14 DAY TRIAL // These days everybody works with all file types. Everyone has pictures taken with their digital camera, home movies, game trailers and music videos, not to mention a heap of music. Normally, for each media type, you use a dedicated program to view and interact with that media, and more often than not, you use one program for viewing and another for changing it in any way. So with three media types, and two programs per each, things start to add up fast. Like all Mac users, I believe in simplicity and ease of use, which is why a program like this caught my eye.
Universal viewer? Stimulus X can work with all the most common media types, which made it extremely attractive to my eye. Sure, the Finder can preview all the media types, but it is often slow, it doesn't filter out the other files that you do not need, and the preview is ever so small. Sure, you can enlarge the preview in the Finder, but you have to do it every time you change folder, which is a royal pain.
Stimulus X promised to be a one-stop solution for all my previewing needs, regardless of the type of files I was looking at, and it delivered, although it wasn't exactly everything that I was hoping for.
For one thing, the way you browse the drive hierarchy is the list mode of the Finder, to which I have become adverse, much preferring icons or columns. The list mode just takes up too much screen real estate without being flexible enough, and the redundant up-down movements as you look inside the contents of a folder and then move up again to close it is horrible.
Furthermore, the program does not seem to have any shortcuts for easy navigation. I say 'seem' because they are there, but they are not mentioned in the manual, and the only reason I knew them was because I used Classic, back in the day, and became familiar with them there. The shortcuts themselves are not that bad, Command-Right to open a folder and Command-Left to close it. That having been said, there is simply no excuse for the lack of shortcuts for anything else.
As an image viewer The first thing I look at in a image viewer is how fast it is, and in this respect, Stimulus X performed admirably. It was just as fast as ViewIt when moving from one huge image to another. It handles all of the most commonly used file formats, so there are no gripes there.
But this is where things start to get dirty. If you are looking at large images there is a fit to window button, but no shortcut, that you can use. However, it only comes into effect after you change to the next file, which is a silly limitation. Furthermore, you cannot click and drag to pan the image around, you can only make use of the scroll bars, and even here, there is no smooth scrolling, only a drag and release to update. Very poor.
There is no full screen mode, and there are no shortcuts for zooming in and out.
As a sound player? Not much over what the Finder offers in this respect.
It has a ten-band graphical equalizer meter display, which is simplistic in look and feel. It doesn't actually have any equalizer sliders that you can use to adjust the sound output, just Bass and Treble sliders.
These are nice but fall short of being actually useful. Much better would have been the ability to read the tags of files and display the information. On the other hand, this is not a program I was considering using over iTunes.
Another thing that can be bothersome, especially if you use it to browse through a large collection of small sound files, is that there is no keyboard command to tell it to play the file again. Another option that is missing is having it automatically move the next sound file, after finishing playing. Fortunately, at least it knows to automatically start playing a file, once you select it.
As a movie player? As a movie player it plays all the files you can view using the Finder's preview. It doesn't support all the codecs or full screen mode, so don't expect it to be useful for anything other than quick previews.
It automatically starts playing movies as you select them, but, unlike other players that choke and freeze when you select a movie they don't have the codec for, this one performs admirably and just displays the QuickTime error message.
The Good Can work with all the media types and is speedy no matter what you are doing and throw at it.
The Bad Sure, you can view all the media types, but there are so many limitations that it's not practical to do so.
The Truth The tremendous potential of this program falls short of actually manifesting itself into a program that you can use. The lack of shortcuts and options not to mention key features such as full screen mode is not offset by the fact that it can work with all media types. Needs more work to actually be good.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
