GridIron Introduces Flow

GridIron Software today announced GridIron Flow, new digital content management software for creative professionals working on graphic design, web, and video projects. Flow automatically tracks the design process from idea to end result and manages assets and applications for the most complex workflows. Flow uses a 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 creative professional applications 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 can capture a point in time snapshot of any project that tracks everything that went into its creation, including media files, fonts, color swatches, applications and plug-ins, which can easily be archived to save or hand-off to the client. Project Archives include a Workflow Map showing how everything fits together, so when a project is sent to the printer, client or colleague, or burnt to disk, everything needed to reproduce it is there. Other features in Flow include a Workflow Calendar that displays the time, date, and duration of projects for up to a year; Visual Versions which automatically track versions of media files, including thumbnails and metadata, as a project evolves allowing users to revert to a previous version of a file anywhere in their workflow; and Tags and Annotations, which provide tags and sticky-note style annotations to assets or projects and support custom tags and metadata standards. In addition, GridIron offers the Flow SDK to tool vendors. Flow will be available this summer for Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard and for Windows XP and Vista. To sign up for the upcoming Public Beta visit http://www.gridironsoftware.com