Every so often we see something that is just so obviously the future that we sit back in surprise, almost speechless. Now — for the second in our “I’ve seen the future” postings — comes Grid Iron Software’s Flow software.
I first saw Flow back in January at Macworld, and it was pretty amazing as what they called “pre-alpha” software. I just saw a demo presented by Daniel Brown at the createchaos conference and It’s clearly come a long way in 10 months. But what is Flow and why do you want it?
Flow pays attention to your assets and your files. If you place a PDF into InDesign, it knows and can track that — that’s no big trick. But if you copy some text from a MS Word document and paste it into Illustrator, then save that as an .ai file and place it into InDesign, then export that as a PDF and place it into a difference InDesign file… it knows, and it can show you the path. If you later decide you need to make a change to the first PDF file, you can easily track it back to the original InDesign file.
But wait, there’s more. If you delete a PDF (or psd or ai or almost any file format) that is in use by your InDesign document, Flow sees it — even if InDesign isn’t running — and says, “Hey, are you sure you want to delete that, because it’s used in this file.”
You can use Flow to search inside documents, such as “find me the photoshop document in which I named a layer ‘duck’.”
You can track how long you worked on a document, or on a project, and give you time reports.
Flow keeps track of every version of every file in a project (optional, of course). So if you change the color in a file, then save it, then later decide to go back to the original color, it’s just one click away. This version control is incredibly slick, and it’s the way I wish Version Cue would have worked from the start.
Flow is simply amazing. And it hasn’t even shipped yet. A public beta is supposed to be shipping very soon, which means I’d expect to see the final version in early 2009. I can’t wait.
That said, I have to say that I really wish they’d just sell the whole shebang to Adobe — I think more people would end up using it. That said, its true that Flow is useable and useful for print, Web, and video. But it’s also going to be useful for many other people, including legal teams, editorial teams, and virtually anyone who has to keep track of files on disk. Joe Bob says “check it out.”
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on October 13, 2008
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