Yes I see the point. But apart from the oh-so-easy-interface on a mac, everything else on mac is much more complicated - especially from a developers point of view. ;-)

LRTimelapse is a tool for professionals. The interface is as clean as it can be with all the powerful possibilities. You as well don't open Adobe Premiere and start editing videos like a pro. There is a bit of a learning curve. I try to explain everything in detail in the tutorials, but I'm aware that it is a complex field. There is certainly more to come from my side regarding this.

What do you think about my idea of an ini-File in the userdir?

I understand. I used to program in freepascal (lazarus) to get platform independency and still ended up partly writing plattform dependend code. Especially when you deal with filesystems you end up doing so. I guess having used Windows, Linux and now Mac also developing programs I don't see that much a problem in the specialties of each OS. If you have questions I might be able to help although I just have basic knowledge about Java.

I got so used to the fact, that (almost) each program under Mac looks and behaves the same that I miss this feature. I am really happy with the rest of the interface. It is indeed clean, easy to use but stil you get all the necessary information you need as I am used to from my Mac :-) The only thing that bothers me is the folder browser ;-)

I agree that you have to learn how to use programs no matter how easy and intuitive they are. But I disagree that this includes file and folder handling. In that case I demand a program to behave like other programs. This is completely platform independent. Under Linux one thing that annoyed me the most was that every program looked and behaved different depending on whether GTK, QT, etc. is used. That's not user friendly.

There are some ideas that come to my mind:
-Get rid of the folder chooser and use an "import dialog" (native) to choose the images. Take a look at http://homepage.mac.com/svc/macosxjava.pdf page 12. There seems to be a "native" implementation of the FileDialog perhaps this could solve the problem. This could also leed to project files you could save with the project specific data etc. Then you could also choose some files from a directory if you don't want to use all.
-Go your own way and implement the ability for the user to choose lokal or external drives manually and then fill the folder view with just the subfolders of the chosen directory.

The idea of a config file is good if you want to store user specific settings like the last used folder. But again as you probably have guessed it doesn't satisfy my need explained above