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Review: GridIron Software Flow

Jul 6, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Workflow program maps project file relationships across multiple computers and professional software apps.

GridIron Software Flow went from "What the heck does this program do?" to "I can't live without this software" faster than any other program I've looked at in my 15 years of reviewing software. For a while, however, it looked like all of us were going to have to live without the product, given a delivery time that slipped like Brett Favre's retirement plans. Though Favre's golfing days might have to wait, it looks like Flow, which was first announced at NAB Show 2008, is finally here.

What is Flow? At a high level, it tracks your project workflow through a number of content-creation programs such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 and 4; Apple Final Cut Pro, Shake, Keynote, Numbers, and Pages; and Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. At any given point, you can package up your projects and associated files and move them to another machine. Flow will warn you if you try to delete a file that's included in any tracked project, and it will tell you how long it took to create every file produced in any supported application included in a project (as well as the creation time for the project as whole). You can even export a .csv file with this time information to pretty up in Excel. Flow also saves separate versions of your projects, totally independent of any program's autosave function, so you can recover content that you deleted multiple versions ago.

True, many content-creation programs perform a subset of these activities. Adobe InDesign's Packaging function comes quickly to mind, as does Word's Properties window that tracks total editing time. But InDesign won't tell you how long it took to edit the Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files you included in the project, and it won't prevent you from deleting them six months down the road. Basically, Flow will help you work more efficiently and, if you charge for your work, track how much time you invested in each component of the job, as well as the total job itself. Best of all, Flow does this without any action on your part after you install the program.

But I'm gushing prematurely. Let's take a quick look at some basics, and I'll tell you what Flow did for me in the three weeks that I've been testing it.

Speeds and feeds

Flow costs $299 for one license (i.e. one computer), with a three-pack available for $399. Using the workflow feature described below, multiple users will be able to contribute to and view the same workflow map over a network. The program will be available for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on Intel and PowerPC machines.

At its most basic level, Flow creates maps of your projects that include all the files in the project and all files rendered from the project (see Figure 1 on p. 22). Flow has two potential sources for this data. When you load a supported project file into Flow—which is how you create a map—Flow parses the file and, to the extent that the information is provided within the project file, displays source and output file-related information in the map. This is called "backtrack scanning."

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