14 DAY TRIAL // ACDSee is one of the most widely known and used image viewers for the PC, so naturally, when I came across the OS X version I was curious to see what it was like. I guess I should have learned from that story about the cat.
First impressions The first thing that struck me was how very un-Mac-like this program is. It looks like the Frankenstein crossover between OS X, Classic and a PC application? go figure. It greets you with the Browser window, in which the volume hierarchy is shown on the right and on the left, the contents of the currently selected folder are presented in little 'slides' that eat up lots of border space.
I won't even go into the tiny 24x24 buttons that make up the toolbar. Not only are they marginally bigger than the mouse, but they are badly drawn, using bright, clashing colors.
"It's OK," I told myself, all it needs is a little tweaking. Boy was I wrong. The Browse mode has three modes of showing the images: the first is the Slides you start up with; the second is Borderless, which is in essence the same as slides except for the actual border around each image, and does nothing to help get more out of the screen real-estate; the third mode, Classic, reminds me of some very, very old applications, the PC kind, with a grey beveled outline surrounding every item and its name. It looks horrid when placed on the white background the application uses.
Digging deeper I decided to go past the fact that the thumbnails it shows in that Browse mode are badly scaled often, having that pixilated look, that there is no anti-aliasing used, and that it cannot display the icons of items in more than 32x32? after all, this is a image viewing program.
In the preferences I found the tab for thumbnails that lets you control all aspects of the thumbnails. Here I managed to turn that horrid border to a minimum and also identified the compression level for the thumbnails. I turned it all the way up to None and reloaded the folder. Unfortunately, the improvement that I was expecting to see was not there. The thumbnails were pretty much the same, although a little better, they were still not on par with the anti aliased thumbnails that other OS X image viewers have got me used to.
Having given up on hope of ever getting those thumbnails to look decent, I turned my attention to the Preview. The Preview of the currently selected image while in Browse Mode suffers from the same bad resize algorithm that puts out pixelated images that scream out in pain, begging for anti aliasing.
OK, so maybe it's not the best browser out there, let's move past that and go into the actual image viewing.
Image viewing for all its worth Going into the view mode and to see the full sized image does not pose as much angst as expected. Mainly because of all the exposure that had taken place so far. This mode presents us with one big window in which to view the images one at a time. By default, the program is set up to show the image at its full size, regardless of how big the window is. This is easily remedied and it also features a Full Screen mode, which is the better choice. There is also the option to resize the window to fit the image, a mind-boggling feature whose use I have yet to grasp. If you have it enabled and open up a series of images of all different sizes, the window will resize vertically and horizontally with every image creating a most pleasant sensation of vertigo.
Using a contextual menu you can turn the different option on or off as well as zoom in and out and rotate and flip the image. If you choose to rotate or flip the image, it will ask you whether you want to save the changes when you move on to the next image. Saving the image is done without you setting any options whatsoever, and JPEG files get compressed at a ratio that is beyond your control. What is more interesting is that if you flip a TIFF image for example, it will ask you whether you want to save the changes but it will not actually save anything.
The crowning moment of using this program was when I tried to change to the next image using the keyboard. The arrow keys produced no effect and so I looked in the menu and saw that the keyboard commands were Command plus "" for back and forward, respectively. "OK, that's not so bad?" I thought. And so I skimmed through the images forward, and then? When I tried to go backwards the Preferences window popped up. At the time I did not make the connection but not it suddenly came to me, Command plus "," is used in all applications to bring up the preferences dialogue. In effect, while you can move forward using Command plus ">" to move backwards, you have to use Command plus Shift plus "
