Minimal Folio: Your live portable portfolio
I quote Simon Heys, the developer:
When I first got my iPad I thought it would be brilliant for showing my portfolio or presenting work to clients. I couldn’t find any apps that were simple enough or worked the way I wanted, so I made one myself. It’s called Minimal Folio.
That’s how the best apps are created.
The iPad sure ships with a slick photos experience, very fluid and touch friendly. It’s probably enough for a photographer or artist to carry along his portfolio with him. But you know that’s not the best way to show off a portfolio once you’ve seen Minimal Folio.
So what does Minimal Folio do differently that you can’t do with the photos app? For starters, it’s meant only for select collection of artwork, so your clients don’t have to see your personal pictures in the photos app while you’re springing out albums. But more importantly, it’s got a zero UI chrome flow that’s all about your artwork.
[I'd have liked to have inserted a screenshot here, but it'd just be a screenshot of a fullscreen image]
It does this by organising your artwork in a column based layout. From the birds eye view mode, tap on images and videos from your photos library, or transferred via iTunes, or via the new Dropbox integration, to add them to your grid. The dropbox integration doesn’t cover your entire dropbox folder though; just the Minimal Folio folder. Drag and drop re-arrange the thumbnails into columns of specific topics. Once you’re done rearranging, get into the portfolio mode by tapping on any thumbnail.
Yeah, I don’t have much to show.
The viewer will never have to see any UI chrome. The moment you launch the app, it loads the top left image (first column, first image). You can swipe down to view that column, or swipe left to move to the next. The columns are not organised like simple grid however. When you’re done swiping down on a column, swiping left to the next will take you to the first item in that column. The flow is absolutely brilliant, and your clients are going to be wowed (on condition that your work is wow worthy). Not only can you create multiple columns, you can even create multiple ‘folios’ — though for some reason switching between folios resulted in an error.
Minimal Folio doesn’t try to be anything more than a wall of your artwork. You can’t pinch to zoom on images (though I hear it’s coming), nor does it have any way to tweet out images. The workflow also ensures that you don’t just dumb a thousand images into the app — it’s supposed to be a carefully curated list of your best work.
Moreover, Heys seems to be committed to this project. While has hasn’t made promises, things like external display support, remote control via iPhone, and hopefully a kiosk mode so users can’t get into the thumbnail manager mode, are being considered. I can only wonder what AirPlay support would do for this app (if that’s even possible).
If you’re a professional photographer, run a business that depends on showing clients artwork onsite, or see yourself as an artist wanting to carry along your portfolio, this is one great app to have on your iPad. And for $2.99, it’s more than worth it.
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