently not possible to directly move files or folders to the Trash from
your app?) Whatever you do, add plenty of logical and easy to remember
keyboard shortcuts.

Besides a better keyboard shortcut for zooming out, you maybe also need some
sort of mouse-centric way of quickly zooming out. Moving all the way up to a
toolbar button to zoom out feels clunky in the age of Google Maps. I don’t
know what would be a good solution in your case, others use gestures or
scrolling. You might want to look into that.

Zooming out needs to animate. Currently there is no indication which folder
the user just zoomed out of which confused me many times. Animating zooming
out would provide users at least with a hint of their place. You could also
automatically select the folder the user just zoomed out of.

I don’t know how hard that would be, but QuickLook and file previews would be
nice additional features.

~~~
seanalltogether
Great feedback, I know what you're saying about the icon, I've cobbled all of
the design elements together myself, but I'm no designer.

The tree view could use from better zoom logic, and I agree that a seamless
neverending zoom in zoom out would be perfect, but right now rendering is very
expensive. I keep thinking this app might be a good excuse to dive into
OpenGL.

------
jason_slack
A few comments for a future version:

1\. When you are scanning a disk and you minimize of hide the app, put a
progress indicator running in the dock and maybe bounce the icon when the scan
is done. Think XCode when you are doing a long compile and you hide it.

2\. Maybe color code sparse bundles a different color than blue? When I
scanned the app showed me that 216gb was being used by my Time Machine
.sparsebundle....maybe other users would have been very quick to remove it
before they realized what was going on. Example
/users/.jtsm/.jtsm.sparsebundle would be the path.

3\. Bug: When I launched Space Gremlins the FIRST time no Volumes showed up
for me, but quitting out of the app and going back in a second time Volumes
showed up for me.

4\. Bug: In Popular Places as I scroll right I have Music, Then a blank space,
the Pictures. If I click the blank space is shows the silhouette of a folder
icon with a label and nothing else. When I click on the blank space it brings
up an empty scan window that says Location:Label Scan Rate: Label, Total
Scanned: Label

contact me and I can sent you screen shots if you want.

~~~
seanalltogether
Thanks for the info. 1 is a great idea and I'll definitely incorporate it. 2\.
I need to learn more about sparsebundles, the default mac file enumerator
trips up on certain files. 3\. Weird, no idea about that. 4\. The empty space
between should be ~/Movies/ but I just realized I don't actually verify if the
user has that folder, I just assume they do. I'll add that to the 1.1 before
it gets uploaded to Apple.

Thank you very much for the feedback.

~~~
jason_slack
I have ~/Movies, but it is empty! Maybe that is part of the issue.

------
abcd_f
How does it compare to other similar programs, e.g.
<http://www.daisydiskapp.com>?

~~~
xtian
And what advantages does it provide over comparable free apps (namely,
<http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net>)?

~~~
jbrennan
Last time I checked, GrandPerspective was pretty busted on Snow Leopard.

~~~
xtian
In what way? Seems alright to me, but I don't use it that often.

~~~
jbrennan
It could be better now. I seem to recall using it around the Snow Leopard
launch and experiencing lots of crashes.

But like I said, it could be better now.

------
rayboyd
Handy. Sifting through du output is never fun when you have 1000's of (badly
named) files.

------
madewulf
This is very useful.

I have been using a similar program for Windows for ages : SequoiaView
[http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visu...](http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview//)

It seems that it has been written by the folks who wrote the paper that you
referred to.

The first analysis can take some time, though. How fast is your implementation
for Mac ?

~~~
seanalltogether
The speed really depends on the size of the view and the depth of the objects.
The pixel dimensions of a folder determine whether to render it's children.
I'm normally able to live resize the window without too much chugging, but as
you hit higher resolutions the speed drops.

At some point I hope to get it into Grand Central Dispatch and see what effect
that has, the nature of the visualization makes it perfect for being
parallelized.

------
hopeless
I like it (I used treemap viewers on Windows and have been looking for a Mac
replacement) but what about some colour-coding? It would add another dimension
to the data and allow the user to easily see which areas are photos, movies,
documents, applications, or misc files. It's much much easier to see colours
than it is to read the folder names.

Please, please, please tell me you've got this planned!

~~~
seanalltogether
Color coding is in the roadmap, right now I have a 1.1 update that improves
scan speed, memory usage, and a handful of bugs, but I've got to wait 15 days
for apple to approve it.

Coloring is something I want to approach very carefully. I had colors in the
beginning and the app turned in to a visual mess. I want to make sure the
colors can convey meaningful information without subtracting from the
readability.

~~~
jason_slack
I bought this morning, when do you anticipate 1.1? When did you submit the
update? I thought that updates were generally processed a bit faster than
brand new app submissions...

~~~
seanalltogether
The are and they aren't. General updates still take 15 days to review. The
only fastracking is if they reject it for an easily fixable problem. I'm
submitting 1.1 at the end of today depending on any extra bug reports that
come in that I'm not aware of.

------
KevinMS
There's also this from the guys that did omnioutliner and omnigraffle and its
free

<http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/>

~~~
jason_slack
Free, YES but not quite in the same league as Space Gremlin. I think that
Space Gremlin will have a lot going for it where people will pay for the app.

------
mxavier
There's a free (though probably less featureful) app for Windows I've used for
years called Windirstat that does a similar job, albeit while looking much
uglier.

------
js2
I wonder if this was inspired by
<http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/bloat/> ?

~~~
mcantelon
These programs have been around for years. Spacemonger for Windows
(<http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/>), Disk Inventory X for OS X
(<http://www.derlien.com/>), and a particularly groovy one for Linux with a 3D
treemap circa 2001 (<http://fsv.sourceforge.net/screenshots/>).

------
jws
Well done! I just deleted the "third down" thing on my "to code" list.

Have you tried scanning with parallel threads? I suspect having 4 or so
threads would allow the disk to internally schedule the seeks better for a
speedup. (For bonus points, track your lookup rate and dynamically tune the
thread count.)

~~~
seanalltogether
Honestly I hadn't thought about that. I assumed a single enumerator was the
best but I really don't know much about how reads are scheduled. I do know
that as of the 1.1 update I have planned, the scan rate is 10% faster the
Grand Perspective and only a couple seconds faster then Daisy Disk.

------
jason_slack
Wow, very cool and I just bought it. One comment....I associate Gremlins as
brown not green! Congrats. If you want to chat about OS X file system stuff,
hit me up. I have a few disk utility apps I have written over the last few
years.

~~~
seanalltogether
Thanks for the purchase and feedback. I may hit you up about that sparse
bundle issue, time machine backups are causing a headache right now.

------
chopsueyar
Anybody remember 'pig' from the DOS days?

