Todos: Everything at your Fingertips

Here’s a new freeware launcher for Mac OS X that is geared specifically to really visual thinkers. It might actually be a useful add-on for Quicksilver, or it might just be cool to look at now and then. You know, something to amaze your Windows friends. The software compiles a collage of all your application icons and displays them in a layer over your desktop. You then just point at the right one. There are definitely times when you can remember the icon but not the name of the software, so in cases like that, this might be the solution over a text-based launcher like Quicksilver. Definitely worth a try!

Update 8/5/06 Cool idea, but simply not ready for prime time. If you have a small collection of applications, you might enjoy Todos, since the amount of time required to display the bezel with your icons is reasonable. When I restricted Todos to showing just the apps in my /Applications/Utilities folder, it took about 6 minutes for the bezel to become usable, and about the same amount of time to fade away when I dismissed it. My utilities folder has about 150 apps, including about a dozen Applescripts. However, one of the most irritating aspects of Todos was present even in this “best circumstance”… namely, when I select Preferences from the Todos menubar item, I have to wait for the bezel to fade away before the prefs window will appear. Other annoyances:

• For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was triggering the Todos bezel to fade away or reappear. It seemed to fade when unexpected… for example, by moving my mouse over the bezel… and to become fully in focus when I was, for example, moving my mouse back to this text field to type.
• From the initial look of the application, I expected to be able to resize the bezel, and in fact I kept trying to do so even after determining that it was impossible.
• I would have expected to see a preference for icon size, or perhaps spacing between icons, since the default view has the icons so packed together it was difficult to distinguish them without a good deal of effort.
• Another possibility would be to provide customizations for organizing the icons differently. Again, with a very large collection of apps, this would be essential. Todos provides only two ways of organizing the icons now—you can sort either alphabetically or “by directory” (not sure if that means, “alphabetically by directory” or what).
• The fade-in and fade-out times also are a major annoyance. Even with a tiny collection of 150 apps–12 rows of 13 icons each–waiting 6 seconds at either end is unacceptable. A mystery to me is why it should take so long to render the icon-filled bezel in the first place. After the scanning has been done, the bezel is filled with all the icons when it begins to fade in—so why 6 seconds? Likewise, when I dismiss the bezel, why can’t it disappear instantly? On subsequent relaunches, nothing less than 1 or 2 seconds of fade will meet the needs of users after the initial curiosity wears off.

Todos has potential, but it’s a little too soon to think of relying on it for navigation. Heck, when I tried Todos with my full set of applications, it took a full 30 seconds to appear, and another 30 to disappear! Some functions were unreliable at that level… for example, I couldn’t set the opacity of Todos any lower than default and still be able to interact with it. Now, in case you think my problem reflects a weak Mac system, it’s actually quite the opposite. The performance numbers I got may in fact be much better than on a lesser Mac. I’m using a PowerMac G5 Quad system with 4GB of RAM and the Nvidia GeForce 7800GT graphics card. Hardly a pantywaist!

This freeware has an undeniable visual appeal, and perhaps if it receives some more polishing, it can be used for more than just a novelty item.