ALAMEDA, CA, USA, October 16, 2007: Karelia Software announced the release of the Karelia iMedia Browser, a free utility to add the familiar "media browser" experience to just about any Mac application.
Built from the ground up to resemble the media browser found in several Apple applications, the Karelia iMedia Browser is a stand-alone utility that can be used to quickly access a user's library of photos, sounds, movies, or bookmarks.
"We initially built an iMedia Browser into Sandvox, our website-creation tool, because we wanted Sandvox users to be able to access their media as easily as they could from Apple's own programs," said Dan Wood of Karelia Software. "Since it's a general need, we decided to release it as a utility that can be used in conjunction with just about any other application as well."
The Karelia iMedia Browser allows users to browse their libraries of photos (iPhoto, Aperture, and Pictures folders); music (iTunes library, GarageBand songs, and Music folders); movies (from iTunes, iPhoto, and Movies folders), and bookmarks (from several leading web browsers). It can be activated either from the dock or from a small icon in the menu bar.
Karelia Software also announced the immediate public availability of the source code for the underlying media browser framework, written by developers at Karelia and other companies. In addition to being used in Sandvox, the iMedia framework is currently used by developers around the world in a number of third-party applications, including Skitch, MemoryMiner, Ubercaster, iStar Composer, Norkross Movie, and Posterino. The iMedia framework is extensible, allowing developers to add new media types or sources of media.
"For more than a year, the Karelia iMedia Browser framework has provided the critically important media browsing functionality in MemoryMiner," said John C. Fox, MemoryMiner's creator. Integration of the iMedia Framework was unbelievably easy. I'm personally grateful to the folks at Karelia for having made this engineering work freely available to the Mac developer community."
The Karelia iMedia Browser is available for downloading from Karelia's website at <http://www.karelia.com/imedia>. It is a Universal Binary for PowerPC and Intel architectures, and requires Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" or 10.5 "Leopard." The download contains nine languages: English, French, Italian, Danish, German, Swedish, Japanese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.