Comments on: GridIron Flow: Ridiculously cool workflow management

By: Alan Gilbertson

Alan Gilbertson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:46:17 +0000

The shipping product incorporated a ton of suggestions and wishlist items from many of us on the beta program, so it ended up even better than we could have expected. Couldn’t imagine working without it now.

By: Ron Jon

Ron Jon — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:33:12 +0000

Seems like the Finder should work like this. Advanced file versioning and workflow management built in.
Apple should buy them out, or let Adobe buy them and then Apple buy Adobe =]

By: Campbell MacDuff

Campbell MacDuff — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:53:19 +0000

Any further word on this baby? I need this yesterday! It looks brilliant. I hope they're not bought out entirely by Adobe or someone else—that always seems to kill the inventive spirit of independent developers. Better an angel investor comes along and allows them to keep doing what made them successful in the first place. [You can sign up for their beta. --J.]

By: RQ

RQ — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:43:08 +0000

I’m also wondering whether this stretches to include audio workflows, & their interactions with video workflows: Nuendo, Pro Tools, etc.

By: vadim

vadim — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:42:00 +0000

It is all good, but…
I love the video and I thought ohh what a great software for a designers and so, I am so jealous that there is no such software for post-production company like the one I am working in. I mean Photoshop, Illustrator and even AE is a good, but I love love to see if it could incorporate flow of the such products as Shake, Final cut ( probably already ), Nuke, Maya, Motion ( too probably already, I don’t know), Boujou etc. In that case it will get even bigger market share in creative professional world.
Anyway I sing up for the beta and I see. One step at the time.

By: mika

mika — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 11:03:55 +0000

Does an AI file placed in Photoshop as a Smart Object maintain a link to the original AI? I thought it did... [No: the file is embedded. When you go to edit it back in Illustrator, you're actually working on a temp copy that's deleted once you complete the edit. --J.]

By: jayse

jayse — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:01:56 +0000

this is definitely a much needed tool for designers. How long have we waited for this? Thanks to Grid Iron for taking on the challenge!
And Jim – I agree – the interface rocks. It was designed by a groovy bloke named Mark Coleran – http://www.coleran.com
// jayse

By: Bastiaan van Oorde

Bastiaan van Oorde — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:26:03 +0000

In contrast to some other users requests, Adobe please don't buy this company. Let these guys create their all universal program that works with Adobe and Apple apps and probably a lot more. I would hate to see this become Adobe only. I would love this to see all my AE files I used in a Final Cut edit etc. Or all the pictures I use in Cinema 4d. [The value of Flow is that it can handle many diverse workflows, spanning numerous apps and file formats. Therefore I don't think that any owner would want to harm that value by restricting format support. --J.]

By: Steve Forde

Steve Forde — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:46:26 +0000

Brett
We will be announcing additions to Flow shortly that deal with collaboration, workgroup environments etc.
The product is designed to be fully compatible with Source Code systems (like Subversion, CVS etc) that are used in Designer – Developer situations.
The product will be fully compatible with Flash / Flex.
There will be more on our website closer to the public beta in the spring. (Although a demo video will be up soon!)
Steve
GridIron Software Inc.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 09:00:39 +0000

I’m pretty sure we will be seing more and more of this kind of sofware on the market.
There really is a need for it.
Photoshop is simply the best for image editing, but at some point you really need higher level type of tools… and version cue/bridge are not helping adress scenarios that imply higher level management from a “editorial” point of view (a bit different than version/project management).
By exemple, for my current project, even if it’s not live/editable, i have generated a graph representation of our illustrations relationship in GraphViz and wich was incredibly usefull (i’m currently missing time and ressources to better integrate the graph generation in our tools). Data represention is very important when you deal wich lots of data! :)
We had already two type of cms/tool (one for workflow/ production and the other for the content of the images(layer content of the psd is validated against a database representation).
The workflow and hierarchical nature of these two tools are missing the expressiveness of the graph generated from GraphViz.
There is no systems that adress all the needs and integrating the different systems is really source of headaches! :) (just keeping the file server, cms and database syncronised by exemple).
I would be really happy to find a conference where developpers would share their experience in the use of such sofware (or developpement of their own in-house system).
I attended a first professionnal conference last year (fitc), and i was a bit deceived that there was no presentation on asset management (in general, not just related to photoshop).
Eric

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:38:15 +0000

Please Adobe, buys this from these guys. This is great. Then use it for Project management so when I collect a Pr file, it will grab all the Ae items. Or an En collection will grab all the original files in r and Ae.

By: jimhere

jimhere — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:40:16 +0000

Does an AI file placed in Photoshop as a Smart Object maintain a link to the original AI? I thought it did…
[No, the AI file gets embedded into the PSD. If you edit the Smart Object, Photoshop kicks out a copy of the AI file to a temp folder, then sucks it back in. --J.]
Flow has a great looking UI. That (rather than Bridge or Lightroom) is the UI direction Adobe should go for.

By: Brett Walker

Brett Walker — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 14:47:25 +0000

It sounds great, but they're a bit light on details. Is this mostly set up for individual users, or can it be set up for group project workflows? Is the versioning compatible with tools like Subversion, or is this proprietary tech? Does this support Flash and Flex? [All good questions, and I expect to see more info from GridIron soon. In the meantime I'll pass your questions along to them. --J.]

By: Dennis Radeke

Dennis Radeke — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 02:37:04 +0000

I was going to do a post on Flow myself but knew you were going to dive in and give it more justice than I. As a guy who does use After Effects, I love the stuff that the mad scientists at GridIron come up with. Their approach with Flow is going to be really exciting as more and more people realize they have to start getting a handle on all of the media that is being created.
So…you may not think you want/need this, but time may show a lot of us otherwise.

By: Anders Skovgaard-Petersen

Anders Skovgaard-Petersen — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:18:45 +0000

Seems to me Adobe should hurry up and buy those guys, their product and their brains.
A feature like this integrated in Bridge could be what made guys like me actually start using it and not just se it as a somewhat redundant file-browser/RAW converter :-)