gBrowser Help: Frequently Asked Questions
Note: see the help section of the web site for the latest info.
1. Is gBrowser a Cocoa or Carbon application?
gBrowser was primarily written using Cocoa. However, it does use a few Carbon functions, particularly when it comes to resource forks and aliases (Apple hasn't put support for any of that into Cocoa yet). Contrary to popular belief, though, there is nothing inferior about Carbon (other than it's a pain in the @%$ to use compared to the wonderful Cocoa API).
2. Can I use gBrowser in OS 9 or earlier?
gBrowser is an OS X only application. If for some reason, you want to use OS 9 and would like something like gBrowser, you may want to try GraphicBrowser (which was the inspiration for gBrowser; sadly it seems it's never going to come to OS X, which is why I created gBrowser). Check VersionTracker or The Info-Mac Archive for it.
3. Then are gBrowser and GraphicBrowser compatible?
gBrowser can display the image previews generated by GraphicBrowser, but unfortunately not the other way around. This is because I chose to save the preview files as jpegs and not pict files, much reducing their size. GraphicBrowser doesn't display them. However, it won't interfere with GraphicBrowser making it's own previews, so the two programs can coexist fine. (On a side note, I've never tested gBrowser's interaction with any other image cataloging/viewing programs, so if anybody notices anything weird, please tell me).
4. So where do these previews get stored? How much disk space do they take?
Image previews are stored by gBrowser in an image file's resource fork. This does not touch the actual image data (which is stored in the data fork). Each preview takes up a bit of disk space (in my experience, when I have previews generated at the size of 165 which I prefer, they take appoximately 10k) but that is usually negligible compared to the size of the image itself. If you wish to remove these thumbnails, you can use gBrowser's "Strip Resource Forks" option. Additionally, if you are working with relatively small images (under 100k or so) you may wish to use the "On the fly" preview loading, which will generate previews for images on the fly each time you run gBrowser rather than generating them once and storing them in the image's resource fork.
5. Does gBrowser work on UFS drives?
It appears to work just fine on UFS. At first I thought there'd be trouble since gBrowser works with resource forks, which aren't supported by the UFS filesystem, but Apple seems to have worked around that.
If you have no idea what UFS is, don't worry about it. Most users go with the default HFS format anyway.
6. gBrowser ate my hard drive and regurgitated a steaming mass of superconducting magnetic goo. How much can I sue you for?
Reread the license agreement.
7. File names in the file list are partially cut off at the bottom with some fonts and font sizes. What gives?
This seems to be a weird Cocoa bug (with NSString drawInRect, if you care). I'm trying to figure it out. In the mean time, it happens with only a very few fonts at larger font sizes, so most likely you'll be able to find something satisfactory that works.
8. Speaking of fonts, how come some fonts don't work at all?
Some fonts don't seem to work with the Cocoa Font Panel. Select them and you just get a generic font. I don't know what I can do about that, sorry. The vast majority of fonts seem to work fine.
9. Sometimes alias filenames are italicised and sometimes they aren't, depending on what font I use. Why?
Simply, some fonts have an italic (or oblique) versions and some don't. For example, click on the Lucida Grande font family in the Font Panel; you will see "Regular" and "Bold" versions in the Typeface column, but sadly no italic. Other fonts, such as Arial, may come in Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic (or numerous others). Carbon and Classic apps can fake italics if there is no italic version of the font, but the Cocoa doesn't seem to be able to do it. If you care enough about having alias filenames in italics, choose a font family that has an italic version (such as the aforementioned Ariel).
10. Why can't I move some aliases (symbolic links) to the trash, or rename them?
There is a bug in OS X that causes some trouble with symbolic links, so for the safety of your files some stuff has been disabled when working with symbolic links.