Best of Macworld: Gridiron Flow

Well, it’s my best in show choice. As excited as I am over a stock widget and the ability to email my broker from my iPod, Macworld’s lost a bit of its charm as Apple’s evolved from scrappy rebel to a full-fledged member of the estasblishment.

The ultra thin MacBook Air is absolutely gorgeous, but my current MacBook Pro better meets my needs. My Apple TV serves me fine now, but that’s due to the Perian hack, not the overpriced, and overly restrictive movie rental service the studios agreed to.

Gridiron Flow wins my best of show award. Asset management is not sexy. Every New Year brings a new resolution to get my assets in gear and get organized. From Extensis Portfolio to Expression Media. It seems I’ve tried them all. Nothing has met my needs, and asset management remains a chore and not a tool.

Though not slated for release until the summer, Flow appears to be exactly what I’ve been waiting for. From the Macworld press release:

Flow uses a sophisticated system to automatically track workflows by recording all Import/Export, Save/Save As, and Copy/Paste actions in a project. It understands the file formats for virtually all creative professional applications, including those from Apple and Adobe, and maintains the relationships between stills, movies, sound clips, fonts, plug-ins, and color swatches on all local, network, and removable storage devices.

Using Real-Time Asset Tracking technology, Flow automatically builds Workflow Maps for every project. A Workflow Map shows the files used in the workflow and how they are connected to one another. Workflow Maps display all related application project files, media assets, and internal structures such as comps and layers. By selecting any file in the Workflow Map, users can view its fonts, color swatches, and the application plug-ins used to create it.

Flow also features a calendar view that allows me to find the file I created last Wednesday that the client hated but now wants to see again.

• Gridiron posted a cute video.
• John Nack, who got a closer look, had this to say.
• You can sign up for the public beta here.