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Here is some exciting news for DOpus fans, version 9 will be released on April 27th. Upgrade information is listed below and here (http://nudel.dopus.com/opus9/) is a preview of the new version.
GPSoftware is proud to announce the imminent release of a major upgrade to its flagship product, Directory Opus. This week, Version 9 passed through the company's rigorous Beta testing program thanks to the help of a dedicated team of Beta testers and is currently is undergoing final testing and certification.
This new version cements Directory Opus' place as the leading File Manager and Explorer Replacement for Windows. Directory Opus 9 raises the bar even higher for Windows File Managers providing full support for Windows Vista and a host of enhancements and new functionality.
* Directory Opus 9 will be available for purchase and upgrade on April 27.
* All registered users will be notified when the product is available for official upgrade. (DO check that your email address you have registered with us is up-to-date. Otherwise you may miss the important notice of your upgrade rights. You may check your registered details from the Licence Manager on the Support page.
* There will be no increase in price for the new product. Pricing will remain the same at AUS$85.00 for a single Licence. (Around US$60-65 - unless the US dollar drops even further through the floor as it has been doing recently!)
* All users who purchased after December 1, 2006 will automatically receive a free upgrade.
* The upgrade pricing for all other users of Opus 8 will be AUS$50.00 for a single Licence with a sliding scale for extra licences.
* A discounted upgrade will also be available for registered users of Opus 6. Pricing to be announced.
* Version 9 has a new Licence which allows a registered user to also install the program on one personal laptop.
* You will be able to run Opus from an external USB flash drive with the new licensing scheme. A USB export Licence will be required for each USB flash drive a cost of AUS$10.00 per Licence per device. These will be able for purchase at the time of order of the new version for new and existing users as required.
http://www.gpsoft.com.au/index2.html
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(http://www.gpsoft.com.au/index2.html)
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ps1. i think dc members are still entitled to a 20% discount on directory opus.
ps2. that upgrade policy sounds very harsh (all purchases before dec 2006 have to pay to upgrade.. not even a year amnesty? yuck).
ps3. remember that these are AUStralian dollar amounts -- it's cheaper in US dollars.
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Great... another expense on the horizon. This one's going to have to fly under my wife's radar or I'll be out on the deck, enjoying the night sky and solitude.
Seriously, I think that many of the new features are killer - opening new folders in tabs instead of new windows, running from a USB stick (the $10 surcharge sticks in my craw a bit, though especially given that the new license allows one run DOpus on two machines - I can't quite see why portability couldn't be covered under this), ability to launch DOpus via double-clicking the desktop even if the process is not running in the background (wonder if this is true, too, of double-clicking on folder icons on the desktop when in "Explorer Replacement" mode?), colour coding folders will be useful and will mean that I don't need to run a separate app to achieve this, etc. - but the upgrade price is steep. I purchased DOpus 6 and upgraded to 8 and eventually wound up buying a license for each of my computers (3). I feel that a 41% discount is a bit stingy (yes, I understand how a market economy works and that developers are entitled to set their own pricing) and I *hope* (against hope) that I'll have the strength to critically evaluate DOpus 9 before reaching for my wallet. I'm not too optimistic, though... My experience is that DOpus is worth every penny asked for it.
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Wow, great find Ken! I counted at least a dozen features that Directory Opus either copied or is finally catching up to XYplorer 5.x on. Wonder if they read the Forum and study the XYplorer betas? $50 (which is probably $40 USD) is a lot compared to XYplorer's Lifetime license, small size, portability, XML settings, System integration, etc. Like Darwin, I bought DOpus 6, skipped 7, and spent another $90 buying everything I wanted for version 8. They really should sell just one complete version. If they want to modularize it, then fine, but start with the portable/micro version and go up, rather than extracting features that should be part of every copy. (I say this because it makes for unfair comparisons with other file managers.)
Directory Opus is one of those programs that are so addictive that it really makes Windows a lot of fun. I spend the majority of my day among the browser, text editor, and file manager.
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Hi Zaine,
I didn't mention XYplorer in my missive above, but it, and its very reasonably priced lifetime license, were on my mind as I wrote it. I have a license for XYplorer and have use it on a thumbdrive when I'm on a machine that doesn't have something more robust on it than Windows Explorer. I haven't quite gotten to the point of considering XYplorer indispensible (compared to DOpus) but considering the price and the feature set, it's very, very close. Too bad gpsoft didn't look at XYplorer's license more closely ;)
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How does DOpus compare to xplorer2 (zabkat.com). I bought a license for that since it seemed to provide the best power user usability features without extra frills. I use it mostly in the dual pane view with a lot of keybaord shortcuts. But the upgrades have been few and far between and since I'm upgrading to Vista soon, I'd like a file manager built for it. DOpus looks good but the kitchen-sink list of features worries me a bit.
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I haven't used xplorer2 in a long time (since before discovering DOpus) but my impressions from that time and what I've read about it on the internet over the last year suggest that it's a very capable alternative. Note that the developer (of xplorer2) states that it was one of the first file managers to be declared vista ready, so you shouldn't actually need to go looking for a file manager to replace xplorer2 under vista.
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So far I've only found three companies that honored their "lifetime" licenses — WinRAR, XYplorer, and UltraEdit so far. Everyone else finds an out by either changing the name of the program or just discontinuing it. SlySoft recently added new features to their AnyDVD program and went back to users who bought Lifetime licenses to ask for $30 to get the new features. I got pissed at that.
I don't begrudge a company — or anyone — going to the bank. I truly believe developers ought to be able to make a living from their software, even if it's smallware, as long as it's good. I figure GPSoft has sold enough licenses to DOpus over eight versions that they know what users will pay, and what they think the program is worth. Unfortunately, DOpus is one of the most cracked programs online anymore. Still this version 9 looks like it will take full advantage of Vista. Wondering if they'll consider a 65-bit version? (64-bit is so 2007) ;D
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MrCrispy, Directory Opus is an advanced file manager. By that I mean it will do just about anything you can throw at it, if you're willing to study it. It's that good. When 9 arrives, download a trial and use it for a couple of weeks. It might grow on you. I've found that xplorer2 users really, really like their file manager and it's difficult to get them to switch.
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I've found that xplorer2 users really, really like their file manager and it's difficult to get them to switch.
-zridling
+1. I have installed DO and XYplorer on my VMs before, but have never gotten deep into trying them out. xplorer2 does everything I throw at it so well, it's really hard to find any motivation to try others really.
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Yeah, count me in as a devoted xplorer2 user! I like the programs philosophy of doing the correct thing w.r.t how the OS behaves. e.g. its one of the few if not only file managers I tried that would correctly display the Explorer namespace including all extensions. So I can choose to go to locations like 'Control Panel', 'Recycle Bin' inside it, and the display columns will show me content specific to those, instead of just being a file manager for files and folders. This extends to proper drag and drop support, context menu handlers etc. Its one of the reasons xplorer2 is so well behaved and flexible.
What got me excited over DOpus 9 specifically is the breadcrumb bar which is one of the best features of Vista's explorer.
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So far I've only found three companies that honored their "lifetime" licenses — WinRAR, XYplorer, and UltraEdit so far. Everyone else finds an out by either changing the name of the program or just discontinuing it.
I'd forgotten about the lifetime upgrade for UltraEdit. Now I'm really glad that I've been dithering about the upgrade to 13 as I'll certainly buy the lifetime upgrades...
SlySoft recently added new features to their AnyDVD program and went back to users who bought Lifetime licenses to ask for $30 to get the new features. I got pissed at that.
No doubt! WTF is the point of buying a lifetime license if it isn't a lifetime license - or do they interpret lifetime as referring to major releases (lifetime of AnyDVD 1, lifetime of AnyDVD2, etc.)?!
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Breadcrumbs were a nice addition to XYplorer in version 5.x. Perhaps the thing I like best about DOpus is being able to assign keyboard shortcuts to specific folders and files if I want. THAT'S just cool, and so handy it makes me say: gigedy, gigedy!
You guys tell me. When I've used xplorer2, for me the big attraction is its apparent simplicity. Yet it has so much power under the hood. It's not intimidating, yet it satisfies the power users. And simple features, like being able to print out a folder list (even indented like your folder tree) is brilliant. I presume its user community came up with such ideas.
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zridling,
You say: "Perhaps the thing I like best about DOpus is being able to assign keyboard shortcuts to specific folders and files if I want"
Can I ask you how this is done? I use Dopus 8.2.2.5 and I can't seem to find how to do this?
Thanks
Damian
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I think %40 off is OK for an upgrade price. I'd prefer more off, say 60%, or a lifetime upgrade, but 40% is fine.
I actually think the AnyDVD $30 upgrade thing is OK as well. I'd say that the change from DVD to HD DVD and Blueray is significant enough to call the new software something different. Specially since it appears that they'll keep updating the DVD part... Again, I'd always want more, but this'll do...
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Total Commander has proper lifetime license, and it's a heckuva lot cheaper than DOpus. I don't doubt that DOpus is an extraordinary Filemanager, but the price is crazy and so is the upgrad scheme, IMO.
I'll definitely stick with TC and it's excellent plugin system 8)
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I think %40 off is OK for an upgrade price. I'd prefer more off, say 60%, or a lifetime upgrade, but 40% is fine.-Hirudin
I have to confess that when I did the math (and calculated the discount in percent) I almost didn't post about it - anything over 25% is pretty standard and 40% is actually higher than my seat of the pants estimate of a 30% average. It's just sticker shock on my part because their standard pricing is almost 45% higher than most of their competition ($70.50 US at today's exchange rate versus a "standard" of about $39.95) so their upgrade price is still higher than the cost of a full license for other products.
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Awesome! I purchased DO in January, so I get the free upgrade. Keep in mind when thinking about the upgrade policy that version 8 was available since 2005 with regular point updates. Those point updates were free. So yes you have to pay for major upgrades, but those don't come very often.
Having said that, I do think there should be a little more of a grace period for the free upgrade.
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Yeah, DOpus' one "negative" has always been their pricing. But, damn, if it isn't one of the finest pieces of software ass around. Darwin's right, even though they are giving us a somewhat nice 40% discount for the upgrade, the original price is so expensive in the first place, that the upgrade fee alone is still more than the regular price of other software. Oh well, as long as the quality of the software remains excellent, then it's ok I guess.
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Wow! Did you guys check out nudel's preview of the new v9? It's freakin amazing. Expensive or not, this program is crazy!
http://nudel.dopus.com/opus9/
Dopus is the shiznit!
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Wow! Did you guys check out nudel's preview of the new v9? It's freakin amazing. Expensive or not, this program is crazy!
http://nudel.dopus.com/opus9/
-superboyac
I'm at work, and I can't view that preview because the address has nude in it. The filter here blocks it as containing pornographic content.
>:(
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I'm at work, and I can't view that preview because the address has nude in it. The filter here blocks it as containing pornographic content.
>:(
-cthorpe
Well, depending on how much you like DOpus, it's almost as exciting as porn, so maybe you should wait until you go home to read it!
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good point :-[
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I wonder if we can apply the DonationCoder discount when we buy the upgrade. I originally bought it because of the discount code and only paid $32. I'd hate to pay $41 to upgrade something I only paid $32 for. If not, I doubt I would upgrade. I'm sticking with XP for awhile so this isn't a must have upgrade for me.
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WTF is the point of buying a lifetime license if it isn't a lifetime license - or do they interpret lifetime as referring to major releases (lifetime of AnyDVD 1, lifetime of AnyDVD2, etc.)?!-Darwin
Er... what can I say? It was late at night and ranting was therapeutic. In the harsh light of the late morning here on the west coast of NA, obviously developers mean the lifetime of the product, not the licensee. Doh! Thanks for making that point obvious to me, Hirudin.
Edbro - I went to sleep wondering the same thing! We can hope, can't we? :)
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Good Lord... I just got home and looked over that preview... Even if I wasn't entitled to a free upgrade, I'd get it anyway. Most of the new features look great.
Carl
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Zaine posted this on his blog (http://www.thegsblog.com/?p=166):
GPSoft only provided two minor updates to Directory Opus 8, and now they want almost 66% of the full price for an upgrade, with several options being left out of the main program unless you want to pay for them. That’s bullshit, and reason enough to claim that GPSoft is hostile to its current paying customers.
I had a flash of annoyance yesterday afternoon when thinking about the issue of DOpus 8 getting only two point releases since it shipped. I can't remember what version DOpus 6.x was at when development switched to 8, but an imperfect memory is telling me that DOpus 6 was "current" for three or four years before a paid upgrade was required...
I managed to edit out of a previous post this observation: XYPlorer would be perfect if it had a dual-pane feature. Actually, I can't figure out if it does or not (so I presume that it doesn't)! If it does and I am a dolt, someone please educate me!
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Well, Zaine does have a point. I wouldn't say that XYPlorer would be at the same level of DOpus if only for a dual-pane feature, but I can certainly understand where he's coming from. As great as DOpus is, their pricing is a little hostile. I've even seen some people on other forums question GPSoft's pricing scheme compared to other similar programs, and GPsoft didn't take too kindly to it.
Realistically speaking, all we can hope for is a nice discount here at DC, otherwise, if you want it you'll have to pay for it.
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yup - no arguments with you on any point, superboyac. I've seen the defensiveness from DOpus' developer's over their pricing myself and you're right, it's not pretty! I don't know... I keep coming back to the essential point, which is that DOpus is an EXCELLENT product and I am really excited about the new version.
I take your point about XYplorer. My point was that I'd possibly be more motivated to switch to it as my main FM if it featured a dual pane view. It is very robust, but can't come near DOpus on feature set. I LIVE in DOpus and can't imagine life without it. As I am still on XP and have no plans to switch to Vista, there's actually no reason for me not to just stick with DOpus 8 - DOpus 9's release isn't going to render 8 junk! It'll continue to be what it is, an excellent file manager...
Content but conflicted in Courtenay, Canada :P
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Zaine posted this on his blog (http://www.thegsblog.com/?p=166):
GPSoft only provided two minor updates to Directory Opus 8, and now they want almost 66% of the full price for an upgrade, with several options being left out of the main program unless you want to pay for them. That’s bullshit, and reason enough to claim that GPSoft is hostile to its current paying customers.
-Darwin
What qualifies as a minor update? There were multiple minor updates since 8.0. The amount of updates and fixes from 8.1.0.8 alone takes 35 pages to list. And don't forget that the move up to 8.2 was a significant update.
http://www.gpsoft.com.au/files/Opus%2082%20Changes.pdf
Yes, I would love to see free updates for all customers, or at least a year of update protection, but the software is excellent, and bugfixes and new features are released more often than the blog mentioned above gives credit for.
Also, as Darwin said, DO8 will continue to work. It is extreamly powerful, and those minor updates I mentioned took care of a lot of bugs. If you don't want to pay for the upgrade, stick with version 8. It's not like an anti-virus program that will fail as soon as you fail to update it.
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I've had the chance to test both XYplorer and DOpus intensivelly.
Last year i downloaded a (cracked) version of DOpus and used it for some time. I felt it was just everything i could ask of a file manager.
Then, i won a XYplorer license here on DC, and decided to ditch DOpus for XY.
My opinion is: XYplorer is definitelly a big advance over plain old explorer. But DOpus is also a big advance over XYplorer.
There are a few advantages about XY, though. It's fast, it's lightweight (which is a feature DOpus doesn't have, IIRC) and does ALMOST everything i want it to do.
My biggest gripe with XY is its enormous amount of bugs. Probably DOpus is developed by a big team, but XY only has one developer, and sometimes the difference is noted. For example: when using the "send to" menu to copy a file to a usb disk, i often get a "the destiny can't treat this file" error after the copy was done, even though everything went well.
There are countless bugs like that one on XY. Stuff that isn't really important, but anoys a bit.
There's a big change coming on the road, though. Since yesterday, XYplorer supports customizable keyboard shortcuts, which is one of the features i missed the most!
So, the hope that it'll evolve into something even better then DOpus isn't lost ;)
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My biggest gripe with XY is its enormous amount of bugs. Probably DOpus is developed by a big team, but XY only has one developer, and sometimes the difference is noted.
-jgpaiva
Directory Opus is developed by two people. That makes it all the more impressive.
http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?p=19866&highlight=team#19866
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My impression is that DOpus is at most a two man show and maybe even, from a development perspective, a one man show (though I could be wrong about that). It certainly is a quantum leap over XYplorer in terms of feature set and I am very much in love with it! That said, there is a price to be paid for its feature set and that is that it is not as svelte and quick as XYplorer. In its favour, though, its feature set means that one can dump a lot of other apps and not lose too much functionality (ftp, archiver, multiple rename, customizing folder colours and icons, at a basic level, music, video and image file organization, etc.). So, I will say that bitch and whine though I might, it's very likely that I'll be upgrading very quickly after (if not on) April 27.
I also have a license for XYplorer and like it very much. I'll be watching its development with great interest.
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What qualifies as a minor update? There were multiple minor updates since 8.0. The amount of updates and fixes from 8.1.0.8 alone takes 35 pages to list. And don't forget that the move up to 8.2 was a significant update.
I assumed from reading Zaine's comment that he meant point releases (8.0 -> 8.1 -> 8.2). You're right, though, there have been a number of minor updates and they've averaged one big update a year since release. I'm still smarting about the price BUT note that I gladly paid the same amount to go from 6 to 8 after about a year with 6. Also, no one REALLY gets too hot under the collar about the price of an upgrade from say Office 2000 to 2007, so who am I to criticise? The comparatively nominal cost of going from DOpus 8 to 9 will probably benefit me far more than the upgrade, costing far more, from Office 2003 to 2007.
The only thing left for me to do now is to wait for DOpus 9 to be released. Impatiently.
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... My biggest gripe with XY is its enormous amount of bugs... -jgpaiva
What??? Caramba! I've heard a lot in the years of developing XY but this is new. The majority of users agrees that XY has extremely few bugs, and if a bug is detected it is fixed within 24 hours in almost any case. I pride myself for being quickest bug fixer on the planet and my top development goals are (a) bug-freeness, (b) usability, (c) speed, (d) lightness, in that order. You should know it because you are a member of the forum. Since you joined the forum you posted exactly one bug (which was rather an observation of relative slowness than a malfunction bug, and which was "fixed" (made much faster) in the next release.
So, if you happen to find another of your "countless bugs" simply let me know and I fix it immediately.
And while you are collecting the bugs I go back to work adding Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts (CKS). ;)
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Whoa.. Now that's nice! :)
Actually, yesterday i was revolted because a bug in XY made me inadvertedly launch a game while my work stuff was taking almost all my mem: i ended up losing half an hour to bring the computer back :(
I'm off to make a post at XY's forum!
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Before I begin, I'd like to clarify/disclose who I am:
I'm the author of the What's new in Opus 9 (http://nudel.dopus.com/opus9/) guide. (The one linked in reply #19 of this thread.) I'm also an Opus beta-tester and plugin writer and I answer a lot of questions on the Opus forums. I don't work for GPSoftware, I don't write Opus and I don't make my living from Opus. I have a day job doing something completely different. I'm just a very enthusiastic user who puts a lot of his spare time and energy into helping GPSoft make Opus better and helping people who use Opus get more out of it.
With that out of the way I'd like to respond to a few questions/statements made here, as best I can.
ability to launch DOpus via double-clicking the desktop even if the process is not running in the background (wonder if this is true, too, of double-clicking on folder icons on the desktop when in "Explorer Replacement" mode?)-Darwin
Yup, it does apply to double-clicking icons in Explorer Replacement mode. If Opus isn't running then it will be launched to display the folder. This isn't a new thing, though. Explorer Replacement in Opus has always worked that way. The new thing is that when you double-click an empty space on the desktop (i.e. your desktop wallpaper) then Opus will open a new window, even if it wasn't running at the time. Before Opus 9 the empty-space double-click event only worked if Opus was already running. Of course, you can turn off the empty-space double-click, and/or Explorer Replacement, if you don't want them. I find them both really, really handy, though.
So I can choose to go to locations like 'Control Panel', 'Recycle Bin' inside it, and the display columns will show me content specific to those, instead of just being a file manager for files and folders.-MrCrispy
Opus does that as well. I haven't used Xplorer2 but I'm assuming that it and Opus do the same thing which is to call on Explorer itself (or a shell extension/namespace for 3rd party special folders) when you go to those folders. You can host Explorer's views inside any application and sometimes it's the only way to provide such a view because the underlying system or data is undocumented and/or subject to change in future versions of Windows.
Opus also lets you choose from a wide range of columns when displaying normal folders containing normal files. You can define different columns/views for different locations (e.g. "C:\Windows" where you might find it useful to display DLL version information in a column), and/or types of folders (e.g. Network Drives, where you might want to avoid any columns that cause Opus to look inside the files because the network is slow). You can also tell Opus to automatically add columns or switch view modes when you enter a folder containing a lot of image files (for example).
"Perhaps the thing I like best about DOpus is being able to assign keyboard shortcuts to specific folders and files if I want"-zridling
Can I ask you how this is done? I use Dopus 8.2.2.5 and I can't seem to find how to do this?-TheOmen
In Opus, go to Settings -> Customize -> Keys, then add new hotkeys with commands which run things like Go "C:\Program Files" -- That will make the active ("source") window go to that folder. Opus 9 also lets you assign hotkeys to items in your Favorites tree, which is a lot easier to manage but the end result is the same. The Go command can be given lots of extra arguments if you want the folders to open in new windows or tabs or whatever. If you have more questions, drop by the Opus Resource Centre (http://resource.dopus.com/) forums where myself or one of the many other people there will help you out.
I'm at work, and I can't view that preview because the address has nude in it.-cthorpe
Hehe, sorry. :)
If anyone else has the same problem, there's a mirror of my Opus 9 guide at my personal website ( http://www.pretentiousname.com/opus9/ ) but, if you can, please used the published URL ( http://nudel.dopus.com/opus9/ ) as GPSoft have much more hosting bandwidth than I do and all those images and Flash demos add up!
it's lightweight (which is a feature DOpus doesn't have, IIRC)-jgpaiva
Define lightweight? I leave Opus running 24/7 on all of my machines at home and at work and it has no effect on other programs. If Opus is using a lot of memory it's likely due to a configuration that uses lots of large background images (they all have to be in memory, uncompressed) or toolbars with hundreds of external icons (ditto), or because you're viewing lots of thumbnails (ditto, but only while viewing the dir, of course). As well as those things, you can also reduce memory a bit more by disabling plugins you don't need.
Right now my dopus.exe process is using all of 5MB of memory and that's with a window open, a few images (not many, no big ones) and all of the plugins enabled. That seems low actually; I think it usually uses more like 10MB with my current configuration, but as I write this TaskManager reports just under 5MB, even after doing some stuff in Opus to see if it would push the memory usage up. Anyway, in 2007, I don't understand why anyone really cares if a useful program uses 5MB or 10MB when machines have a gig or two of RAM and when, more importantly, Windows pages out the memory of idle programs you aren't using when something else you are using needs it. It's a non-issue unless you're using a 486 with 16MB of RAM or something, in which case you've got bigger problems to worry about. :)
Probably DOpus is developed by a big team-jgpaiva
Nope, just Jon, the main coder, and Greg, who generally handles running the business, writing the manuals and the official support emails. (Not to be confused with the Resource Centre forums which are, I guess, semi-official support. Greg & Jon also reply to questions there, but most things get answered first by the community other users.) A few things are done by people outside of GPSoft, e.g. Trevor Morris did the graphics and icons, Steve Banham looks after the Resource Centre forums and I've written several plugins and a few guides and tutorials in my spare time, as have several other users. There is also a team of beta testers, generally selected from enthusiastic users who have given useful feedback in the past. (Jon is the same person who has been writing Opus since the first Amiga version in 1990. The program has never changed hands, although the old Amiga versions were given to other people to take over when GPSoftware moved to the PC and started a new program from scratch.)
So, the hope that it'll evolve into something even better then DOpus isn't lost-jgpaiva
Don't forget Opus is a moving target and will also evolve into something better than what it is currently. :) (Better, of course, being subjective. To some Opus isn't the best file manager, just as to me it is. There's no absolute best for everyone.)
it is not as svelte and quick as XYplorer-Darwin
What sort of stuff do you find slow in Opus? I would think most operations are bounded by how fast the filesystem can supply directory listings. You can slow things down by turning on certain options, though, so maybe that's what you're seeing? Or maybe there's something none of us have noticed that could do with fixing/improving. Let me or GPSoft know and I'll pass it on.
The rest of what I want to say is mainly in response to Zaine Ridling's weblog post.
Zaine, I tried to reply to your weblog but there seems to be an issue with the comments system there. That probably explains why every post has zero comments. The page gives you the impression that you can post comments but they seem to go into the void. If you have cookies enabled (which I don't by default, except for a whitelist) then your comment will appear, but only for you. Is that to disguise the fact the comments are moderated (but never approved by the look of it), or to make people think they've had their say when nobody else can see it?
I'll reply here instead but I wish I could have my say on your weblog to add some balance to what you posted because your post ranges from incredibly subjective to downright misleading and borderline slanderous in places.
XYplorer beats DOpus in many ways, among them speed and options at-hand; that is, within a keyboard shortcut or right-click-zridling
As I asked someone else above, what do you find slow in Opus?
Regarding keyboard short-cuts and right-clicks, I'm not really sure what you mean by this comparison. Opus lets you can assign just about any internal function, or external command, to almost any keyboard shortcut, toolbar button, menu item or right-click context menu. Do you just mean that the things *you* use are not configured by default in Opus? Ever considered that other people use different things to you and if every single Opus function was added to the default menus/toolbars then they would fill a pair of 30" monitors and then some?
If you mean that it can be difficult to find settings in Opus 8 then nobody can deny that. It comes with having a lot of settings! Opus 9 helps by making it possible to search the Preferences and Customize windows. There are still a lot of settings, of course, but Opus is that kind of program. People who don't want many choices always have Windows Explorer, etc.
However, I counted no less than twelve features that Directory Opus either copied or is finally catching up to XYplorer 5.x on, from breadcrumbs to thumbnails to folder tabs to new rename options to new find features, and more-zridling
I wish you'd qualify statements like "twelve features" and "beats DOpus in many ways" by giving a complete list. I wish you'd also point out and/or realise that twelve features out of several thousand is a pretty insignificant percentage. Also, as I'll get to in a moment, I wish you'd realise that all or most of what few examples you did give are wrong.
FYI, I don't think anyone involved in writing or beta-testing Opus has ever even installed XYplorer let alone scoured it for ideas. Jon never has. Greg never has. Trevor never has. I never have. Suggesting that Opus has stolen ideas from other file managers is pretty rich considering Directory Opus has existed for 17 years, since the first Amiga version way back in 1990, and is often explicitly mentioned as the inspiration for many of the Windows file managers available today. Opus invented and introduced more than its fair share of ideas. Of course, it is possible (and in some cases true) that some feature requests have come from users who saw something in another program and asked for the same thing in Opus. To my knowledge, though, that's never happened with features from XYplorer. The actual examples you gave in your blog post are completely and utterly off-base:
a) Opus 9 stole breadcrumbs from Vista's Explorer, not XYplorer. In addition to that, Opus 8 already had a "hot paths" feature, thought up by GPSoft independently, that was already quite a lot like breadcrumbs (minus the pop-up menus for sibling folders) before anything I know of had breadcrumbs.
b) Are you seriously claiming XYplorer invented thumbnails? (WTF!??) Opus 6 had thumbnails. Explorer has had them since I can't remember. There's prior art going back to the stone age.
Or did you mean to type "Tiles" instead of "Thumbnails"? If so then I can confirm that the idea for Tiles mode was indeed "stolen". Not from XYplorer but from Windows Explorer, again. I imagine XYplorer got the idea from Explorer, too, if it also has Tiles mode. Or maybe the XYplorer developer thought of it independently before Windows XP came out, I don't know. It's hardly revolutionary to say "let's combine thumbnails with more textual information than just the filename" so it's not unthinkable that different people thought of similar ideas. If you're going to accuse Opus of stealing ideas, though, get your facts straight about where it stole them from!
You'd be a strange person indeed if you preferred that developers avoided adding useful features if they were already present in something else. Personally, and in general, I'd rather have all the useful features in one place so I don't have to live without anything or switch between different things which ultimately do the same task. Where two programs have the same feature, let them compete by how well they implement it. (For example, in Opus's Tiles mode you can define which information is shown per filetype. If you want the focal length or GPS coordinates your photos were taken at to be displayed next to them then you can do that. I don't know what XYplorer's tiles view (if any) is like but there's no such option in Explorer, at least.)
c) Are you seriously claiming XYplorer invented tabs? (WTF!?!??) Tabs in Opus were inspired by Firefox which probably got the idea from Opera which was probably just applying Microsoft's MDI concept to web browsing.
I mentioned your weblog post to Trevor Morris, creator of the graphics and icons inside of Opus and long-time beta-tester and collaborator going back to the Amiga versions. He replied: "Funny, because I think I was one of the first people to suggest/request tabs in DOpus, and I've certainly never installed (nor even heard of) XYplorer." I don't know when XPlorer got folder tabs but Trevor was asking for them years and years ago.
Actually, forget when they were first requested, Tabs were already in Opus 8, which itself was out years ago! Opus 9 has improved on them but your weblog makes it sound like Opus only just got folder tabs and is only just "catching up", which is utter rubbish. Credit where it's due: I believe the ideas of locked and renamable tabs originated with Total Commander. Those features were added to Opus 9 after people who had used TC kept asking for them in Opus. Again, if you want to accuse a program of stealing ideas, get your facts straight and at least accuse it stealing from the right program! Or, even better, see it as a good thing. Would it better for the Opus developers to ignore all the people asking for a feature because it already exists in another program? Nobody wins then. If something is a good idea then let it be added to all programs and let them compete on how well they implement them.
I trust that if XYPlorer adds a dual-pane feature (if it doesn't have one already; I don't know for sure, but two posts here say it doesn't) then you will post to your webblog about how XYPlorer is "catching up with" and "stealing ideas from" Directory Opus or some other file manager going back to Norton Commander or whatever it was that first came out with a dual-pane view. (For what it's worth, and as far as I know, Opus was first file manager to combine being able to open as many windows as you want with being able to have dual-displays in one (or more) single window(s) when you wanted it, for the best-of-both-worlds combination of the two paradigms. Maybe something else did it first but if so I never saw it in action.)
Different programs have different features. Differnet programs might gain different features at different times. Programs which do similar jobs are not all heading down the same road in the same direction towards the same final end-state of feature-complete perfection because there's no such thing. Different developers and users have different opinions about what makes a perfect program, and that's a good thing because it gives us all choice. (The only thing the whole user and developer community can agree on in the whole world is that Lotus Notes sucks.)
A lot of the stuff added to Opus 9 has been in the feature request list for literally years. There's only so much that can be added to a program in any one update and the developers have to make a call about which features they think are important for the next release, taking into account how long they'll take to integrate with the existing code and what effect they'll have on other things that are also wanted. If another file manager adds something that Opus doesn't have then good for it; meanwhile, the Opus devs have been working on some other feature which some people might find more important. Or less important. It's subjective. Even if those two programs then trade features at a later date, it doesn't mean one is "catching up" to the other. It just means those features seemed like good ideas, or were asked for by users, and it made sense to add them at that time. It doesn't even mean one program is copying another as the features may have been thought up years ago, or inspired by a third program or something with nothing to do with computers at all.
Neither program is a subset of the other. If I had the time or saw the point I'm sure I could list hundreds of features that Opus has that XYplorer hasn't. That would be pointless, though. They're two different programs. I have nothing at all against XYplorer. From a quick look at its website it looks like a good program and I wouldn't hesitate to include in the list of file managers I'd recommend people try when working out which is best for them. It looks like XYplorer has its own unique features that aren't in Opus just like Opus has its own features that aren't in XYplorer. Neither fact makes one program better than the other.
I just wonder what planet you are on by attributing the invention of things like thumbnails (or tiles if you meant that) and tabs to XYplorer and claiming that Opus is "catching up" to XYplorer because XYplorer "stole" Vista's breadcrumbs idea before Opus did. (If Microsoft stole breadcrumbs from XYplorer then I apologise for that accusation but, like I've said, I don't see what's wrong with "stealing" ideas like that. To not do so would be like IE not adding tabbed browsing for years after it became apparent to everyone else that it was a killer feature.) Using the same type of logic and arbitrary selection of features that you used in your weblog post it would be easy for me to argue that XYplorer has a lot of catching up to do with Opus, but that wouldn't paint a fair picture of XYplorer at all. (e.g. The very first item in the most recent XYplorer update on their front page: 29th March 2007 "Added preview of *.tga (Targa) files!" Opus had that years ago. Oh my god, a stolen idea! ...Or maybe, up until now, displaying TGA files simply wasn't the top priority in the minds of the XYplorer developers who were busy doing other things.)
All you've done is arbitrarily pick some features that have been added to Opus recently and were already in XYplorer while ignoring all the other new features added to Opus that XYPlorer doesn't have. More importantly, you've ignored all the features Opus has had since version 6 or 8 that XYPlorer doesn't have. You're also judging the Opus 9 update before you know everything that's in it, given that the full list of changes has yet to be published (my guide ignores literally hundreds of small changes that might be a big deal to some), and in addition to that it's apparent that you didn't even finish reading my Opus 9 guide or GPSoft's very brief highlights list before running off to slag off the Opus 9 update on your weblog simply because it costs money. (How strange, saying something is too expensive or should be free before you even know what's in it.)
Regarding your "four very important ways" and other statements:
Portability and Size
I assume that by "portability" you mean running from USB. I guess you didn't read my guide or GPSoft's highlights because this is covered in both.
In Opus 9 your complete setup, including the program itself and all your settings, can be copied directly to a USB stick in about 5 mouse clicks. You can then run Opus from that USB stick by double-clicking dopus.exe in the root of the drive. No installation, no copying and no registry changes. (The U3 system is also supported but Opus doesn't require it and doesn't rely on it, or anything else, to clean up the registry since Opus no longer stores its settings in the registry.)
As for size, my Opus install is 20MB, 9MB of which is optional plugins that I could delete to reduce the size to 11MB. Even if I add on the optional online-help files, optional PDF manual, optional language translations and the multiple copies of the Release Notes for various versions I have sitting around, Opus is still only using 37MB of my HDD. (If your Opus install is bigger than that is probably due to a load of background graphics that you've copied into the directory or somethign like that.)
10MB to 40MB is hardly massive or likely to fill anyone's computer, iPod, memory stick or whatever in this day and age. I put it to you that it just doesn't matter if a program is 1MB or 20MB. I also put it to you that functionality is much more important than a few meg of disk space. I've you disagree then I've got a copy of Norton Commander that you might like. It fits on a single floppy disk with room to spare for a low-res, heavily compressed JPEG.
XML settings
In this thread (but not on your blog) you also mention that XML settings is something XYPlorer has that Opus doesn't. Once again, apparently you didn't actually read the list of changes! My guide has an entire section about XML configuration.
Yeah, it would've been great if Opus used XML settings all along but that's life. The move to XML settings and other changes for USB mode took a lot of time and effort which (a few small things aside) only really benefit the relatively small number of people who want to run Opus from a USB stick. That's why USB mode is an optional extra. It was significant amount of work for a relatively small number of people so those people are being asked to pay for it if they want it. If they don't want it or don't think it's worth it then nobody is forcing them to buy it.
To put things in perspective, if I had Opus 9 without USB mode and I needed to buy the add-on in order to help a friend down the road with his computer then I would spend as much on a return pair of bus tickets (GBP £2 each) getting to his house as I would on USB mode itself (GBP £4), and I'd be able to use USB mode forever afterwards, unlike the bus tickets.
Ability to easily save and restore all settings to/from external files.
There's a settings Backup & Restore Wizard in Opus 9, also shown and mentioned in my guide. You select Settings -> Backup & Restore from the menus, select the Backup radio button and then click Next a few times. A second later all of your settings are saved to a single file that can be imported just as easily. (The backup is just a zip file with XML files, background images, etc. inside it so you can open it up and edit it if you need to for some reason.) Opus even puts your username and the date into the default filename so you can easily keep several historic backups in one place without having to rename anything. If don't think that's easy then I don't really know what to say. It wasn't exactly difficult in Opus 8, either.
System Integration
In this thread you mention "System integration" as somehing XYplorer does better than Opus. What do you mean by that? Opus hooks into folder double-clicks (Explorer Replacement mode), and it'll run just about any other program that has a command-line or DDE interface, too. It lets you create system-wide hotkeys, docked toolbars on the desktop, etc. It lets you view My Computer and Recycle Bin, etc. It lets you view Word documents etc. Sounds like system integration to me but I don't have a clue what you actually meant by that. What is it that you feel is lacking under the vague label of "system integration?" If something is missing and it's a good idea then I'm sure it will be considered for addition. Enlighten us! Just throwing around vague terms doesn't help people decide which program is better for them, nor does it help developers improve their products, because nobody but you has any idea what you're talking about.
Lifetime licence
When I first read this I thought you were suggesting that the Opus licence expires some time after you buy it. It doesn't and it'd be nice if you corrected your weblog post so that people reading it don't get the wrong idea.
You buy a version of Opus and you can use what you bought forever. The only thing that expires is the right to official support and that expiry, which has never been enforced to my knowledge, only kicks in if you are still using an old version a year after a newer version has been released. In reality people in that situation still get support. They'll certainly get support from myself and the other fellow users at the Resource Centre Forums and my guess is that they'll still get support from GPSoft. (I've been copied on replies from GPSoft about Opus 6 issues that had some relation to me, e.g. plugins I've written, even in the last few months, for example.) The clause is just there to stop someone who bought Opus 6 in 2001 *demanding* support for it in 2015 when Opus 6 is ancient history and nobody can even remember how it worked. Seems reasonable to me.
Having read some of the posts here I see now that you were not talking about licence expiry. You were talking about the right to free updates forever. There's a big difference between the licence to use a piece of software and the right to free updates for a piece of software and it's not helpful to anyone to confuse the two. Aside from anti-virus products (for obvious reasons), very few programs expire unless you pay more money. (There are a few exceptions. CDRWin springs to mind. I don't know if it's still around or using the same annoying licence/protection system that forced you to buy updates every year even if no significant work had been done on the program but that annoyed me and made me switch products.)
Okay, let's look at the idea of being able to buy the right to free updates forever:
So far I've only found three companies that honored their "lifetime" licenses — WinRAR, XYplorer, and UltraEdit so far.-zridling
Like you said, three companies in total. Why expect this from everyone?
Given the assumptions that developers don't have unlimited time and that developers need money to pay for food and rent, it seems to me there are only four ways such a business model can work:
- The developer rarely spends significant time improving the product and users almost never get major updates, only the odd bug fix or minor feature that nobody would pay for in the first place.
WinRAR was one of your examples. When was the last time WinRAR received a significant update that anyone would have paid money for? I'm not knocking WinRAR here; it does what people paid for and it's not falling apart or anything like that but since you bought WinRAR have there been any updates bigger than those that would have been free for Opus? I'm not an avid WinRAR user, and apologies to RARLabs if I'm wrong here, but, as far as I'm aware, the answer is "no". So the "unlimited updates" thing doesn't mean a hell of a lot in this example. Sure, it's nice to know you won't get screwed for a minor update just because it's been a year since you paid some money, but that isn't how Opus updates work either and any program that was sold like that is probably best avoided in the first place.
- The developer offers lifetime updates at a *significantly* increased up-front cost compared to buying discounted updates normally when they become available.
You used UltraEdit as another example so let's look at that: USD $50 gets you UltraEdit and entitles you to free updates for a year. Fair enough. However, if you want unlimited updates then that will cost you USD $125 instead. That's 2.5 times the product's FULL price. Factor in that upgrades don't cost full price, and that no company in the world will guarantee they will carry on producing new versions of any product, and it doesn't seem like a great deal to me, unless UltraEdit has non-free updates very, very regularly. I have nothing against the people who make UltraEdit for offering such a deal but it's not one that I would take up.
Let's examine a hypothetical world where Opus had a similar pricing scheme offering unlimited updates for 2.5x the "new user" price. Back in December 2001 when Opus 6 was released for Windows you would have paid USD $175 for a licence with lifetime updates. (I'm using current prices and exchange rates to avoid confusing the issue with one of general foriegn exchange speculation.) Fast forward five and a half years to 27th April 2007 and the release of Opus 9. You would still be USD $25 down compared to what you'd have if you'd bought Opus 6 for USD $70 and then paid USD $40 for each of the Opus 8 and 9 updates ($175 vs $150). There were about two and a half years between Opus 6 and 8 and the same between Opus 8 and 9 (there was no Opus 7) so let's assume Opus 10 gets released about two years from now, in 2009. Eight years after the start of the original deal you would finally be saving money. You would have paid USD $175 while someone who did things the usual way would have paid USD $190. Wow, that's a whole USD $15 saved over an eight year peroid for an up-front investment of USD £105 above the usual price. Whoop-de-doo.
Of course, your investment would not have been risk-free. During those eight years someone else might have come out with a better program that you decided to switch to, making your investment worthless. Or the developers of the original program may have taken it in a direction you didn't care for, producing updates that had no value to you and that you would not have paid for given the option, making your investment worthless. Or the developers of the original program may have converted to the Church Scientology and stopped releasing updates at all because they became too busy lecturing random people about anti-depressants, making your investment not only worthless by as bad as paying money to see a Tom Cruise movie.
However I look at it, spending 2.5x the full price of a product to get free updates forever seems like a crap investment to me. Here's a better idea: Buy the normal updates and stick the rest of the money in a savings account.
- The developer has won the lottery or something and is so filthy rich they don't have to worry about paying bills or buying food ever again and yet, inexplicably, they still charge money for the initial purchase instead of giving the program away for free.
I don't know of any examples of this.
- The program's userbase is expanding so quickly that the developers can make enough money even if they only charge new customers.
I can't think of any examples of this, either.
Note that I haven't mentioned one of yours example, XYplorer, because I don't know where it fits in the 4 scenarios. Maybe it fits in a 5th scenario I haven't even thought of.
Of course, there are other situations where the program is given away free and there's no concept of "free updates" because everything is free anyway. This is usually either because the developers work on the program in their spare time and have other sources of income (in which case major updates are *probably* quite rare) or because the program is funded as a loss-leader by one or more companies with some larger agenda (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, StarOffice). Neither case applies to Directory Opus which is a full-time job and the primary source of income for the two people who are GPSoftware.
Affordability
If you think it's too much and that Opus doesn't give you enough in return then that's fair enough. I can't tell you what your money is worth or which features are important to you. Personally, I think that Opus is more than worth it. I also don't think think GBP £35 or USD $70 (that was USD $65 a couple of years ago; the US economy is sliding) is a lot of money for such a useful tool. It's subjective, of course, but we're only talking about the price of a decent meal out for two or a couple of rounds of drinks on a night out with some friends. We're not talking about a month's rent, like if you buy Photoshop, or something like that.
I bought DOpus 6, skipped 7, and spent another $90 buying everything I wanted for version 8.-zridling
There was no Opus 7 to skip. The version numbers jumped from 6 to 8.
(Trivia: The version number was changed quite late in the Opus 8 beta cycle. If I remember correctly, we were all testing "Directory Opus 7" until the last couple of betas. AFAIK the number change was for purely silly and cosmetic reasons: Someone didn't like the look of the number 7 at the end of the Directory Opus logo! 6, 8 and 9 have nice rounded edges on the right which balance out the big letter-O on the left of the logo but 7 has harsh straight lines. :) Silly if you ask me, but so long as the version number increases with each release I'm happy enough, and it's a nice bonus when it means people talking rubbish on weblogs and forums get caught out a couple of years later. :-) )
Speaking of which, I do not understand where your $90 figure came from. If you owned Opus 6 then updating to Opus 8 would have cost you USD $40, at most, plus USD $10 extra if you bought the Secure-FTP module, which was the only optional extra at the time. That's at most USD $50, not $90. (I say "at most" because the upgrade pricing from 6 to 8 used a sliding scale that maxed out at $40 depending on how long ago you bought Opus 6. GPSoft dropped the sliding scale for Opus 9 updates since it was confusing and made it impossible to publish a clear upgrade price, even if it was arguably fairer for some. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that they might be nice to you if you just missed the five-month cut-off date for a free update.)
They really should sell just one complete version.-zridling
If they did it would presumably cost as much as it would to buy the normal version plus the two optional extras that are currently available.
People keep asking, "why isn't there a cut-down version of Opus with fewer features?" The problem is, as always: Which features? Something essential to one person might be completely useless to another, and vice versa. How do you decide?
If they want to modularize it, then fine, but start with the portable/micro version and go up, rather than extracting features that should be part of every copy.-zridling
Exactly my point. You're saying "I think feature X is essential but I don't use feature Y. If there's going to be a cut-down, cheaper version then it should clearly have X and not Y. Anything else would be stupid." Yet someone else is going to feel exactly the opposite to you and, if you think about it, USB mode is a niche feature. It's very useful to enough people that it was well worth implementing. I think it's cool and I carry Opus around on a USB keyring just in case I end up working on someone else's computer. It's cool. It's really, really useful to some. But it's still a niche feature. The vast majority of users run Opus on their own computers and don't go around to other computers with a USB drive sticking out the front.
In the end, the way I see it (which may not be the way GPSoft see it; I'm just assuming):
- If something is likely to be useful to just about everyone then everyone gets it as part of the main program.
- If something didn't take a lot of time and effort to add then everyone gets it.
- If something is difficult to separate from the rest of the program then everyone gets it.
- If something took a lot of time and effort to add, yet is only used by a handful of people, and is easy to make optional, then it might be turned into an optional extra.
The last point has only happened with two things so far: SSH/SFTP/FTPS support (basic FTP support is standard) and USB mode. Those two things cost more if you want them. If you don't want them or don't think they're worth USD $10 then pretend they were never added to the program.
Potentially, I could also see a feature being optional where adding it required licensing a costly library or other technology. That hasn't happened yet but if it did it would seem unfair to pass that cost on to everyone when only a few benefit from it.
There is scope for a future version of Opus that has some of the current features removed and costs less or maybe even a really stripped-down and free version. Who knows. People keep asking for it but, again, it's hard to know which features to remove without creating a crippled program nobody wants to use, or that doesn't offer anything that you can't already get from some other cheap/free file manager. Look at Photoshop Elements, for example. It's a complete piece of crap and it makes the real Photoshop product look bad by sharing its name. Anyone who wants a cheap/free photo editing program would be better off using PaintShopPro or The Gimp, and the users of the real Photoshop would be better served by Adobe not diverting resources to a lesser product they have no interest in.
Also, no one REALLY gets too hot under the collar about the price of an upgrade from say Office 2000 to 2007, so who am I to criticise? The comparatively nominal cost of going from DOpus 8 to 9 will probably benefit me far more than the upgrade, costing far more, from Office 2003 to 2007.-Darwin
Good point about paying for Office updates. There's also a lot of software that seems to be updated once a year, without fail, even if there are no significant new features on offer. I don't mean Office, where lots of features do get added but very few people use them; I mean programs where you're being offered version N+2 when it feels like you only just bought version N, let alone N+1. Where the update email seems more interested in the date than telling you about new features, of which there are only five to speak of, none of which excite you. I won't mention any names but I've noticed it in the backup and defrag software market from several (not all) of the vendors. (It's happening with computer games now as well.) I find that annoying myself but, meh, I'm free to skip updates until one comes along that I want, and that's what I do.
You're free to skip Opus updates as well, of course, but Opus updates don't work that way. GPSoft seem to be releasing major (i.e. non-free) updates only once every two and a half years or so. They don't release an update that costs money unless it actually adds significantly to the product. This in turn means that between releases GPSoft are working hard so that they actually have something to show when the next update is ready, else there's no food and rent for them when the new users dry up! The jump from Opus 6 to 8 was massive. The free 8.2 update added several major features for free, since they were already coded up at the time and there weren't enough of them to justify selling a new version. There were also ten or so (I don't know the actual number) other, more minor updates for both Opus 6 and Opus 8, adding small things and fixing various bugs as they were reported (a couple of times within a day or two of the report, if the problem warranted it). Many vendors would have charged for 8.2 but GPSoft gave it away. The jump from Opus 8.2 to 9 is here now and it's significant enough to warrant being a paid-for update. It's a personal call whether the new features interest you enough to pay for them but people seem very positive so far, once they've learnt what they are. I would also bet that there will be more features added in free updates after Opus 9, like the 8.2 update added to Opus 8. Just a hunch.
If the update price seems a lot, keep in mind that you're paying for updates about half as often yet arguably getting more when the updates arrive.
GPSoft only provided two minor updates to Directory Opus 8, and now they want almost 66% of the full price for an upgrade, with several options being left out of the main program unless you want to pay for them. That’s bullshit, and reason enough to claim that GPSoft is hostile to its current paying customers.-zridling
Here's another version of the truth: The only thing that is bullshit, sir, is your knowledge of the facts. 8.2 was far from a minor update, as cthorpe thankfully pointed out, and there were many more than two updates for Opus 8. (It didn't just go 8.0, 8.1, 8.2. There were minor revisions between the point releases.)
Since when is "several" used to describe two things?
And "hostile to its current paying customers?" In what way, exactly? How is offering two and a half years' work for USD $40 a hostile action? Nobody is being forced to upgrade, nobody who bought Opus 6 or 8 is having anything taken away from them. Customers old and new get ridiculously good and swift support, on the whole, from the Opus Resource Centre forums. Hostile to paying customers? That's so wrong it's insulting.
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Nudel, welcome to the site! I've got a soft spot in my heart for anyone who can write a long post like that :-*
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Welcome Nudel.
What a convincing, polite, well-written post. If I didn't know Dopus (I'm an user since v. 6) I'd run to check the software right now. If soft can make an user as passionate as you, it must be good soft.
FYI, I have contacted support a few times and the asnwer was fast and effective. The forums are really good too. The program is extensible using plugins, and these (extensions and forums/good support) are key features for me.
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Nudel, thanks for writing here. People, Nudel is extremely active in the DC forums and is very, very helpful in answering DOpus questions.
I agree with most of what you wrote here, and I can understand your frustration with some of what's been discussed here. I also respect Zaine's opinion, who has been very helpful here on the DC forum. I really think the main, core issue here is the money, and that is what's getting people riled. Regardless of what features are added or aren't added to DOpus 9, it's the price that is bothering people. There's no right or wrong about. If GP charges too much, he will price himself out of the business, and if he charges too little, he won't be able to sustain himself. There's a very large middle ground and that's where we are. It's economics, people, and the owner is free to charge whatever he wants, and we as customers have the right to choose whether to buy or not. So, no one is really doing anything wrong here.
Personally, I wish DOpus was cheaper, but there's nothing I can do about it. But I like the program so much and it's just so dang useful that I'm going to pay the upgrade fee anyway. I guess the only other thing I can ask for is maybe GP can give an *extra* discount for Donationcoder users for the upgrade? :Thmbsup:
In any case, let's just remember that money is the real issue here not the quality of the programs. I think it's pretty obvious that DOpus and XYplorer are both well-written, useful, and fantastic programs. Comparing the two is like debating whether or not chocolate or vanilla ice cream is better. They're both delicious.
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There is not a specific, individual feature in Directory Opus that makes me prefer it. Rather, it is the program's customizability. It has many commands that are already defined and you just use them. When you need something more though, it has a very powerful script language that can be used to perform simple and brief to lenghty and complex tasks. I have many (hopefully no one will ask me to define that) programs on my computer, but none are as flexible and configurable as DO. At least I have found that I can use it at a simple level, but when I need to do something more complex, it will allow me to modify it to do what I need without getting other software. That's the mark of a good program in my opinion. Find me a file manager that is more powerful and configurable (will do more things) and I'll buy it and switch to it. I don't think it's perfect and I think it has some features missing, but I don't think anything else even comes close to it.
What's the point of all this? I don't know. Just expressing my opinion I guess.
Ken
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regarding complaints about dir opus, im not sure the core price is the issue here (and i think pricing in AUS confuses people people into thinking it's more expensive than it is). dir opus is one of the most powerful, configurable tools there is, and the v9 preview looks extremely powerful. it's a terrific program. [it's setting can be overwhelming and it really is a program for pro users i think].
however i do think there may be some reasons why people sometimes get a kind of iffy feeling from dir opus developers regarding cost. it's not that it's expensive but rather the feeling that one has to pay for these little extras that should be part of the program, and things like this: "(all purchases before dec 2006 have to pay to upgrade)."
even when the price is very reasonable, it can give you a kind of uneasy feeling to be charged for each extra feature (like usb portability, sftp ability), as if you are going in to buy a car and in the end you paid double because of all the extras you had to pay for. maybe this isn't really a *logical* complaint, because you could just as well say you are saving most users some money since they don't need such features.. but psychologically it kind of gives you an uneasy feeling sometimes.
another related thing, i understand the dir opus v9 update will require purchase from anyone who bought before dec 2006 (5 months amnesty i guess). i just think it's nice to give customers a long period of amnesty for upgrades, so if you buy it and a major new version comes out within a year, you get the upgrade for free. i'm not saying companies have an obligation to so this at all, i'm just saying it makes a difference to me in terms of viewing the company as "friendly" to customers or not. in this sense i think it's also a smart business decision. it's not that i wouldn't buy dir opus anyway, but it would effect how i "feel" about the company, and speaking personally that's something that is important to me. it's the difference between saying "what a nice company i want to tell everyone about them and can't wait to get the new version!" vs. "it's a great program, but do i really need the new version?"
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Actually, yesterday i was revolted because a bug in XY made me inadvertedly launch a game while my work stuff was taking almost all my mem: i ended up losing half an hour to bring the computer back :(-jgpaiva
Hmm, what kind of bug makes someone inadvertedly launch a game? :huh: Sorry for your lost time. By a strange coincidence yesterday I go the idea of adding a "safe mode" to XYplorer, which, if enabled, would pop a confirmation box right ahead of any operation involving files (copy, move, rename, delete, read, write, open -- you configure the degree of safety). I'm not sure yet whether the idea is good, but it probably would have saved you half an hour.
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Whew! That's a long one... had to read that in 2 sittings...
I think I'm locked in for an upgrade. I'm going to Vista soon, and I really hate the idea that the new Explorer will have some features that Directory Opus does not.
Also, make no mistake about it, DonationCoder talked me into Directory Opus. There's no way I would have bought DO without DC. I hope GPsoft takes this into account and gives us another nice discount!
The USB thing sounds cool, but not for me. I think if I were given the choice between a hypothetical "full" version and a version that only lacked USB portability for $10 less, I'd go with the cheaper version. I think the fact that I seem to have lost my USB drive in my room (AKA "The Abyss") is making my decision easier.
How are the upgrades going to work? More or less we'll get a new key and the old key will no longer work, right? I know it's a little late (and the wrong forum) to be making threats, but if I have to install 8 to make 9 work I'll probably do a lot of shopping around before I plunk down my CC... DonL, XYplorer is first on my list.
About the whole "Bread Crumb" thing... yeah, I thought it looked like MS stole that feature from DO, and improved it.
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Meanwhile, I'm sitting here exceptionally happy with Total Commander and it's great price and great developer.
It's quotes like the following from TC-developer Christian Ghisler that makes me happy I discovered Windows Commander (as it was called back then) and was the very first software I paid for (yes, I downloaded cracks, keygens, etc. when I was younger.).
Ghisler's replies upon users' request for a donation option or alternative to re-registering:
Btw, it's really not neccessary to register again just to support me! You should better spend this money to support the victims of the Tsunami flood, or the hunger in Africa...
In fact there is no donation scheme. Believe me, we (my brother and I = C. Ghisler & Co.) earn enough with new registrations so we don't need to charge for updates.
What if you cannot afford the TC licence? We tolerate the use of the unregistered version by private users who cannot afford the program. However, we expect that companies who make real money buy the software when they use it, and also private users who can afford it (where the licence wouldn't take a big part of the salary, as in some countries of eastern Europe or Asia now). This isn't yet written in the licence in the program, but will be written there in the near future.
I'm not slagging off DOpus, which by the looks of it is a fantastic file manager, but I'm a bit surprised at the high price of upgrades. I would assume that there are many DOpus users, possibly even more than TC (I have no clue), and it's surprising that with the small team behind it they still need to charge for major upgrades.
But that'll be my last Total Commander promotion in this thread ;)
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Windows Commander (as it was called back then)
...-TucknDar
I had that WAAAYYYY back in the day too (I'll guess 98...). I think at least. I used it to change the timestamps on my mp3 files.
P.S. does 9 years ago count as "WAAAYYYY back in the day"?
P.P.S. Nudel, I like the "toasty" on your web page. I just want to uppercut every time I see that. (I hope this refrence isn't lost on everyone here!)
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Windows Commander (as it was called back then)
...-TucknDar
I had that WAAAYYYY back in the day too (I'll guess 98...). I think at least. I used it to change the timestamps on my mp3 files.
P.S. does 9 years ago count as "WAAAYYYY back in the day"?
-Hirudin
When we're speaking about computers, yes, that's WAAAYYYY back!
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DonL: It was the [enter] on address bar bug, as it didn't work, i tried ctrl-[enter]... BIG mistake. I didn't know ctrl-[enter] would launch the focused app. The focused app was the game. Oh, and i stupidly pressed ctrl-enter more than once. Combine that with only having 512mb of mem, a slow disk and an apache server running with java virtual machine.. And you can imagine my problem :P
As for the "safe mode" you mentioned..I don't think that's a good idea. I don't eve have the delete confirmation dialog.
Oh.. I just remembered something else i'd like on XY: being able to press ctrl-z after deleting something to bring it back, as in Explorer.
Nudel: currently, by what i mentioned above, you can understand why 5mb or 10 do make a whole lot of difference to me :)
Actually, XY is now taking me 16mb of mem, thus, if it'd behave in my computer as it does in yours, you're right, DOpus would take less.
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I don't really care about the money - it's "the banker" and her reaction to me spending the money that I'm worried about!
That aside, I'm starting to feel embarrassed about my role in extending this thread. $45 Cdn. -that's all an upgrade to DOpus 9 is going to cost me (if I don't spring for the USB licence). Another way I can look at this is that this works out to "about" $22.50 Cdn. per year (I say about because I purchased DOpus 8 on Oct.4, 2004 and the last update to it was October 20-ish, 2006). I have other subscription based software that costs me more than that per year and doesn't necessarily get updated that often (i.e. no major releases from one year to the next). Additionally, I would say that the only software I have loaded on my computer that I use more is the OS!
I hit "Post" and went shopping for a barbeque, probably three hours ago now. Got back to find that the above hadn't been posted because Ken had posted while I was typing. Tried to post again and got a note that SEVEN new replies have been posted. This is a popular topic! Right - off to read the 8 new posts...
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Nudel,
Wonderful post. Sold me on the upgrade, even though I probably don't take advantage of 25% of the features in 8.2
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Also, make no mistake about it, DonationCoder talked me into Directory Opus. There's no way I would have bought DO without DC. I hope GPsoft takes this into account and gives us another nice discount!
-Hirudin
I agree. Without Donationcoder, I wouldn't even have tried DOpus.
I'm (actually was) a Norton Commander addict. Goes back to don't know when and I was so used to the many shorcuts F5, F6, F8, Alt commands etc and each time I tried to switch to some of the many other Two-Pane File Managers, each time, I found myself fumbling over their "new" routine commands. It was these routine commands that were so hard for me to get over simply because they were second nature to me as you tend to use them so often.
This issue seriously stumbled me and prevented me from exploring the many other useful features (no doubt) that other two pane file managers had.
I had come across DOpus somewhere along the way. But perhaps the price did look intimidating to me compared to the "rest". And I never got beyond that initially.
But in hindsight, it's the question of my initial perceived value (that's really a marketing issue DOpus has to deal with for people like me who started off using other File Managers).
But I only become a convert after reading through the Donationcoder forum and having used it for several months now, I will say that one of the best things about DOpus is the tremendous customizability.
But what good is this if you cannot figure it out and this is where the http://resource.dopus.com/ forum comes in.
There were quite a few times when I could not figure out how to do something, a quick search there would give me the answer or a question posted there would give me an answer by one of the expert residents in minutes if not hours. There are very responsive and come out with the right answers as well.
This allowed me to overcome my "second nature" problem. I simply duplicated the Norton Commander command set in DOpus (simply by reading their forums and posting questions there and Nudel was one of those who replied amongst many others including the author of DOpus).
After that I was off to explore all the other many useful features, such as those that allowed me to integrate DOpus with say Beyond Compare, Double Killer or any programs that accepted command line arguments).
Please note I post there under a different Forum name.
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Quote from: Darwin
it is not as svelte and quick as XYplorer
What sort of stuff do you find slow in Opus? I would think most operations are bounded by how fast the filesystem can supply directory listings. You can slow things down by turning on certain options, though, so maybe that's what you're seeing? Or maybe there's something none of us have noticed that could do with fixing/improving. Let me or GPSoft know and I'll pass it on.
:'(
DOpus is 12.4MB on disk while XYplorer is 2.37MB. Running both side by side with each open to the same folder, DOpus oscillates between 0 and 24% of my CPU, uses 7,592K RAM and 29,940K VM while XYPlorer is stable at 0% CPU, 22,344K RAM and 14,348K VM... So, all I can do is eat crow. My gut reaction to your question, Leo, before running the quick and dirty test just described, was "What was I thinking about when I wrote that DOpus isn't as quick as XYPlorer?" All I could think of, again prior to testing this, was that I must have been referring to size - XYPlorer is a lot smaller (but it does a lot less, too). Going and comparing the two, though reveals that, given its power, DOpus is tiny and that it's very economical with my system resources as well. XYPlorer IS smaller than DOpus and uses significantly less VM, but so what? I have a gig of RAM and a 120 GB harddrive. Further, the thumbdrive that I am quite anxious to install DOpus on is 2GB in size and I'm only using about 300MB of it currently... I'm not trying to disparage XYPlorer here. I bought it expressly to run from my thumbdrive so that I don't have to tolerate trying to work on other peoples' computers while shackled by Windows Explorer. When I did this, there was no reliable way to run DOpus from a thumbdrive (though there are several threads on their forum that describe how to do this, and which include some helpful comments from the developers). I have no regrets about doing this but I AM looking forward to running DOpus from a thumbdrive as I have found myself missing the absence of dual-pane viewing in XYplorer. As stated above, I will continue to follow XYploer's development and will keep it loaded.
Somewhat tangetially, the only thing I find slow in DOpus 8 is displaying my favorites menu on one of my three computers. I've no idea why this is so, and it persists even after paring the list down to two and disabling smart favorites. It works fine on my very old P-IIIE notebook and on my wife's notebook (which is a couple of years newer than the affected computer).
I'd like some brown sauce with my crow, please, and a pint. This is what I get for shooting from the hip. Sorry, I shouldn't talk with my mouth full :-[
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After reading about RAM usage and stuff I figured... what the heck, I'll check what DO is using on my computer right now... I should note that I don't have any windows open, it's just running in the background.
Hmmm... after looking a little more, it seems that Process Explorer and Windows Task Manager have different ideas of how much ram it's using...
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
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Just to clarify - "VM" in my post above is Virtual Memory as read in Task Manager and, as far as I've ever been able to determine, corresponds to Process Explorer's "Private Bytes". Anytime I've ever compared what the two are reporting, TM's VM and PE's PB have been the same.
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Thanks for the comments. Wow mouser, your post count is bigger than mine is on the Opus forums. :)
Fair points about the pricing etc. I'm not an economist or businessman so I don't know what the right answer is (if there is one!). I agree that price, and things like optional extras and free-update windows, have a psychological effect that can outweigh or pre-empt other factors.
If you use even a small percentage of its features then I think Opus is more than worth the price but it can be difficult to know how much you'll get out of a program before you use it and if you're put off by the price so much that you don't even test-drive the 60-day trial then you'll never find out. Even if the price of something is completely fair for what you get, if people don't try it then they won't realise how much value they'd get for their money.
It's a balancing act of pricing and of marketing/promotion. It's really difficult to explain what Opus does and what makes it special. It's the the sum of lots and lots of small things that don't matter much on their own.
KenR and patteo both said it well. The massive bullet point is configurability and that's hard to explain (if it's even a word :)). I could say to someone, "Opus is great because it allowed me to create a button that runs a tool that embeds folder.jpg from the same folder into the WMA files I had selected", and they'd probably think, "WMA album covers? I don't care about that, it's not worth the money!" The point isn't that it could do that particular thing but that it allowed me to do what I wanted and will probably allow them to do what they want, whatever that is.
The difficulties I had explaining the benefits of Opus prompted me to write my introduction to Opus (http://www.pretentiousname.com/opus/index.html) a while back. I wanted to list out some of "the little things that add up to something big" and to give a few examples of what I made Opus do for myself in the hope it would help people understand what Opus can do for them. I don't know how successful I was but at least now I can paste the URL into conversations instead of fumbling with words. :)
Many people don't seem to "get" configurability. They see a screenshot of a program and think that's it. "It's got too many buttons." But you can remove them. "That cat picture (at the bottom of the first page) is ridiculous!" I know, it's meant to be!
It seems to me that most people, at least on Windows, are used to letting the tools they use dictate how they get things done. Most programs aren't very configurable so people aren't used to saying "F*** this, I'm sick of seeing this dialog all the time!" or "I do this thing every day and it takes five mouse clicks, why can't I do it in one click or via a hotkey?" or "Why are all these stupid programs that I never use on my context menus in the way of the things I do use?"
Opus is the kind of program that you can adapt to solve problems like that but I don't think many people realise problems like that are there. They accept "it's how things work" and don't wish they could change things, so when the odd program like Opus comes along they don't see how it's useful. Opus lets you customise just about everything to your personal needs and that requires something that I don't think people are used to using: imagination about how they could use their computer better. Of course, it also requires the investment of time and energy towards tweaking things but if you're a geek like me then that's often a pleasure in itself. (I seem to spend half my time tweaking my computer so it's easier to tweak my computer. :))
Comparing the two is like debating whether or not chocolate or vanilla ice cream is better. They're both delicious.
Well said!
I guess the only other thing I can ask for is maybe GP can give an *extra* discount for Donationcoder users for the upgrade?-superboyac
I hope GPsoft takes this into account and gives us another nice discount!-Hirudin
I don't know what GPSoft's plans are but I'll mention it to them.
if I have to install 8 to make 9 work-Hirudin
You won't have to install Opus 8 first. You'll get a new licence code that unlocks Opus 9 directly. At least, that's how it worked from 6 to 8.
Don't worry, I would go on strike and post the longest whine in the history of the Internet if GPSoftware ever made the update/install process force you to install the previous version in order to install the update.
(Installing CyberLink PowerDVD, for example, drives me f***ing nuts. Every time I reinstall Windows or switch PCs I have to faff about installing the first version of PowerDVD I ever bought and then installing every update since then in sequence, each with a different licence code, because the PowerDVD installers refuse to install with an update licence code unless they can see the previous version, even though the installer contains the full set of program files. It's so painfully stupid. I could understand them asking me to type in my old licence code to prove I'm entitled to an update (although didn't I do that on their website in order to get the update code?!) but actually having to install the old versions, one by one? WTF. It'll never happen with Opus. Not on my watch!)
How are the upgrades going to work? More or less we'll get a new key and the old key will no longer work, right?-Hirudin
Technically, if you buy an update to Opus 9 then, as far as I know, your old Opus 8 key will continue to work with Opus 8. Of course, legally, you wouldn't be allowed to have Opus 8 installed on one machine and Opus 9 on another using the two licences (unless you had a two-machine licence) since you've bought an update and not a second copy. But if you needed to go back to Opus 8 for some reason then I don't think anything would stop you doing that.
About the whole "Bread Crumb" thing... yeah, I thought it looked like MS stole that feature from DO, and improved it.-Hirudin
On a slightly related note, it's great to see that Explorer in Vista selects the filename, minus the extension part, when you press F2 to rename something. Just like Opus always did (by default). I don't know if MS got the idea from Opus and I don't really care; I'm just glad they added it to Explorer so I don't get irritated every time I rename a file on my Desktop!
Btw, it's really not neccessary to register again just to support me! You should better spend this money to support the victims of the Tsunami flood, or the hunger in Africa...-Ghisler
Respect to that. Every so often the mIRC guy donates a month's registrations to charity, too. He's donated a fair amount. It surprised me how much actually. Something like $30,000 for a month of registrations which is a lot of people buying mIRC, but I guess a lot of people use mIRC and at least some of those registrations will be people who are buying it again just to donate.
I just want to uppercut every time I see that. (I hope this refrence isn't lost on everyone here!)-Hirudin
Is that a Mortal Kombat reference? That had a face that appeared on the screen sometimes, right? I'm rubbish at those Beat 'Em Ups, pretty much anything post-IK+, where the control systems turned into a case of weird input sequences that you had to work out and memorise. I managed to get to grips with Ninja Gaiden (the newer Xbox one) and God of War but the one-on-one two-player games make me throw the controller at the wall in frustration. Actually, Ninja Gaiden did too at first, but that game really rewards perseverance!
Your reference probably had nothing to do with beat 'em ups and now I've started a weird tangent, haha.
Actually, XY is now taking me 16mb of mem, thus, if it'd behave in my computer as it does in yours, you're right, DOpus would take less.-jgpavia
Probably not less, to be fair to XY, but a similar amount. Coincidentally, as I type this my Opus is using just under 16MB (15,692K) as well. Depends what I'm doing, of course, as it would in XY too.
I'd like some brown sauce with my crow, please, and a pint.-Darwin
:-) Thanks for taking the time to compare the two. I'm not sure where the impression that Opus uses lots of memory and/or is slow comes from but it's one of those things that people seem to think and repeat without really checking it out. When examined it doesn't turn out to be true. If Opus is using a lot of memory or running slowly then it's probably because of a 3rd party thing that Opus is hooking into.
For example, Opus relies on the video codecs installed on the computer to make thumbnails of movies and to get information out of them to display in its columns (e.g. dimensions and length of time). Unfortunately, a lot of video codecs are full of bugs for some reason. (Dunno what it is about people who write video codecs!) If a codec goes into a 100% CPU loop or leaks memory all over the place then it's dopus.exe that gets the blame in Task Manager since the codec DLL is loaded into the Opus process. If you see that happen and don't know any better then it's easy to think Opus is buggy.
I think it's a lot like reports of Firefox being unstable. They usually turn out to be due to extensions, not the program itself. That's the risk of hooking into other people's components.
Another thing I remember is when someone posted some timings which appeared to show that Opus copied files significantly slower than Explorer. The timings sure looked bad but after some investigation Opus was exonerated. It turned out to be two things:
First, the tester was copying thousands of small files and in Opus the options to preserve timestamps and attributes when copying files were turned on. Explorer doesn't preserve those things (or maybe it does one but not the other? I'm not sure right now) but Opus does, by default, since it's nice to do so and it normally takes a negligible amount of time (i.e. milliseconds). When copying a huge number of small files, though, that per-file overhead adds up and takes up as much time as copying the files themselves. It didn't add up to a hell of a lot, as I remember, but it still made Opus appear to be slower than Explorer, which was bad. I turned off two checkboxes and the time to copy the same files in Opus and Explorer became so close that I couldn't call a winner. (The time fluctuates, of course, but I did several copies and averaged the results.)
Second, and much more importantly, the person who did the original timings hadn't done a fair test at all. They copied the files in Opus and then copied the same files in Explorer without doing anything in between. Since the filesystem caches data Explorer had a massive advantage since Opus, before it, had caused all the files to be cached. Opus was reading files from disk while Explorer was reading them straight out of RAM. Test the two in the opposite order and Opus appeared much faster than Explorer. By doing a fair test, where I made sure the filesystem cache was filled with other data between copies, I found that the two programs were really the same speed.
Doing all those tests, copying files over and over again with different combinations of options, was really tedious but I wanted to work out if the results the user posted were valid. If they were then I'm sure GPSoft would have fixed the problem but, happily, it turned out there was no problem to fix.
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Nudel, based on your guide to the new features in v9 and your post here, I've also decided to purchase DO when it comes out. It helps that I'll be moving to Vista at about the same time on my home pc. I know I should post questions about the program on your forums, but I'm being lazy and its easier to ask an expert :). Maybe it will help other users here as well. I have one very simple query - is it possible to make DO behave like xplorer2? By that I mean -
- have double click to select a file in the program even though Explorer has single click
- use the standard 'Commander' keys found in many dual pane managers - such as F5 (copy), F6 (move) etc
- have left/right/tab move between the 2 panes
- Ctrl+Shift+<Drive> goes to that drive
These are the commands I'm used to, and they make a lot of sense. Over time, I want to learn more Opus specific features and use them, but in the meantime I want something familiar which doesn't disrupt my work too much. I have a trial version of DO8 and I haven't been able to get it to do these things.
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- have double click to select a file in the program even though Explorer has single click
-MrCrispy
Do you mean to launch a file, rather than to select one? If so then yes, to a degree. Opus ignores Explorer's "single-click" mode, but does have its own option if you want "single-click to select" inside of Opus. So you could turn single-click on in Explorer and leave it off in Opus. (It's off by default in Opus.)
The only problem will be when Opus is displaying a folder via one of Explorer's views. (Opus relies on Explorer to display My Computer, Recycle Bin, Network Places, and similar folders. They are displayed within an Opus window, but Explorer is doing the work behind the scenes.) In those cases I think Explorer's settings will be respected, so things will be inconsistent if Explorer and Opus aren't configured the same way.
- use the standard 'Commander' keys found in many dual pane managers - such as F5 (copy), F6 (move) etc
That's easily done. You can create standalone hotkeys via Settings -> Customize -> Keys. You can also assign hotkeys to toolbar buttons by editing the buttons. (Toolbar buttons' hotkeys will also be listed in the Customize Keys dialog.)
Tip: If you try creating some hotkeys in Opus 8, make sure you uncheck the System-Wide Hotkey option, else the hotkey will function even when Opus isn't the active program. (That's useful for certain things but you wouldn't want it for stuff like Copy and Rename for obvious reasons.) The System-Wide Hotkey option is turned on by default for new hotkeys in Opus 8. Opus 9 turns it off by default since it kept confusing people. ("Why does Opus start doing stuff when I press a hotkey in another program!?")
- have left/right/tab move between the 2 panes
Do you mean you want to be able to move folder tabs from the left to the right and vice versa? If so you can do that by dragging them. (Drag the tab's icon, not the label. The icon represents the tab while the label represents the folder, and dragging that would be like dragging the folder to another location. Similarly, right-clicking the label and the icon give you different context menus.)
- Ctrl+Shift+<Drive> goes to that drive
Easily done through Customize Keys and commands like "Go C:\". You'd have to create a separate hotkey for each drive letter but it's a one-off job and hopefully not too much hassle (unless you've got 26 drive letters).
Over time, I want to learn more Opus specific features and use them, but in the meantime I want something familiar which doesn't disrupt my work too much.
Perfectly reasonable! Change Opus's configuration for yourself, not the other way around.
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You can add me to the long list of DO users that first learned about it on DC.
I'm not sure whether I'd prefer a special DC discount for the upgrade, or a 7-zip plug-in....Hmmmmm. Scratch that, I would definitely prefer the 7-zip plug-in which has been talked about on the DO forum for a long time but never seems to go anywhwere.
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Scratch that, I would definitely prefer the 7-zip plug-in which has been talked about on the DO forum for a long time but never seems to go anywhwere.
-jdd
I'm not sure what's going on with Nosh's 7-zip plugin. I think maybe somebody else had also started on one?
I'm in the process of arranging to take a sabbatical from my day job for a few months, during which I plan to do a lot of Opus plugin work because it's been bugging me that I haven't been able to add certain features to my existing plugins and that there still aren't plugins for certain things. (Multi-page TIFF for example. I've done a bunch of work towards that already but there's only so much coding I can get done at the weekends.)
If nobody has finished a 7-zip plugin by then then I'll make one. The 7-zip API looks pretty simple so it won't be hard.
I also wish Opus had a read-write RAR plugin, instead of the read-only one it has currently. Seems to me the only way to do this, since there is no read-write RAR API/DLL for whatever reason (sigh!), is to call rar.exe or winrar.exe from the command line, which is a PITA but seems to work for Total Commander and others. I wasn't sure how well that would work with unicode filenames, though. Haven't really looked into it enough.
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Nudel, thanks for the great features page for DOpus 9. We're all grateful. It's almost 6a and I don't have the energy to respond to every point, but as I was going down the list of new DOpus features in version 9, I noticed that most of them were already part of XYplorer 5.x. As for speed, file operations are noticeably slower in DOpus than XYplorer, on both XP and Vista. Dual panes are overrated as with tabs, catalog, or a variety of keyboard shortcuts, I can switch among drives and locations in XYplorer within one click or hotkey. While both programs are highly customizable, XYplorer's UI is more so, and can be configured to look and work just about anyway you can imagine. Anyone claiming a "lot of bugs" in XYplorer doesn't use the program full-time as it's one of the tightest jobs of coding I know of, comparable to Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon RSS reader. XYplorer's dev doesn't merely fix bugs, he's constantly adding new features and tweaks, on a weekly basis.
I use and have registered both, but the biggest criticism I have against Directory Opus is its exhorbitant price and upgrade costs. Similarly, the biggest criticism I've had with XYplorer is its lack of customizable keyboard shortcuts, but that's no longer true with XYplorer's latest beta. A major plus is that XYplorer offers a true Lifetime license; Directory Opus does not. With XYplorer you always know where the program is headed, and hey, even XYplorer's dev, Donald Lessau, responded here! But if high price is the only real gripe against a program, then that doesn't take anything away from its quality, which Directory Opus has in abundance.
It's just that GPSoft is going to keep coming back for more money on a regular basis, and I don't feel they offer a substantial enough discount to registered users. On the other hand, XYplorer doesn't ask for a dime after the initial registration (although I find it really cool that XYplorer retains a small donation link on its site for anyone wanting to contribute beyond the cost of the $30 license). Ironically, I'm more than willing to consistently donate to a vendor who offers me a [true] Lifetime license than to continue buying high-priced upgrades. I've sent far more money in donations to open source apps, freeware, and to a lesser extent, XYplorer, than I ever will spend on upgrades for costly upgrades. It's just how I show my gratitude for being appreciated and trusted as a customer. Goodwill can go a lot further in the long run than a few dollars, and XYplorer is in for the long-tailed long haul.
(Comments are re-enabled on my blog. I apologize. I was getting so many porn/spam comments that I shut it down for a long time and forgot to turn them back on. Just deleted over 9,000 this week alone!)
Once again, thanks Nudel, I appreciate your feedback here and all the hard work you did on your site — you do a great service to Directory Opus! I too, am a tweak-freak and share your compulsion.
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Thanks for the reply. I guess we've both said all there is to say really.
Paying USD $16 a year (i.e. USD $40 every 2.5 years) for keeping a useful tool up-to-date with new features doesn't seem expensive to me, but maybe I'm rich or something. :-) (Of course, it's not as cheap as paying nothing; it just doesn't strike me as expensive.)
Comment spam is such a pain so I understand you disabling them. We had a lot of issues on the Opus forums until Steve installed a bunch of things that seem to have stopped them for now. Spam is bad enough but spam with explicit pictures that could get someone fired for reading an innocent site just isn't funny.
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It's just that GPSoft is going to keep coming back for more money on a regular basis, and I don't feel they offer a substantial enough discount to registered users. -zridling
I guess this is my biggest issue with DO. I think that your registered users should get a bigger break. They (registered users) are often your lifeblood for new sales. I have convinced many people to buy the programs that I use by showing them how much time it can save or how it can improve their computing experience.
I registered DO8, tweaked it in a way that almost worked for me, and used it for a while. My config actually mapped most of the NC or TC key strokes since that is my frame of reference. Unfortunately, I could never get everything to work from the keyboard the way I wanted. The tab functionality seemed really odd coming from a Commander frame of reference. It also seemed like the listers lost focus at times that I would not have expected. (I rarely use the mouse when I am working on file management duties)
I will test DO9, since I like to test good programs, but I don't know that I can pay more than the price of XYPlorer or TC just for an upgrade. In fact, I might just register XYplorer to support its development.
BTW, I still use Total Commander (registered many years ago), but I keep an eye on xplorer2 (registered), Salamander (registered), DO (8 registered), and XYplorer.
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My brief impressions of TC, and some of the odd feature requests from ex-TC users about what they'd like the mouse buttons to do in Opus, is that moving from it to any other program would be a bit weird in a few ways. Or maybe that's just a configuration thing (i.e. it allows you to make it weird but it also has the option of working the way most other Windows apps do) in which case that's fair enough.
Right, I've gotta get out of the house to go buy the new NIИ album that came out today (tomorrow in the USA) for £12. Despite buying his last five albums and turning a few dozen people on to his music, I don't get a free copy :(.
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Right, I've gotta get out of the house to go buy the new NIИ album that came out today (tomorrow in the USA) for £12. Despite buying his last five albums and turning a few dozen people on to his music, I don't get a free copy .
Cheeky monkey ;D
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Does anyone know if XYplorer can have a source code viewer with syntax highlighting like dopus (i.e., in the bottom half of the screen?). I find that really useful.
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Does anyone know if XYplorer can have a source code viewer with syntax highlighting like dopus (i.e., in the bottom half of the screen?). I find that really useful.
-urlwolf
Last time I checked it did not. ;)
I happily admit that there are one or two things that DOpus does and XY doesn't. And just like DOpus does not try to do everything that's possible (in XY), XY does not try to do everything that's possible (in DOpus). The power of a software (or any product) lies (also) in the difference from others. Clearly DOpus is in various ways bigger than XYplorer, and this size relation will stay like that very probably. If DOpus is Godzilla then XYplorer is T. Rex -- it always depends what suits you best for your current task. :)
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My brief impressions of TC, and some of the odd feature requests from ex-TC users about what they'd like the mouse buttons to do in Opus, is that moving from it to any other program would be a bit weird in a few ways. Or maybe that's just a configuration thing (i.e. it allows you to make it weird but it also has the option of working the way most other Windows apps do) in which case that's fair enough.
Right, I've gotta get out of the house to go buy the new NIИ album that came out today (tomorrow in the USA) for £12. Despite buying his last five albums and turning a few dozen people on to his music, I don't get a free copy :(.
-Nudel
Hehe... :-[ that would be me. I think that I'm the main one making the posts about what the button clicking should be like on the mouse. I did a particularly detailed post on the DOpus forum just recently. In my defense, it's not that I want the clicking to be like TC because I'm used to that. On the contrary, I'm used to DOpus and haven't used TC for 2 years now. But the mouse navigation on TC allowed faster navigation with fewer mistakes (as far as selecting things and drag & dropping). It's very subtle.
Anyway, I suggested it and got an email confirmation back from the Dr., but I don't know if it is being seriously considered.
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Are we there yet? Is it April 27th? Are we there yet? When will we get there? Is it April 27th yet...!? :wallbash:
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Right, I've gotta get out of the house to go buy the new NIИ album that came out today (tomorrow in the USA) for £12. Despite buying his last five albums and turning a few dozen people on to his music, I don't get a free copy :(.-Nudel
Hope it's not just an update of the previous album with a couple of new chords here and there then ;).
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Hope it's not just an update of the previous album with a couple of new chords here and there then ;).-Jibz
I bought all of his remix records, plus (two copies of) the remastered version of TDS, too. :-)
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When DC first offered Directory Opus with a 50% discount I was the first to warn that this product is very expensive when it comes to upgrade fees & the authors are very quick to take offense if anyone even begins to insinuate that they may be charging even a nickel too much for their program or its upgrades.
I won't fault Mr. Potter for his pricing tactics. The best way to become a success is to charge as much as the market will bear for your product & his market seems to be doing very well. It's just a little too expensive for my tastes is all. If he were head & shoulders above the competition it'd be an easier pill to swallow.
However, with viable (cheaper) alternatives out there such as Total Commander, Directory Opus becomes less of a must-have. If one works within archives a lot (7z, ARC, RAR, ISO, LHA, etc) then Total Commander totally obliterates Directory Opus. At least in that area anyway. Total Commander & Directory Opus have different design philosophies, though, so each has different sets of strengths and weaknesses.
For the money, dollar for dollar (or whatever your country's equivalent unit of measurement is) Total Commander is the better deal. For less than the cost of one version of Directory Opus, you get a lifetime license for Total Commander that entitles you to free upgrades forever. No one can say the author, Mr. Ghisler, is slacking off due to a lack of regular income, either. The new v7 that is in release candidate status right now is a hugely anticipated upgrade with tons of new features that has literally been years in the making. It, too, will be available free of charge to anyone who has ever bought a Total Commander license...even if you were one of the ones who bought a $10 v1 license way back in the day.
If one widens the scope from file managers, one could also look at the binary file usenet downloading program Newsbin Pro to see another very successful lifetime license story. Version 5 just came out a few months ago and it was totally rewritten from the ground up being optimized and tons of new features added. Again, this new version (and all future versions) are free to anyone who ever bought a Newsbin Pro license.
There are other examples, but I think my point has been made. Do not mistake this post as any indication I wish ill of Mr. Potter. Quite the contrary, I am one of his oldest fans. At the risk of making myself sound geezerly I'll say that I was a proud owner of Directory Opus v1 on the Amiga. Directory Opus was one of the best file managers on the Amiga & it is one of the best file managers on the PC.
Until the number of plugins reaches near the number that are available for Total Commander then Directory Opus is going to be extremely lacking in specific areas. I'm sure the plugins will come in time. Right now I'd settle for more archive file formats being supported.
Speaking of such, read-write capability for RAR files is something that just unfortunately is not going to happen for any file manager (at least not in a legal fashion). RAR's author/inventor will gladly license the read api, but staunchly refuses to let anyone besides himself market programs that can write RARs.
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Why would someone want to create RAR files? In my experience the majority of rar archives come from p2p sources and its the preferred format of the 'scene', but you hardly ever see it for mainstream downloads. The savings over free formats like zip/7zip are far outweighed by the universal zip support built into nearly every OS and utility on the planet. I can safely send zip content to anyone and be sure they'll be able to open it. </end off tangent rant>
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Hi Leo,
may i ask you here a question instead of the DO Forum?
Related to this posts :
http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?p=19878&sid=23be236653daf93fc4dab6c1e65e2654#19878
[...]
* USB key export is a separate Licence and EACH physical key requires a separate export Licence at AUD$10 each.
If you lose you USB key you will need to write us a pleading letter:)-greg GPSoftware
> If I upgrade my USB thumb drive from a 1gb to a 4gb [...], do I need to purchase a new USB license [...]-djeaton3162
> in this case you can re-use your licence.-greg GPSoftware
Now my question:
I don't understood > in this case you can re-use your licence.
So is this licence in any way ""hardware bundled"", i mean, can i us DOpus today on this USB device and tomorrow on an another...
.. or must i always eMail GPSoft to update the licence?
I think about buying DOpus but i use different USB-Sticks (some day an stick, but sometimes an little USB-Drive instead,... only used by me one after another)
Thank you if you can ask this for me.
.
---
Edit
FYI Leo,
Your link to the fully-featured text editor as seen at Getting to know Directory Opus (http://www.pretentiousname.com/opus/bf1.html#big) is not valid any more.
Did you have an other link please?
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MrCrispy,
Sure the zip format is convenient and widespread, but the choice of archive format goes beyond just compression. While RAR offers modestly better compression than ZIP the main reason I use it is far superior error-correction and repair capabilities if somewhere down the line my archive has become corrupted.
My rule of thumb is for quick and dirty packaging and emailing something ZIP is fine, but if I want something to stay in an archive an extended amount of time on my hard drive then I use the far more robust RAR format. I have lost some archives over the years to the ZIP format so I shy away from using it for long-term storage.
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Abterix,
I think what the Directory Opus web site is telling you is that if you lose your serial number that unlocks USB functionality in the program, be prepared to beg the authors for it to be re-issued to you. (Which doesn't make sense to me. As long as you can prove you purchased it I don't see why you would have to 'beg' for something you legally own).
Now if you have USB functionality & you were using it on a 1GB usb drive and later decided to buy a new 4GB (or whatever) usb drive you are within your rights to transfer the program from the old usb drive to the new one without having to re-purchase anything.
I'm going to be watching DO9 closely. The USB functionality & the clever ways of getting around UAC are exciting features. I can't wait for the 27th.
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[DonL]: If DOpus is Godzilla then XYplorer is T. Rex — it always depends what suits you best for your current task.
Oh man, that's the best quote I've seen in a long time. ha!! There are some categories that have a lot of good software choices, and this is definitely one of them. These two programs are distinguished, however. I've got to use that quote in future reviews from now on, thanks Don.
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Abterix,
I think what the Directory Opus web site is telling you is that if you lose your serial number that unlocks USB functionality in the program, be prepared to beg the authors for it to be re-issued to you. (Which doesn't make sense to me. As long as you can prove you purchased it I don't see why you would have to 'beg' for something you legally own).
-Innuendo
I don't think it was serious about begging. Note the little smily face. I thought it was common knowledge that the smilely implies joking after a statement like that.
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Abterix,
I think what the Directory Opus web site is telling you is
that if you lose your serial number that unlocks USB functionality in the program,
be prepared to beg the authors for it to be re-issued to you.
(Which doesn't make sense to me. As long as you can prove you purchased it
I don't see why you would have to 'beg' for something you legally own).-Innuendo
I don't think it was serious about begging. Note the little smily face.
I thought it was common knowledge that the smilely implies joking after a statement like that.-cthorpe
Thanks for the support.
My problem is not the 'beg' eMail.
I ask for the technically background how this USB-Licence is implemented.
Q: is the licence bundled with hardware related properties
like drive number of the file system or like this?
Or enables this USB-licence just the possibility to store the settings into the xml file?
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General Opus 9 news
- The Opus 9 manual in PDF format is available to download now to let people read it ahead of Friday's release:
http://www.gpsoft1.com/files/DOpus9ReferenceManual.pdf
- Greg @ GPSoft mentioned that there will be more features added in free updates after 9.0, for things that required large changes that there wasn't time for in the end (given that people need a Vista-compatible update yesterday already):
I dont know if this is already answered somewehere else but this is the official dopus 9 topic so:
Is the copy queue implemented in the new version ?-Delphier
No. We had this on the list but it involves a very deep fundamental design change so it did not make this version.
We have to draw the line somewhere with new versions and the Vista changes et al caused several delays.
But it and several other advanced features are planned for the next update in a few months (which currently is planned to be a maintenance 'update' not an upgrade and hence free of charge.)-Greg
- There's a new German translation of my Opus 9 intro (translated by Haage & Partner, GPSoft's distributors in Germany):
http://www.haage-partner.de/dopus/tutorial2/
Replies
Shout if I've missed something that needs a reply!
Q: is the licence bundled with hardware related properties
like drive number of the file system or like this?
Or enables this USB-licence just the possibility to store the settings into the xml file?-AbteriX
I'm still under NDA about Opus 9 and I'm not sure how much GPSoft would want me to say about how the licencing/copy protection stuff works but what I can say is that GPSoft have erred on the side of "not making life hell for paying customers" rather than "doing everything possible to thwart pirates". There's nothing to worry about in this area.
: If DOpus is Godzilla then XYplorer is T. Rex — it always depends what suits you best for your current task.-DonL
As we've seen, though, the memory usage of the two programs is very similar and nobody so far has mentioned a way in which Opus is slower than XY.
If it's significant that Opus uses a few meg more of HDD space then I must be living in a different era of computing to everyone else. :) Otherwise, I don't get the analogy. Which isn't to say that the two programs don't have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, I just don't see how Opus have a heavier footprint, beyond a few meg of disk space that nobody cares about in 2007.
but if I want something to stay in an archive an extended amount of time on my hard drive then I use the far more robust RAR format-Innuendo
The problem with RAR is that RARLabs do not licence the format, or a library, or the ability the call into WinRAR (if it's installed) via any kind of API. The only API they give anyone is unrar.dll which is what Opus already uses for read-only RAR support.
I believe TC creates RAR archives by calling WinRAR on the command-line and I'm thinking about writing an Opus plugin which works in the same way. Seems a giant pain in the arse, though, and I wish RARLabs would be more sensible about licensing their format/algorithm/API for use in other tools instead of the idea that anyone who wants to create a RAR should be forced to use WinRAR or FAR. :-( (WinRAR is fine by itself but the idea that you shouldn't be able to create a RAR in anything else is just silly.)
If there was a proper RAR API available to licence then Opus would already have read/write RAR support. I'm not really looking forward to the fun of generating command-lines and parsing the text output of another program, plus the potential issues with Unicode filenames etc., but if nobody else is going to write the plugin then I guess I'll have to. :-(
7zip etc. are still so rarely used that it doesn't seem a big deal to me that you can't browse them in Opus but, as I've said, I'll look at writing a 7zip plugin myself during my sabbatical from my day-job if nobody has written one by then. (A couple of people started writing plugins but haven't finished them yet.) Since 7zip provide a proper library it will be easy to make a read-write plugin.
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Quote from Nudel:
Quote from: DonL
: If DOpus is Godzilla then XYplorer is T. Rex — it always depends what suits you best for your current task.
As we've seen, though, the memory usage of the two programs is very similar and nobody so far has mentioned a way in which Opus is slower than XY.
If it's significant that Opus uses a few meg more of HDD space then I must be living in a different era of computing to everyone else. Otherwise, I don't get the analogy.
:D I took Don's analogy more in the spirit of XYplorer and DOpus are both at the top of the food chain in their respective niches and that he was basically saying "different horses for different courses". If he had likened DOpus to a Brontosaurus and XYplorer to T.Rex, then my readig would the same as yours...
Thanks for the link to the manual for DOpus 9 - I hadn't noticed that being available. And abterix, as to the licensing, I've never had a problem moving my DOpus' licences from machine to machine so imagine that doing the same with a USB licence will not present any issues, either.
Anyway, Nudel, nice to see you posting here, and in other threads. Welcome to donationcoder!
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:D I took Don's analogy more in the spirit of XYplorer and DOpus are both at the top of the food chain in their respective niches and that he was basically saying "different horses for different courses".-Darwin
That I can dig. Maybe I was being too defensive on Opus's behalf.
Thanks for the link to the manual for DOpus 9 - I hadn't noticed that being available.-Darwin
No problem! It only just got finished/released.
And abterix, as to the licensing, I've never had a problem moving my DOpus' licences from machine to machine so imagine that doing the same with a USB licence will not present any issues, either.-Darwin
Yup. By the way, when the USB mode was first being discussed in the closed betas I had the same worries/questions about how it would work. The way it works in the end is fine and shouldn't cause any problems at all.
Anyway, Nudel, nice to see you posting here, and in other threads. Welcome to donationcoder!-Darwin
Thanks! There's lots of interesting stuff being discussed here. :Thmbsup: I'm trying to ration my time spent venturing outside of this thread to the weekends to avoid not doing anything else but chatting here. :)
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Quote from Nudel:
I'm trying to ration my time spent venturing outside of this thread to the weekends to avoid not doing anything else but chatting here.
Sound thinking! I should probably try to do the same, but am hopelessly addicted to being here, even if I lurk most of the time.
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Thanks for the answers boys :-*
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All right. I am a patient man and with a five year old and a three year old, I need to be, but my patience is being tested. By my reckoning, it has been April 27th in Brisbane for at least eleven hours and yet I am still taunted by the flash animation on the DOpus website, coquettishly promising that that wait is just about over. Puhlease! HELLO! It's April 27th already. Do the calendars go backwards in Australia, too? Did I miss the 27th already?
Hysterical in Courtenay.
:wallbash:
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Welp, it's out.
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Yeah - I've downloaded it and busy backing up my system. Of course, it's now getting on for midnight here (west coast of Canada) so I don't know if I'll get it installed before bed or not... OK, I will. Just messing with you...
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HEHEH... I'm about to download it myself. I've already paid for my upgrade. Decided to go with a 2 license upgrade this time, $17 more.
By the way, the Donation Coder discount code still works!! (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2585.0)
Brings the price of a single license down to $64.00 AUD ($52.82 US)
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[nudel]: ...nobody so far has mentioned a way in which Opus is slower than XY.
________________________________________________
Except for XYplorer has advantages in:
- installation speed and ease
- (free) portability to any device
- quicker and vastly simpler customizations and program configurations
- easier to save and load your configurations, and backup options
- folder size calculations are done on the fly, in the background, and significantly faster than DOpus in large folders with lots of files (>10,000, for example)
- licensing and maintenance costs; also ONE (Lifetime) license and ONE download, along with the fact that XYplorer doesn't presume registered users to be thieves and pirates
- access to almost all of Windows System folders are all one click away
- XYplorer is anywhere from 5% to 8% of DOpus's total install size, depending on what various parts of DOpus you install or purchase, if you can keep up with all the options, that is
- a variety of configurably refresh options, from (superfast) thumbnails to network drives to file operations
- distinctly faster, more comprehensive, and easier to use search options
- renaming options for multiple files are one keyboard shortcut away
That's a start, at least. Download the latest beta; see first-hand! :Thmbsup:
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Any takers for the DOpus advantages short-list ?
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[nudel]: ...nobody so far has mentioned a way in which Opus is slower than XY.
________________________________________________
Except for XYplorer has advantages in:
- installation speed and ease
- (free) portability to any device
- quicker and vastly simpler customizations and program configurations
- easier to save and load your configurations, and backup options
- folder size calculations are done on the fly, in the background, and significantly faster than DOpus in large folders with lots of files (>10,000, for example)
- licensing and maintenance costs; also ONE (Lifetime) license and ONE download, along with the fact that XYplorer doesn't presume registered users to be thieves and pirates
- access to almost all of Windows System folders are all one click away
- XYplorer is anywhere from 5% to 8% of DOpus's total install size, depending on what various parts of DOpus you install or purchase, if you can keep up with all the options, that is
- a variety of configurably refresh options, from (superfast) thumbnails to network drives to file operations
- distinctly faster, more comprehensive, and easier to use search options
- renaming options for multiple files are one keyboard shortcut away
That's a start, at least. Download the latest beta; see first-hand! :Thmbsup:
-zridling
Most of which is irrelevant to the question I asked. Most of which is BS as I've already pointed out. I feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall here.
Any takers for the DOpus advantages short-list ?-tomos
Exactly! I don't have all day to list the things Opus does that XY (or anything else) doesn't. Like I said in my original, huge reply, programs don't follow each other down a linear path to "feature completness".
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Thanks for modifying your reply - disagreement isn't a problem but lets try and keep civil folks.
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I am luckily not the one who has been given the job of defending DO against zridling's nonsense, but I think I'd have a hard time keeping my reply to a post like the one above civil...
Installation speed? Give me a break!
XYPlorer doesn't do dual panes does it? End of story for me.
Does XYPlorer do FTP? If not, DO is way faster than XY when it comes to FTPing.
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Any takers for the DOpus advantages short-list ?
-tomos
Ooops,
I didn't mean to stir things up any more than already shaken/stirred
I did want to say,
but for some reason didn't in last post, was -
to be fair, while the DO developers may have an unhelpful approach at times towards liscencing/attitude towards the public at large, I dont think it's fair or helpful to say they "presume registered users to be thieves and pirates".
I was actually seriously interested in hearing the advantages of DOpus from someone who knows both programmes. (of course maybe I should just go back reread the thread :-\ )
I'll probably get the DO upgrade eventually (or sooner!) but I think it's about equal the cost of XY so...
But as Hirudin says without dualpane...
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I'll see if I can write up a list sometime during the weekend. I own licensed copies of both programs (+ Total Commander... yes, I'm a file manager addict :P) so it shouldn't be to much of a problem making a comparison.
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I'll see if I can write up a list sometime during the weekend. I own licensed copies of both programs (+ Total Commander... yes, I'm a file manager addict :P) so it shouldn't be to much of a problem making a comparison.
-Dirhael
I'm with you Dirhael. Hi my name is Nomadin and I am a file manager addict (FMA). I probably need FMAA. ;D It is really a sad affliction that ultimately costs me money, but none-the-less, I still enjoy playing with the programs. It goes way back to the Amiga days with the Amiga versions of Directory Opus.
I suspect that I will still register DO and it is possible that I will adopt it as my main manager. There is much to like and it is so tweakable. We shall see...
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My name is Mike and I am a File Manager Addict... I have licences for DOPus (9 now... the heart is willing but the flesh is weak), XYplorer and DiskJockey FileViewer Deluxe. I ALSO have licences for AccelMan and Frigate 3 courtesy of giveawayoftheday (http://www.giveawayoftheday.com). Of all of them, I only have DOpus and XYplorer installed at the moment as the others are not in the same class, IMNSHO. There is a lot to like in both of them... Unfortunately, I am really familiar with DOpus but have yet to seriously explore XYplorer (no pun intended!).
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I bought Disk Jockey two or three years ago based on a rabidly positive mention by John Dvorak - it was so buggy the developer agreed to refund my money. My feelings about the program were later confirmed in a PC Mag review.
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I bought Disk Jockey two or three years ago based on a rabidly positive mention by John Dvorak - it was so buggy the developer agreed to refund my money. My feelings about the program were later confirmed in a PC Mag review.-mrainey
Heh, heh... hence my no longer having it installed. I didn't find it buggy, but it's ROUGH and largely counter-intuitive. Support isn't great, either. Check out the discussion forum (http://www.clear-simple.com/cgi/bbs/bbs_forum.cgi?forum=open), which is hosted by the developer, and where the developer will go for up to six months without responding to queries. Having said that, when I've e-mailed support it was prompt enough. Still, I wish I'd had the wit to ask for a refund! I at one time thought I'd run it on my wife's machine and DOpus on my own. I wound up springing for a second Dopus licence - DOpus is that much better than DJDE.
On other fronts: it may just be me, but DOpus 9 seems much quicker than 8. Also, and I'm very pleased about this, they've cured an issue (http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=2711) that plagued DOpus 8 with more recent releases of the Stellent Viewers. Overall, very pleased with the update. I'm still not sure about the new icon set, but it's incredibly easy to switch to DOpus 8's icons if you're really not happy with them. The new ones are growing on me.
Edit: added link to DJDE discussion forum.
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P.S. That Dvorak review was what hooked me, too!
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On other fronts: it may just be me, but DOpus 9 seems much quicker than 8. Also, and I'm very pleased about this, they've cured an issue (http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=2711) that plagued DOpus 8 with more recent releases of the Stellent Viewers. Overall, very pleased with the update. I'm still not sure about the new icon set, but it's incredibly easy to switch to DOpus 8's icons if you're really not happy with them. The new ones are growing on me.-Darwin
I don't think that it is just you. I must say that I am pleased with the performance of the new version. I also like the improvements/streamlining of the configuration dialog. There are still a monumental number of settings, but it seems easier to navigate. The export/backup function for settings seems much cleaner too.
Now, if I can just figure out a way to maintain my backup system, I wll be set. I need to find a way to select a directory and have DO zip or RAR the directory, defaulting to the name of the directory and appending the date. So, if I am in c:\temp and I want to back up the temp directory, I would like to select it, press a hotkey (or use a context menu) and create an archive named "temp 20070427.zip". Near as I can tell, it is quite possible, but I am not sure how to do it yet.
So far I am having fun poking around with the new version.
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Now, if I can just figure out a way to maintain my backup system, I wll be set. I need to find a way to select a directory and have DO zip or RAR the directory, defaulting to the name of the directory and appending the date. So, if I am in c:\temp and I want to back up the temp directory, I would like to select it, press a hotkey (or use a context menu) and create an archive named "temp 20070427.zip". Near as I can tell, it is quite possible, but I am not sure how to do it yet.
-Nomadin
Ok, so this is an ugly hack... but here goes...
Create a batch file somewhere on your computer:
rename %1 %2
Then create a button:
Copy ZIP=single HERE
d:\applications\rename.bat {file}.zip {file}_{date|yyyyMMdd}.zip
Change D:\applications\rename.bat to point to wherever the batch file is located.
Carl
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So, does anyone know if we get a special discount here at DC for the upgrade, or if we can use the current discount code?
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AFAICT the current DC code will only give a 25% discount ie approx $AU21. If you already have a DO licence you can go to the DO website and claim the upgrade discount which is $AU30 for a single user.
BTW the $AU is starting to come back against the $US in the last day or so.
Jeff
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AFAICT the current DC code will only give a 25% discount ie approx $AU21. If you already have a DO licence you can go to the DO website and claim the upgrade discount which is $AU30 for a single user.
BTW the $AU is starting to come back against the $US in the last day or so.
Jeff
-JeffK
Aw, crap. I was kind of hoping there would be a DC discount in addition to the regular price of the upgrade (which i wouldn't really call a discount). Freakin A, $40 for an upgrade, now I know what everyone here was complaining about--it is a bit much.
Mouser, is there any way we can convince DO to let us use the 25% discount for the upgrade and maybe reduce the price to about $30?
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Yes. I was fortunate to buy DO8 for $AU47.30. The upgrade will cost me $AU55 atm. Given that I don't use it intensly I will probably wait for an opportunity to buy the upgrade cheaper.
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I definitely don't know, but I don't think there will be a way to combine a DC discount code with the upgrade. I don't think so because when you put in your old registration code it generates a discount code which is grayed out. Even if we could put in a different coupon code it would require removing the upgrade discount code... I don't know how hard it would be to put in another code box on the website though...
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I can confirm that one can't put both the upgrade discount code and the DC discount code in the box at the same time or one after another.
Jeff
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Well, maybe DO may be able to offer a special DC discount for upgrades if we ask them nicely?
I don't consider the upgrade discount a "discount" really. I'd just consider it the regular upgrade fee. Hopefully, we can get an additional special for being members of this fabulous community.
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I use ADS intensively to keep info of hundreds of movie clips (in mpg format). I try 3 programs, total commander 6.53, xPlorer2 V1.653 and DOpus V9 all offer the ability to add addtional columns: "Title", "Subject", "Author", "Category".
1) DOpus does not has the "Category" field.
2) TC and Xplorer2 display all the above 4 fields correctly but DOpus DOES NOT! (Those fields if added in DOpus as columns, they will simply be blank columns, nothing shown at all)
3) When copy/move a file with ADS info, xPlorer2 is able to copy the ADS stream along, for TC the ADS info is dropped... I have not tried this copy/move test with DOpus before I uninstall it, I am quite disapointed in DOpus, if it can't extract the ADS info, why put those fields there...??? Am I missing something?
Note:
I am using WinXP+Sp2, my ADS data has characters from multiple languages: English, Chinese simplified, Chinese Traditional and occasionally Japanese.
How good if I can have the flexibility + user friendly GUI + superior in handling ZIP/RAR of TC and the Decent power of xPlorer2 (especialluy in unicode and ADS handling) in a single program... sigh!
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I use ADS intensively to keep info of hundreds of movie clips (in mpg format). I try 3 programs, total commander 6.53, xPlorer2 V1.653 and DOpus V9 all offer the ability to add addtional columns: "Title", "Subject", "Author", "Category".
1) DOpus does not has the "Category" field.
2) TC and Xplorer2 display all the above 4 fields correctly but DOpus DOES NOT! (Those fields if added in DOpus as columns, they will simply be blank columns, nothing shown at all)
3) When copy/move a file with ADS info, xPlorer2 is able to copy the ADS stream along, for TC the ADS info is dropped... I have not tried this copy/move test with DOpus before I uninstall it, I am quite disapointed in DOpus, if it can't extract the ADS info, why put those fields there...??? Am I missing something?
-tslim
I use DOPUS 9 to move ADS information on files (not movies) basically so I cannot comment on the category field). I can confirm that DOPUS 9 or for that matter DOPUS 8 does move ADS properly when a file is moved.
In fact the way DOPUS is designed with customisability in mind, allows you to even copy information from a website and paste it into the ADS with a hot key.
I suggest that you post your concern in the very responsive http://resource.dopus.com/
I'm pretty sure you will get your question answered by one of the very helpful experts there.
I have on many occasions posted questions and gotten answers within hours of posting them or at worst, a couple of days.
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...
xPlorer2 V1.653 and DOpus V9 all offer the ability to add addtional columns: "Title", "Subject", "Author", "Category"
...
if added in DOpus as columns, they will simply be blank columns, nothing shown at all
...
if it can't extract the ADS info, why put those fields there...???
...-tslim
Sounds more like a bug or oversight than an intentionally missing feature.
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The "Title", "Subject", "Author", "Category" columns in Opus show the attributes from within Office documents.
They don't currently read the ADS attributes but if you send GPSoft a feature request I imagine they'll look at it as it makes sense to support them.
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I was quite excited when I found xPlorer2 (at least there exist such utility that) can displays those ADS values correctly in columns as well as move/copy these values along with the host file.
The author of xPlorer2 has put up a poll for user requested features, among which "search in ADS info" is one of them. I suppose only few of those features with highest #votes will be implemented in xPlorer2 Ver 1.7
My very BAD NEWS is, "Searching in ADS" feature get ZERO vote as of this writing... :(
And for TC, I read their forum and learn that TC 6.5x is not unicode ready and the author says it won't be so until (probably) Ver7.5
The funny thing is TC can "display" and "search" ADS info in multiple languages but it simply can't copy/move those values along with the host file...
I mean if it is not unicode ready, how come it can display file and folder names in multiple (more than 3 diff) languages at the sametime?
If TC can search in ADS info why can't it move/copy it with the host file....????
Btw, Nudel, thanks for your info.
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What is this ADS stuff I've heard so much about? Is it like ID3 tags for MP3s? But it's somehow not moved with the file?
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Heh, heh, I was wondering the same thing Hirudin!
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ADS is an NTFS file system feature.
ADS means "Alternate Data Stream" or like that.
This ADS are stored hidden on the disc.
The are accessible with "filename.ext:stream" , i saw a nice demo
Video: Tour of the Sysinternals Tools
Download: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx ===> http://www.solsem.com/videolibrary.html
The tool in question is an command line tool 'streams.exe' ==> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/Streams.mspx
of an sysinternals dvd about this issue.
The OS use this ADS e.g. to store the info from where a file is downloaded (internet, trusted zone,...)
I guess there must be an wiki entry about this... please wait an moment while i am on the search.... ahh yes ...>here< (http://www.wikistc.org/wiki/Alternate_data_streams) for example.
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Cool, thanks very much AbteriX!
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I would like to select it, press a hotkey (or use a context menu) and create an archive named "temp 20070427.zip".-Nomadin
An update (Opus 9.0.0.1) just came out which addresses this:
- The Copy ZIP and ADDTOZIP commands can now accept the CREATEFOLDER argument to specify the name of the destination Zip file
So you can use this to zip the selected folder into "temp <todaysdate>.zip" in the current folder:
Copy ZIP HERE CREATEFOLDER="temp {date|yyyyMMdd}"
Replace HERE with TO="C:\blah\blah" if you always want the result in a specific place, or leave that part out entirely for the result to end up in the destination pane/window.
Full list of changes here: http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?p=22588
Edit: I've posted an improved version of this button that automatically uses the selected file/folder's name instead of always using "temp". You can find it here: http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?p=22621
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I use ADS intensively to keep info of hundreds of movie clips (in mpg format).-tslim
Does anyone reading know how to set the ADS fields in Vista? I'm sure that in XP you could do it via the Properties dialog but on Vista the data seems to be read-only. Are Microsoft discouraging the use of the ADS fields themselves, or has the functionality been moved elsewhere?
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An update (Opus 9.0.0.1) just came out.
-Nudel
Strange - 'Check for updates' doesn't find this - do you have to manually download and install this update?
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An update (Opus 9.0.0.1) just came out.
-Nudel
Strange - 'Check for updates' doesn't find this - do you have to manually download and install this update?
-Carol Haynes
It's probably a manual download for now.
GPSoft usually put stuff on the automatic updater a little while after the release. I don't know if that's to spread out the server load or if it's to give a few early adopters a chance to spot problems before suggesting the update to everyone. (People who aren't enthusiastically checking the forums every day would probably be irritated if they kept being prompted to install minor updates that fix things they didn't care about. Lagging the automatic updates helps strike the balance between not making people install updates every day and being responsive to problems/requests that people bring up.)
Firefox updates seem to work the same way, FWIW. The auto-update usually lags behind the website by a few days in my experience.
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I would like to select it, press a hotkey (or use a context menu) and create an archive named "temp 20070427.zip".-Nomadin
An update (Opus 9.0.0.1) just came out which addresses this:
- The Copy ZIP and ADDTOZIP commands can now accept the CREATEFOLDER argument to specify the name of the destination Zip file
So you can use this to zip the selected folder into "temp <todaysdate>.zip" in the current folder:
Copy ZIP HERE CREATEFOLDER="temp {date|yyyyMMdd}"
-Nudel
Huzzah! I fought with Opus for hours when I first got version 8 to try to do this. Thanks for the heads up!
Carl
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Could this whole ADS not being copied business have anything to do with the following option in Opus?
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Could this whole ADS not being copied business have anything to do with the following option in Opus?-Hirudin
If you turn that on then Opus should copy them. It still won't (currently) display them in the corresponding columns (since they're for Office files only in Opus, unless ADS support was added and I forgot) but it won't lose them either.
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I have to say DOpus 9 is the best version ever, easily. The preferences have been cleaned up TREMENDOUSLY. For someone who spent quite a while in the preferences in v8 trying to figure shit out and just never knowing if I had everything set the way I liked it.. v9 is just beautiful. New icons everywhere, a far better structure with a tree on the left that auto-collapses as you move to a different section in the prefs (just like in UltraEdit) and overall better and clearer language. Also.. has anyone tried the filter search in the preferences? That's gotta be the best implementation of preferences filter search I've ever seen. It finds all instances of the word for you and even highlights it everywhere it appears with this read, semi-transparent box with round corners. It just kicks ass.
I had my doubts about DOpus this time around.. I loved v8 but just hated dealing with the million tons of clutter in the preferences that I found made it very hard to make the right choices in setting the Opus up the way you like. Now all that crap is gone and everything is cleaned up and beautiful. I'm very, very impressed. I have not even checked out all the sweet new features, hell I don't even know what's new anymore.. I'm just happy DOpus is kicking so much ass again. Seriously. I'm a licensed XPlorer2 customer too, but I always found XPlorer2 lacking somehow. I could never quite point my finger at what it was.. but I had this feeling. One thing that I never liked is how in the preferences, they'd say "you can tweak more stuff in this settings file". How user-friendly is that? I know only the most advanced of users would probably even consider looking in that config file.. but come on. If you're going to give me options, give them to me in an accessible way.
DOpus does this too, except in a much friendlier way. You can access a longish list of all sorts of additional settings, but that list is integrated into the preferences directly. You can view and edit it right there, which is just the way it should be.
So.. can anyone point out what you find to be the most notable changes from v8? I just installed it late last night and have had no chance to really check it all out.
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It's strange a 9.0.0.1 update was mentioned, yet when I check for updates in my 9.0.0.0 that I have installed, I'm told that I have the latest version running already.
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It's strange a 9.0.0.1 update was mentioned, yet when I check for updates in my 9.0.0.0 that I have installed, I'm told that I have the latest version running already.
-moerl
See a couple of posts back. The auto-updater is lagging behind what's available on the website (on purpose).
For a guide to the main new features in Opus 9, see my page: http://nudel.dopus.com/opus9/ (There are lots more changes in the Release Notes but that takes longer to read and isn't full of pretty pictures like my overview/guide is. :) )
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I had the same experience, but visited the gpsoft download (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/DScripts/Download.asp) page, downloaded and installed the update and all is well...
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Hi, i just transfer from xplorer2 to DOpus 9.0...wow that's certainly an upgrade worth my time... :Thmbsup:
Although the strength of DOpus is in its customisation, i am able to work very comfortablely with the default settings...
Just wondering if i mess up the settings or not, is it common for DOpus to exit after a certain time of inactivity?
As it exit by itself twice this morning....
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oh, also is there a way to only open one instances of itself???
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oh, also is there a way to only open one instances of itself???
-reko100
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
Those 2 options on the left combined with the highlighted option on the right might be enough for what you want.
So far as I know, Directory Opus doesn't have any kind of timeout or anything.
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Thank you...maybe i will go to the DOpus forum to find out more....
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Just wondering if i mess up the settings or not, is it common for DOpus to exit after a certain time of inactivity?
As it exit by itself twice this morning....-reko100
If something crashes then it might cause Opus to exit. Usually the culprits are shell extensions but it's quite rare. Another possible cause of unexpected exits is using a pirate version, but let's not go there. :)
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ok, I have reinstall DOpus and have not have an unrxpected exit for the past two hours...going to cross my fingers.. :P
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Opus 9.0.0.2 just got release with a few more fixes for issues that people raised in the support forum. Like 9.0.0.1 it probably won't be on the auto-updater (at least for a while). Here's the list of changes:
http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?p=23152
I wish I got support like this from some of the other products I've bought. :( Venturing out of the Opus forums to seek support for other software/hardware is a harsh reminder of how poor most support is. I feel lucky if someone even replies to my messages, let alone fixes/improves things in response, let alone after only a few days.
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Sad, but true, Leo. The good news is that DOpus support is so good! Thanks for the heads up about this one - I'm off to check it out!
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Hi all,
Just a note to let you all know that DOpus 9.0.0.3 is out (you have to download it manually from here (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/DScripts/download.asp) as the "check for latest version" link doesn't pick it up from the Help menu within the program).
Changes are listed here (http://www.gpsoft2.com/files/Opus9/Opus9ReleaseNotes.pdf) (pdf file).
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I bought the upgrade, and though it was a little more expensive than I would have liked, it's still a nice piece of software. I am saddened that I still cannot use it to replace Explorer on my 64-bit Vista PC. It works, but then things like the control panel icons (in regular explorer) disappear.
Unfortunately it seemed to be working great while I was testing it, and it does otherwise work well as an explorer replacement on my machine, but it breaks the control panel, Windows update, and probably any other 64-bit applications that are supposed to run through explorer.
I know 64-bit machines aren't supported by GPSoft, but I wonder how complicated it would be to bypass dopus altogether for the 64-bit components while still replacing explorer.
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broken85 - I have no experience with, and no access to, the 64-bit version of windows but have you tried playing with the Windows Explorer Replacement settings in DOpus? The setup in this screenshot should be the best of both worlds:
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
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I just got a upgrade quote from Dopus 8 to Dopus 9 and it's for Aust$50. That's a bit steep.
I might just give it a miss as I probably could live with existing functionality of Dopus 8.
On the other hand does anyone know if we donationcoders can get a discount for the upgrade ? That might change my mind.
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The donationcoder discount cannot be applied to the price of an upgrade, as far as I or anyone else in this thread could tell. There was some talk of an approach to GPSoft about the possibility of a Donationcoder discount to the upgrade but I don't think anything came of it.
FWIW patteo, I had initially decided against upgrading myself but did the day it came out and am glad I did. It's got a ton of great new features, is more responsive than 8, and overall it's just been "tweaked". Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure that this version is a MUST have upgrade over 8 but I suspect that 9.1 or 9.2 will as some features slated for 9 didn't make it in but have been promised for later builds. Note that the $10 AUS for a portable licence is worth it, in my opinion. It's awesome to be able to troubleshoot someone else's computer without having to fuss around with Windows Explorer.
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The donationcoder discount cannot be applied to the price of an upgrade, as far as I or anyone else in this thread could tell. There was some talk of an approach to GPSoft about the possibility of a Donationcoder discount to the upgrade but I don't think anything came of it.
FWIW patteo, I had initially decided against upgrading myself but did the day it came out and am glad I did. It's got a ton of great new features, is more responsive than 8, and overall it's just been "tweaked". Don't get me wrong, I'm not sure that this version is a MUST have upgrade over 8 but I suspect that 9.1 or 9.2 will as some features slated for 9 didn't make it in but have been promised for later builds. Note that the $10 AUS for a portable licence is worth it, in my opinion. It's awesome to be able to troubleshoot someone else's computer without having to fuss around with Windows Explorer.
-Darwin
Hmm, I wonder if our Discount Coordinator cthorpe would have sufficient persuasive powers with GPsoft.
I'm one of those who would probably have given Dopus a miss if not for the donationcoder forum. I did look at it in a much earlier version but just kind of winged it without looking at it much deeper until I followed the discussion at Donationcoder.
Perhaps there are many others here like me.
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I'm one of those who would probably have given Dopus a miss if not for the donationcoder forum-patteo
I've already purchased the upgrade, so a new discount would not apply to me, but I'm also someone who would not be a DOpus customer if it weren't for DC. Hopefully, GPSoft will recognize the value of DC.
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I love DO version 9. I have tried all the file manager out there. AB Commander, FolderBox, PowerDesk, Total Commander, Universal Explorer, WinNc.Net and xplorer2. DO has beaten them all in my humble opinion. The only negative that I have is DO feels bloated when compared to xplorer2.
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Here's a lil' personal experience I had with DO recently...
I wanted to be able to copy the path for a file to the clipboard with little fuss. I searched Google for a while, there were lots of little programs out there, some of which the authors actually wanted money for(!). I downloaded a few, but I never actually installed any when I realized DO would probably do exactly what I needed. I little Google searching later I found this tutorial (http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=223) Nudel (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=79083) made...
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here's a "Button" for DO8 -
Left click: Copies full path names of selected file(s)
Right click: Copies names of selected file(s)
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<button display="label" effect="saturate" min_width="yes" type="three_button">
<guid>{2B47C5A8-F9FE-4E2B-A7A0-C777A25AB839}</guid>
<label>path</label>
<icon1>10</icon1>
<button display="label" effect="gray" label_pos="bottom" separate="yes">
<guid>{F5EA265F-4D8B-41FB-9C85-9E819C68122C}</guid>
<tip>Copies the full pathnames of all selected files</tip>
<icon1>84</icon1>
<function type="normal">
<instruction>Clipboard COPYNAMES</instruction>
</function>
</button>
<button display="label" effect="gray" label_pos="bottom">
<guid>{7FD5D71A-AFD9-486C-85B9-BA1D56D6AC4E}</guid>
<tip>Copies the names of all selected files to the clipboard</tip>
<icon1>84</icon1>
<function type="normal">
<instruction>Clipboard COPYNAMES=nopaths </instruction>
</function>
</button>
</button>
You may want to tweak it a bit for icon etc.
In case:- to add to toolbar -
right click toolbar > customise
right click toolbar again > paste
right click button to edit
Dont know where I picked that up - definitely from or with help of the DO forums :)
http://resource.dopus.com
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The only negative that I have is DO feels bloated when compared to xplorer2.-barfarf
In what way?
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So, it looks like there will be no upgrade discount for DC members, right?
An alternative is to hold off for a while with v 8 and then move to 9 whenever there's a discount available.
In fact, d 9 has crashed more than 8 for me.
I have 20 days left on my trial license. Will keep it till the end, and then make a decision.
I don't think 9 is any faster than 8 btw.
And 9 hosed the tags of some music files (Warning: if you use foobar, Dopus will show tags all wrong, and you may even save them -they look like ????????). No fix seems to be coming out, since DO blames foobar and viceversa.
RE: support: well, the last question I asked (support ticket) was never answered (it's been days). It was about this foobar issue, and also how to "revert" to 8.
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So, it looks like there will be no upgrade discount for DC members, right?-urlwolf
Looks that way, AFAIK.
An alternative is to hold off for a while with v 8 and then move to 9 whenever there's a discount available.
Has there been any indication that there will be an upgrade discount (beyond the existing one) in the future? There were some christmas sales for 6 and 8 I think but I can't remember if they included updates or not. May have done but I'm unsure.
In fact, d 9 has crashed more than 8 for me.
Have you reported the crashes or worked out why?
I don't think 9 is any faster than 8 btw.
Some parts of it are faster, like list drawing/scrolling and duplicate file finding. Overall most of the program isn't that much faster but 8 was never really slow IMO anyway. Most of the time you're waiting for the OS to read files off the disk as in any other file manager.
And 9 hosed the tags of some music files (Warning: if you use foobar, Dopus will show tags all wrong, and you may even save them -they look like ????????).
Opus 9 hasn't hosed your tags or modified your files at all, has it? It just doesn't understand Foobar's tag format when Foobar is used in certain ways. (I use Foobar as well and haven't had any problems but I don't use the ReplayGain part of Foobar.) Jon mentioned that the MP3 plugin needed updating to cope with this but it hasn't been done yet as other things have taken a priority.
No fix seems to be coming out, since DO blames foobar and viceversa.
AFAIK nobody from GPSoft has blamed Foobar; that was someone on the forums blaming Foobar. The issue is that Foobar, when you do certain things with it, writes Unicode tags in a way which the Opus MP3 plugin doesn't currently understand.
RE: support: well, the last question I asked (support ticket) was never answered (it's been days). It was about this foobar issue, and also how to "revert" to 8.
Don't know if you've noticed but the forums have been ridiculously busy since Opus 9 came out and I imagine the official support channel has as well. If you let me know what the issue was about I will chase it up for you but it's probably just because everyone is very busy dealing with all the feedback/help/reports right now.
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The only negative that I have is DO feels bloated when compared to xplorer2.
-barfarf
I own DirOpus 8 but I'll be going back to xplorer2 next week when I load Vista. $42 to upgrade is just too steep for me.
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OK here goes a third attempt at posting this (keep's timing out): just to note, there have been seven updates to DOpus 9 (9.0.0.1 through 9.0.0.6) since it shipped on April 27. Impressive for a two man development team that is also active on the users' forum. Take a look at the version history (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/DScripts/download.asp?file=Opus9/Opus9ReleaseNotes.pdf) to see what they've been working on. I've no doubt that if the Foobar tagging issue can be solved from the GPSoft end, it will be.
The number of updates indicate to me that the team is very concerned about making sure that DOpus is a top-notch File Manager.
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There's now a "pre-release" version of a new MP3 plugin which should fix the Foobar/ReplayGain tag issues and some other Unicode problems. You can get it from here:
http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=5530
If you find any problems with the plugin report them to GPSoft or the Opus Resource Centre. Remember it's a pre-release version for people to test and not guaranteed to be perfect yet.
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Thanks nudel - checking it out now.
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JFY, I got an answer today about the foobar tagging issue.
DO will not hose your tag straight away but if you alter anyone and hit save, all your tags become ???????.
That was before they released the fix for the mp3 viewer.
I'm glad to say that everything works now.
Thanks to anyone involved in testing/fixing this. (Nudel?)
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Damn, It forgot that I had ogg and flac associated to the viewer too.
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The fixed MP3 viewer, plus a bunch of new features and bug fixes, are part of the new 9.0.0.7 release of Opus. Here's the full list of changes:
http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=5796
(Comments are re-enabled on my blog. I apologize. I was getting so many porn/spam comments that I shut it down for a long time and forgot to turn them back on. Just deleted over 9,000 this week alone!)-zridling
Seems it still does that thing where it makes it look like someone's comment has been accepted and posted when it hasn't, by using a cookie. It's your blog so you can moderate the comments how you like and throw away critical posts if that's how you want things, but making it look to people like they have commented when it's gone into a black hole is a bit lame if you ask me:
http://www.pretentiousname.com/temp/fakecomments.png
Left browser posted the comment 11 days ago and still has the cookie. The right browser doesn't have the cookie.
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Something really strange happened to the colors in my DO9. Suddenly, all files and folders had turqouise backgrounds and pink letters. I didn't set it up that way and had to manually mess with changing colors in the settings. Quite the pain.. I was looking for an option to revert settings to default in the prefs and could not find that. Is there a way to do that?
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turqouise backgrounds and pink letters
-moerl
:D :D :D :D :D :D :D
sorry... pretty funny bug. Can't help you though.
Darwin?
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Something really strange happened to the colors in my DO9. Suddenly, all files and folders had turqouise backgrounds and pink letters. I didn't set it up that way and had to manually mess with changing colors in the settings. Quite the pain.. I was looking for an option to revert settings to default in the prefs and could not find that. Is there a way to do that?
-moerl
I made a theme with the default color scheme. Just unzip it, import it into DO, and apply it. It should only change the color scheme, and not mess with anything else.
Get it here: http://www.carlthorpe.com/defaultcolors.zip
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Something really strange happened to the colors in my DO9. Suddenly, all files and folders had turqouise backgrounds and pink letters. I didn't set it up that way and had to manually mess with changing colors in the settings. Quite the pain.. I was looking for an option to revert settings to default in the prefs and could not find that. Is there a way to do that?
-moerl
Open up Properties for dopus.exe. Is it digitally signed by GPSoftware?
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Something really strange happened to the colors in my DO9. Suddenly, all files and folders had turqouise backgrounds and pink letters. I didn't set it up that way and had to manually mess with changing colors in the settings. Quite the pain.. I was looking for an option to revert settings to default in the prefs and could not find that. Is there a way to do that?
-moerl
Open up Properties for dopus.exe. Is it digitally signed by GPSoftware?
-Nudel
I'm at work now, but will check when I get home.
And thank you, cthorpe! Much appreciated :)
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Open up Properties for dopus.exe. Is it digitally signed by GPSoftware?
-Nudel
I'm at work now, but will check when I get home.
-moerl
Dude, you work long hours. :)
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Open up Properties for dopus.exe. Is it digitally signed by GPSoftware?
-Nudel
I'm at work now, but will check when I get home.
-moerl
Dude, you work long hours. :)
-Nudel
lol.. damn! Totally forgot about this thread! I'm at work again now and have a lot of crap on my mind until Monday (I go home for two weeks to Europe!) so I guess that's why. Hopefully I'll remember tonight.
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Directory Opus 9.1 (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/) has been released, now in two separate flavours - 32 bit and 64 bit. Full details here (http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=6960). Main changes are:
An update for Directory Opus is now available for download from the GP Software website.
Directory Opus 9.1 6th December 2007
New Features
Full 64-bit (x64) support
Directory Opus now comes in two separate versions– the classic, 32-bit x86 version for 32-bit versions of Windows, and the new x64 version for 64-bit versions of Windows.
Apart from being a native 64-bit application, there should be little or no difference between the two versions - all of the significant issues encountered when running the 32-bit version on an x64 OS should now be resolved.
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Note that on my XP Pro Sp-2 system DOpus 9.1 rendered my system VERY unstable on initial reboot and I had to kill both processes (dopus.exe and dopusrt.exe) via taskmanager and restart it to use it. Haven't done another reboot yet to see if this was just an anomaly but will do so now and report back.
UPDATE: All's well now... I'd be interested in knowing if anyone else experiences this, though.
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No problems here. It runs smoothly.
Dopus 9.1
XP Pro SP2
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Great! The small part of the change log that I pasted in above really doesn't do justice to the details that have been tweaked. I'm playing with it as well, and it's as smooth as silk on my system as well :Thmbsup:
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Fantastic! Always glad to see an app move to 64-bit, as long as it doesn't increase in size sevenfold.
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Well... there are two installers, and the one for the 64-bit version (22MB) is 33% bigger than 32-bit version (14.8MB) :o So the size hasn't even doubled :Thmbsup:
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Far be it for me to bring this up since i happen to think Directory Opus is an outstanding program.
Butdo we need to have some kind of informal understanding about when it's appropriate to post about a new release of a program? I ask only because i'm slightly concerned that everyone is going to have their own favorite programs (and authors have their own programs) and they might feel like they want to post every time their is a new release.
I guess my first instinct is that we should discourage a new thread being started each time a new release of a program comes out.. If there is something important about it, or if it's a major new exciting release of an important program, etc. then that's a different matter.
Just my 2 cents, nothing more.
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Fair comment and it took me a moment to remember why I posted this here, in its own thread rather than in the Directory Opus 9 (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8056.0) thread... (full 64-bit support). However, given that other thread runs to seven pages, I suppose I should have posted it there. Point taken, mouser ;)
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PS Perhaps this thread should be migrated to the Directory Opus 9 thread (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8056.0) I referenced above?
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merging this thread with another below..
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Thanks mouser :Thmbsup:
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Well... there are two installers, and the one for the 64-bit version (22MB) is 33% bigger than 32-bit version (14.8MB) :o So the size hasn't even doubled :Thmbsup:
-Darwin
The 64-bit installer is bigger because it contains both the 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. This is so people can export the 32-bit version to a USB stick if they want to (since that's probably more useful than a 64-bit export, but you get the choice of either).
That said, the 64-bit binaries are slightly larger than the 32-bit binaries as well. That's just what happens when all the pointers double in size, I guess. (Bit like we pay for Unicode apps with slightly larger binaries as well.) I guess that anyone with enough RAM to warrant running 64-bit Windows isn' going to care about the difference anyway.
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Two humble questions from an avowed Total Commander-er...
1. Does DOpus have anything like Total Commander's command line? I use it all the time, and in DOpus I've only been able to find the "CLI" window, which only seems to process commands internal to DOPus.
2. How can I configure DOPus to give me the equivalent Total Commander's F3=View (i.e. what TC calls lister)? I see there is a viewer, but it always opens in the embedded pane, while I want a separate window, and need to be able to view more than one file at a time. I suppose I could drag the viewer pane to undock it, but that's too much work :)
(TC does nearly everything I need, but I'd like to explore DOPus and I envy the "virtual folders" and the breadcrumbs features, so I was thinking I could buy DOPus and use it for some specific operations. But without a command line and without a superfast View that works *exactly* like TC or better, I wouldn't really be able to use it much.)
.marek
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1. Does DOpus have anything like Total Commander's command line? I use it all the time, and in DOpus I've only been able to find the "CLI" window, which only seems to process commands internal to DOPus.-tranglos
Type a > character and the Find-As-You-Type field that appears at the bottom of the window will turn into a Command field where you can run any internal Opus command.
Type a ? character and you can run any MS-DOS command.
There are also keys to insert the current filename into the command field, and it can also be used to filter or search for files by name/wildcard. See the Navigation by Keys section of the manual for full details.
2. How can I configure DOPus to give me the equivalent Total Commander's F3=View (i.e. what TC calls lister)? I see there is a viewer, but it always opens in the embedded pane, while I want a separate window, and need to be able to view more than one file at a time. I suppose I could drag the viewer pane to undock it, but that's too much work :)
Go to Tools -> Customize -> Keys and edit the F3 hotkey (or define a new one if there isn't one already) to run the Show command.
If you haven't already, check out the forums, guides and add-ons at http://resource.dopus.com/
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Go to Tools -> Customize -> Keys and edit the F3 hotkey (or define a new one if there isn't one already) to run the Show command.
-Nudel
Oh-my-God, I've just seen the hotkey customization dialog in DOpus! :) The ability to assign a sequence of commands is awesome.
Thanks a lot, Nudel!
.marek
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The multiview plugin for Dopus (which allows you to use Stellent viewers to preview files in the viewer) was broken in 9.1. You can download a fix from the link below. As noted in nudel's post accompanying the fix, this will ship with the next update.
http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?p=33841
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Just an update to the above - the multiview bug only shipped in the first couple of days following Dopus 9.1's release, so check out whether or not your installation is functioning correctly before downloading and installing the updated plugin (ie if Multiview is functioning as expected, ignore the above!).
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Thanks, Darwin. The viewer seems to be working fine, though of course I don't know what to expect as correct behavior. The only thing that's bugging me is that for some document types (when the viewer is embedding an ActiveX control, I guess), the viewer window cannot be closed by hitting Esc.
Plus, I can only open one viewer pane at a time. When trying to view another document, the existing viewer window is reused. I'm not happy about this, since in TC I often work with multiple viewers open.
Also, the viewer in TC lets me switch between viewing modes live (ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, Hex, etc), with a single keypress. The reason this is important is that sometimes I want to view html files rendered, but other times (more often) I want to view the source. Or try various encodings, to see which one works. I can't find a comparable feature in DOpus viewer (except View As Hex).
In general, DOpus doesn't seem too friendly to keyboard-only navigation. In fact, this was what caused me to uninstall DOpus when I first tried it some months ago). Navigation in DOpus is pretty much the same as in Windows Explorer. Note what happens, for instance, when you press Enter on a folder. The subfolder opens, with the first folder focused but not selected. If you press Enter now, nothing happens. If you press down arrow, DOpus will select the *second* subfolder, probably not what you want. To descend into the first subfolder, you have to press up arrow first. This could be easily fixed in the program, apparently the author just didn't care and users aren't bothered by this. I'm also missing the ".." entry in folder list for going up in a folder tree. Yes, I can see the up arrow above the list, but it's too tiny for fast clicking. I use Backspace instead, but Enter in TC is much nicer: press Enter once to go into a subfolder, press Enter again to go up.
Small things, admittedly, but they slow me down and in general this is how I tell a program is not for me.
(On edit: I've found "Automatically select first file in folder", which helps a little.)
Then again, if a program has been in development for years, is at version 9+ and has a huge user base, I guess I'm not a target user. I get that a lot recently, e.g. with UltraEdit, which has like a million registered users, who apparently don't mind all the usability annoyances, big and small, I have found in 30 minutes of playing with it. Sometimes I want to start a movement to donate a copy of Alan Cooper's "About Face" or Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers" to all our favorite shareware authors, because many of them should really read those, for our benefit :)
marek
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marek, I have the same complaints as you do. On my end, I was very particular about TC's excellent mouse navigation features. I wrote several long threads about the subtleties of why it was good in the DOpus forums, but it seemed like nobody else was interested.
It's difficult to convince people to make these little changes that are seemingly insignificant, but actually make the user experience so much better. It's even hard to describe because it's borderline miniscule...like in your example above, you're explaining pressing the down arrow and enter, etc...most people are probably thinking "So, what's the big deal?" It's frustrating.
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This won't help you, really, Marek and Superboyac, but you can cycle through the viewer filters via the context menu when you initiate it from the viewer itself.
I just counted the number of file managers that I have installed with licences... 11 (12 if you include NT 4's File Manager with Winability FMStepUp and Wincorner's FMView 2 installed - this is a KILLING setup, actually). I keep finding little things about all of them that I love. Have to be honest, though, DOpus reigns supreme for me WRT GUI, ease of use, etc. This could be familiarity more than anything else, but there it is...
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[OT]As an aside... I love TC! However, I do find it counter-intuitive NOT to have a context menu at all. This, no doubt, is something that I just need to get used to. That said, I love the keyboard navigation features.
I'm in the minority, it seems, in finding TC's GUI quite attractive, though its masked on my system at the moment because I've installed TC Ultra Prime on top of it.[/OT]
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Darwin, you're crazy! 12 file managers?! Wow. If you actually use them all, I'm even more impressed!
As for TC, it does have a context menu...you have to press and hold the right mouse button. I actually prefer TC's mouse controls over DOpus. It's one of the few features I can tweak just right on DOpus, otherwise, Dopus is definitely the best of the bunch.
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Yeah, well... I have an obsession! I keep buying the damn things! Anyway, I do use them all, but more or less to learn them and their ins and outs. Of course, I don't have time to do this properly so there are major gaps in my knowledge (you know, simple things, like how to bring up a context menu in TC (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/esmileys/gen3/1Small/gwizd.gif)).
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The only thing that's bugging me is that for some document types (when the viewer is embedding an ActiveX control, I guess), the viewer window cannot be closed by hitting Esc.-tranglos
You mean the separate viewer window, right? (Not the similar "preview pane" that is joined to the file display. Esc only closes the window not the pane, so I assume you're talking about the window but correct me if I'm wrong.)
I am in the process of re-writing the Opus ActiveX plugin so I'll see if I can make Esc close the viewer window. To be honest I had never thought of that before since I almost never view that kind of document in the viewer window. (In the preview panel I view them a lot, but if I double-click them they open in Word or Firefox themselves rather than an Opus viewer window. Personally, I only really use the viewer window for pictures.)
Plus, I can only open one viewer pane at a time. When trying to view another document, the existing viewer window is reused. I'm not happy about this, since in TC I often work with multiple viewers open.
Hmm, now I think you're talking about the preview pane since you can definitely open more than one viewer window in Opus. Select a file and use File->File Commands->Show Pictures to open the file in a viewer window. Do it to another file and you'll get a second viewer window. Of course, if you use it a lot you can move the command to somewhere more convenient (e.g. a toolbar) and/or give it a hotkey. (And maybe rename it since "Show Pictures" doesn't really do the viewer justice, hehe.)
Also, the viewer in TC lets me switch between viewing modes live (ANSI, OEM, Unicode, UTF-8, Hex, etc), with a single keypress. The reason this is important is that sometimes I want to view html files rendered, but other times (more often) I want to view the source. Or try various encodings, to see which one works. I can't find a comparable feature in DOpus viewer (except View As Hex).
If you want the Text plugin to let you switch encodings you should send GPSoft a feature request since that's one of their ones.
To view an HTML file as text you could make a button/hotkey which runs Show PLUGIN=Text although that will open a new viewer rather than switch the format of an existing one. You can change the format of an existing one using the menus, which allow you to tell it to use a different plugin, but it takes several clicks and probably isn't that useful if you want something you can click to quickly flick between things.
I guess I could add something to the ActiveX plugin to allow you to toggle between IE and a text display of HTML files. Should be fairly easy, thinking about it. I'll add that to my list. I'd find that useful myself now that you mention it.
In general, DOpus doesn't seem too friendly to keyboard-only navigation.
I don't use the keyboard much myself so I'm not in a position to disagree but you can put just about any command on hotkeys, as well as make hotkeys which jump the focus to certain parts of the window (e.g. left tree, or filter edit box, or whatever). I know there are one or two things that need fixing, like how you can open the Find panel with a hotkey but have to use the mouse to close it, but I think Opus is pretty keyboard-friendly, at least if you configure some hotkeys to do what you want.
The subfolder opens, with the first folder focused but not selected. If you press Enter now, nothing happens. If you press down arrow, DOpus will select the *second* subfolder, probably not what you want. To descend into the first subfolder, you have to press up arrow first. This could be easily fixed in the program, apparently the author just didn't care and users aren't bothered by this.
You've found the option to stop this happening so I guess it's not so important, but when you push Return it's the same as double-clicking all selected files. If no files are selected then nothing happens. As well as pushing Up you can push Space to select the file with the keyboard focus.
Having said that, it probably would make sense to have a special case where if return is pushed and nothing is selected then the file/dir with the keyboard focus gets "double-clicked". I'll send in a feature request along those lines.
I'm also missing the ".." entry in folder list for going up in a folder tree. Yes, I can see the up arrow above the list, but it's too tiny for fast clicking.
You could make two full-sized toolbar buttons which go up in the left and right sides if you just want a bigger target to click on. (There's already a toolbar button which goes up in the active side, of course.)
I use Backspace instead, but Enter in TC is much nicer: press Enter once to go into a subfolder, press Enter again to go up.
This, combined with your complained above about having to push an extra arrow key to select the folder you want to enter, seems more like you're just used to exactly how TC works and want Opus to be the same, even if it doesn't make a lot of difference.
In TC if you want to enter the first folder then you have to push down-arrow to skip over the ".." item, so it's as many keypresses as in Opus without the "automatically select first folder" option, and one extra keypress than in Opus with the option on.
If you've just entered a folder by pushing return and then want to go up, you only have to move your finger one key to the backspace key, and I'd say there is value in having one key which always goes up (Backspace) and another key which always goes down (Return).
Then again, if a program has been in development for years, is at version 9+ and has a huge user base, I guess I'm not a target user. I get that a lot recently, e.g. with UltraEdit, which has like a million registered users, who apparently don't mind all the usability annoyances, big and small, I have found in 30 minutes of playing with it.
You seem to be assuming that the little things that bug you a lot are shared by everyone else? Maybe nobody, or very few people, have noticed and commented on them before, but if you mention them to GPSoftware they'll tweak things? I can't tell you how many good ideas come from people which nobody has thought of or mentioned in the past, even when it's at version 9, and often people are amazed that they're the first to mention them.
Of course, some ideas take more convincing than others, but sometimes if someone mentions something it's an instant "yeah; never thought of that or used the program that way before, but they've got a point and it doesn't break anything else so let's do it" moment.
Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers" to all our favorite shareware authors, because many of them should really read those, for our benefit :)
Joel is strange for me. I seem to strongly agree with half of what he says and strongly disagree with the other half, with no middle ground. :)
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Thanks for the response with pointers, nudel. Always great to see you around here :Thmbsup:
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who apparently don't mind all the usability annoyances, big and small, I have found in 30 minutes of playing with it.
Specifics?
One of the nicest things about UltraEdit is its customizability. There are probably a few too many options and workarounds to learn about in thirty minutes.
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who apparently don't mind all the usability annoyances, big and small, I have found in 30 minutes of playing with it.
Specifics?
One of the nicest things about UltraEdit is its customizability. There are probably a few too many options and workarounds to learn about in thirty minutes.
-mrainey
If you have the new version (13.20, with or without the latest hotfix), try opening any file in UltraEdit, then minimize the editor, and see if you like what you see :) If you don't catch on immediately, with UE still minimized to the taskbar (not the tray) press Ctrl+F, or whatever shortcut you've assigned to Search -> Find. Yes, it's totally broken, and yes, I've reported the bug, and yes, the developers have confirmed it. I'm just surprised it took a trial user to report a bug that happens to be quite bothersome (esp. when you switch applications often). Meaning, I hope everyone else didn't think it was a cool new UltraEdit feature :)
Or in any version, double-click empty area where the file tabs are. That I guess is not a bug, since it's been like that forever, it's just weird and doesn't seem to serve a purpose.
I'll post some of my favorite UE annoyances, since it looks like I'll be buying it out of necessity anyway. That'll be a spearate thread, and tomorrow, since it's past 2 a.m. where I a.m.
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You mean the separate viewer window, right? (Not the similar "preview pane" that is joined to the file display. Esc only closes the window not the pane, so I assume you're talking about the window but correct me if I'm wrong.)
-Nudel
I mean the separate window, yes.
(In the preview panel I view them a lot, but if I double-click them they open in Word or Firefox themselves rather than an Opus viewer window. Personally, I only really use the viewer window for pictures.)
-Nudel
See, this is where one gets a very different experience depending on the particulars of the tasks one performs. EmEditor - a fantastically configurable editor, and practically the only editor for Windows that handles *all* Unicode files correctly and reliably all the time - does not have a "replace in all open documents" feature. It's a mature product, so apparently no-one has requested it much. Myself, I need this function a few times every day, sometimes many times an hour, when working for a particular client. Sometimes "Replace in files" can substitute, other times it cannot, because I need to see and double-check the results immediately, lest I do something stupid that will corrupt the files. So I need to run another editor side-by-side, because it's missing one simple feature, while thousands of other people never notice that it's missing.
But back to the viewer...
I use TC's viewer all the time, and almost never to view pictures :) Most often I use it in conjunction with the search feature, to view all kinds of documents, usually in some dense xml-based format, to look up various things. Often there is no application associated with a filetype, or opening the file in the application would take a long time (the files can be quite large), or I'm searching for stuff in hundreds of files at a time, which no GUI text editor will handle comfortably, *or* the application associated with the files is itself slow, awkward to use and/or has a much inferior search functionality. (I'm talking about various "trade" applications used in software localization; you'd think they'd all have excellent search built in, since it's almost their whole purpose in life - I certainly thought so once :) Sometimes the associated application is designed to hide things from me, like XML tags, that I need to be able to see - a frequent case where programmers wrote software for translators seemingly without ever having consulted one.
Hmm, now I think you're talking about the preview pane since you can definitely open more than one viewer window in Opus. Select a file and use File->File Commands->Show Pictures to open the file in a viewer window. Do it to another file and you'll get a second viewer window.
Interesting. This is just what I do, and I always get a single viewer window. I assigned F3 to "View file" command. Select a file, press F3, get a separate viewer window. Without closing it, switch back to DOpus, press F3 on a different file -> the new file replaces the previous one in the same, single viewer window. (Not the internal pane.)
Another thing I've noticed:
I tried to view a PDF file. The viewer window opens empty, then Acrobat Reader opens with the document, but mostly covered by the blank viewer window.
Then I viewed an HTML file, saved from the browser. The file has a BASE HREF tag in it, so the embedded browser connects out to the site. I don't know what went wrong there, but all I got was a blank page, with no content at all, and the viewer wouldn't respond to clicking the close button for a few seconds. (I guess it was hanging there waiting for the remote server.) This is my main issue with viewers that invoke or embed handler applications instead of just showing the file contents: you get nothing if the application is unable to render the document. Try opening a badly formed XML file in IE - all you'll see is an error message. Not good. I need a viewer that will let me see the actual content, so I can still do whatever I need to do.
To view an HTML file as text you could make a button/hotkey which runs Show PLUGIN=Text
That's exactly what I need. Thanks!
(I must say DOpus has an excellent trial policy, the best I've seen, except for infinite trials, which are mostly a thing of the past. The 60-day extension will be immensely useful, because there are plenty of things I like in DOpus and want to keep trying it out, but it does take time.)
I'm also missing the ".." entry in folder list for going up in a folder tree. Yes, I can see the up arrow above the list, but it's too tiny for fast clicking.
You could make two full-sized toolbar buttons which go up in the left and right sides if you just want a bigger target to click on. (There's already a toolbar button which goes up in the active side, of course.)
I haven't figured out yet how to make separate toolbars for the left and right lister; I'd love to have two drive bars, one for each side (it's faster than having to click a lister first, then pick a drive). It looks like you've just hinted this can be done, so I'll go digging.
This, combined with your complained above about having to push an extra arrow key to select the folder you want to enter, seems more like you're just used to exactly how TC works and want Opus to be the same, even if it doesn't make a lot of difference.
I will grant that, and still point out that I'm mostly flagging the things that slow me down. Naturally, there's a lot I have to find out about DOpus. Right now I get awed at some newly discovered feature one minute, then find things that are flying in TC, which in DOPus proceed more slowly (example: in TC dragging any file to the toolbar makes a new button, then I can right-click any button to change its icon, associated command etc.; in DOpus this doesn't seem available).
Then again, if a program has been in development for years, is at version 9+ and has a huge user base, I guess I'm not a target user. I get that a lot recently, e.g. with UltraEdit, which has like a million registered users, who apparently don't mind all the usability annoyances, big and small, I have found in 30 minutes of playing with it.
You seem to be assuming that the little things that bug you a lot are shared by everyone else?
No, that's about the opposite of what I said :) I assume I am *not* the target audience, i.e. I use the application in a weird idiomatic ways that were not in the developers' usage scenarios. I'd always like to think that developers *had* usage scenarios in the first place, though!
Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers" to all our favorite shareware authors, because many of them should really read those, for our benefit :)
Joel is strange for me. I seem to strongly agree with half of what he says and strongly disagree with the other half, with no middle ground. :)
Same here, and I disagree with Alan Cooper even more. But just reading a book like that makes you think about a lot of things for the first time; things you may never have considered as issues to resolve. It makes you more aware of what you're doing to people using your software.
.marek
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Another thing I've noticed:
I tried to view a PDF file. The viewer window opens empty, then Acrobat Reader opens with the document, but mostly covered by the blank viewer window.
Strange it doesn't do that for me - the PDF file is opened in an Acrobat pane within the separate viewer window.
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Another thing I've noticed:
I tried to view a PDF file. The viewer window opens empty, then Acrobat Reader opens with the document, but mostly covered by the blank viewer window.
Strange it doesn't do that for me - the PDF file is opened in an Acrobat pane within the separate viewer window.
-Carol Haynes
This might have something to do with the version of Acrobat Reader, who knows. It did look pretty strange :)
On Edit: Better idea: in Acrobat Reader options, I once disabled the "show in browser" feature, because I don't like it when Acrobat freezes Firefox for a long while as it loads the document. So maybe now Acrobat considers itself non-embeddable at all. Makes sense as a side-effect of disabling that feature.
marek
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I see Zaine is up to his usual BS:
http://www.thegsblog.com/?p=228 (warning: NOT SAFE FOR WORK)
(Edit: Added the NSFW warning after someone here PM'd me after they got unsuitable images on their screen in the office/at work. Sorry! I forgot there isn't just software on The Great Software Blog. :( )
Zaine, why can't you manage not to mention Opus whenever you pimp XYPlorer? So you like one product over an other. Fine. Talk about XY all you want. But why do you have to slip in stupid jabs at Opus all the time? And why can't you manage to be objective instead of extremely biased and full of crap? :-(
A while ago you were accusing Opus of "stealing" features from XY because an Opus update happened to add a couple of minute things that XY had. You have since then praised XY updates many times for adding features that Opus has had for YEARS, without applying the same standard to your pet app. (I am not accusing XY of stealing features. I am accusing you of bias, double-standards and downright stupidity.) Here you are doing it again... Maybe XY will also be "bloat-ass" by the time it catches up to Opus's feature set? ("bloat-ass" as in "oh no the program won't fit on a floppy disk how will I run it on my 286!?!?", apparently.)
Sheesh. Please just leave Opus out of it. I'm sick of reading your stupidity.
(To anyone who doesn't know, please note that I don't write or sell Opus. I'm just an active member of its community who is sick to death of seeing Zaine's stupid comments appear all over the web.)
(Posted here because I've never managed to post a comment to Zaine's blog and have it actually appear, except in the same browser that posted it.)
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I am not a moderator, but this is not the "Complain at zaine" Forum or website. Please, in the future, post your transgressions to a private message because I for one, and I know I am not alone, don't care.
While you might not have been able to post to zaines blog, there is probably a reason. I would delete comments by someone who seems to have an insatiable interest in my own reviews. I am sorry, but this type of posting (which you seem to do repeatedly) actually hurts DOpus and it's reputation as it makes you appear desperate to have to debunk any and all negative comments.
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While you might not have been able to post to zaines blog, there is probably a reason. I would delete comments by someone who seems to have an insatiable interest in my own reviews.-Josh
Please have a look through the history of this thread before you judge my word vs Zaine's word, and to get an understanding of how Zaine has been antagonistic towards Opus. Surely you can understand me being annoyed at this? Wouldn't you be annoyed if someone kept dragging something you liked through the mud unfairly and without reason?
I am sorry, but this type of posting (which you seem to do repeatedly) actually hurts DOpus and it's reputation as it makes you appear desperate to have to debunk any and all negative comments.
I don't debunk "any and all negative comments," I debug false and unfair comments. If you disagree please show me an example where I've done otherwise. :( Even within this very thread I have confirmed several things that Opus can't do or doesn't do as well as other things. I don't claim Opus is perfect and nor do I try to silence anyone who says they think something else is better for their needs. I went out of my way to make that clear earlier in the thread and I've done my best to be helpful with people's questions regarding Opus in this thread and elsewhere... It's just that Zaine's constant BS makes my blood boil, TBH.
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I would be annoyed yes, but posting to a forum which has nothing to do with zaine's comments it inappropriate. Surely you would be annoyed if you saw someone post a personal grievance against another user in a way that is unnecessary and draws unneeded attention to something that can be handled privately?
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I would be annoyed yes, but posting to a forum which has nothing to do with zaine's comments it inappropriate. Surely you would be annoyed if you saw someone post a personal grievance against another user in a way that is unnecessary and draws unneeded attention to something that can be handled privately?-Josh
I think the point is that it is in public and not private. The issues about Zaine's comments on Dopus and XYplorer and the loss of comments made to his blog have been raised previously in this topic.
tbh, I'm not sure that Zaine is doing much for XYplorer by carping on about his views on Dopus.
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Yes, but do they really need to be brought to DC? If Nudel has something against ZR, then I think that needs to be handled with him and not on the public forum of DC in an attempt to solicit a response here. This is hardly the most appropriate place.
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Handling it privately doesn't add any balance to what he keeps saying in public. That's the problem. I've tried posting comments on his blog. None of them make it through or get a reply. I've never been more rude to Zaine than he has been rude to Opus, so I don't see any reason for him not to publish my comments and questions/challenges about what he has written, but he either chooses not to or fails to configure his blog properly.
He keeps saying stupid things no matter what, so I doubt a private message would make him change his ways. I know he reads here, and other people who know him read here, so my choices are either to ignore what he says or post about it here. Or to start my own public blog purely for the sake of debunking what Zaine says on his, I suppose; but isn't it better to reply to someone's comments in a place where people who read those comments are likely to see?
Usually I just try to ignore it, but sometimes I feel like I have to say _something_.
Anyway, this sub-thread is probably going to annoy uninterested people even more, so I'll shut up now.
PS: Josh, you replied to me in public here rather than sending me a PM. Maybe you understand why I am responding to Zaine in public more than you think? :)
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Hey guys - bucket of water time. Let's calm it down and drop the personal attacks please.
If you disagree with someone's view that is fine but let's not get personally abusive about it.
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Hey, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. I am completely new to Dopus. I was reading the online tutorial to see what I can do. Came across this section:
The Drive Buttons toolbar item will generate a dynamic list of all devices in the system, automatically adding and removing them as required. For example, if a new network drive is mapped or a USB memory card is inserted it will appear in your toolbar ready to use. You can have multiple sets of drive buttons and are able to filter each by drive letters and types of device. In a dual-lister window the drive buttons will affect the Source side by default, but you can change this so that a left-click on a drive always opens it on the left and a right-click opens it on the right.
http://www.pretentiousname.com/opus/bf1.html
Got excited, but it ended there without an explanation of how to do it. I have the "Drives" toolbar, and I have messed around a bit, but can't find anything to get the right click on a drive button to open it in the right lister. Always brings up a context menu. Left click on a drive button will open that drive on whatever lister is focused.
btw I have interpreted the explanation to mean:
On the "Drives" toolbar:
- left click on a drive button opens in the left lister
- right click on a drive button opens in the right lister
Is that right? Has anyone here got that working?
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Got excited, but it ended there without an explanation of how to do it. I have the "Drives" toolbar, and I have messed around a bit, but can't find anything to get the right click on a drive button to open it in the right lister. Always brings up a context menu. Left click on a drive button will open that drive on whatever lister is focused.-Lefax32
Directory Opus comes with a mountain of documentation, but unfortunately, Directory Opus comes with TWO mountains of functionality & the included documentation leaves a person wanting for more information sometimes than what is available at the author's web site.
I cannot help you with your problem directly as I am not a Directory Opus user, but there is a fine user support forum supported by other users that was started way back in the day to help with lapses in documentation such as this.
http://resource.dopus.com/
I am sure if you search over there in that forum your question is most likely already answered & you'll probably learn a lot of tips and tricks along the way.
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On the "Drives" toolbar:
- left click on a drive button opens in the left lister
- right click on a drive button opens in the right lister-Lefax32
Yes that's a correct interpretation. To do this, you need to add the 'multifunc' argument to the drives button.
Enter customize mode and you'll find the drives button shrinks down to a single item, edit that item so that the command is:
Go DRIVEBUTTONS=multifunc
The multifunc argument will force the lister into dual mode if it's not already in it when you right click to open a drive.
There are a number of other arguments which can be used here, seperate them with a comma. For example, my hdd button is:
Go DRIVEBUTTONS=hideempty,-ghmn,multifunc
Which does the following:
- Hides Empty Drives (usb etc)
- Filters out CD Drive (they're shown on another toolbar for me)
Hope that gets you started.
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btw I have interpreted the explanation to mean:
On the "Drives" toolbar:
- left click on a drive button opens in the left lister
- right click on a drive button opens in the right lister
Is that right? Has anyone here got that working? -Lefax32
Here's my drive toolbar, which I have down the left side of any lister I open: Left click opens to left side, right click opens to, (or opens), right side.
Extras: MMB on the Net button will list available domains (WORKGROUP, MSHOME, etc)
RMB on Root = My Docs in active lister
MMB on Root = My Pics in active lister
Other locations, LAN etc, are absolute referenced.
Top sect is stuff that doesn't change, Root, network, etc. Next is fixed/removable HDDs, and bottom is removables. CD/DVD, flash.
[ You are not allowed to view attachments ]
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Thanks so much 4wd, that's awesome. ;D
Just wondering can I assign that same function to ( left click = left lister / right click = right lister) to any button? eg on a button made to go to my favorite folder?
eta found it. Also, is there a thread here, or a forum somewhere, where people share buttons / commands that they have made?
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[/i] Also, is there a thread here, or a forum somewhere, where people share buttons / commands that they have made?
-Lefax32
I suspect you will need to go to the Dopus forum for that (there's the odd tip scattered about here but not much really)
On the "Drives" toolbar:
- left click on a drive button opens in the left lister
- right click on a drive button opens in the right lister-Lefax32
Yes that's a correct interpretation. To do this, you need to add the 'multifunc' argument to the drives button.
Enter customize mode and you'll find the drives button shrinks down to a single item, edit that item so that the command is:
Go DRIVEBUTTONS=multifunc
The multifunc argument will force the lister into dual mode if it's not already in it when you right click to open a drive.
There are a number of other arguments which can be used here, seperate them with a comma. For example, my hdd button is:
Go DRIVEBUTTONS=hideempty,-ghmn,multifunc
Which does the following:
- Hides Empty Drives (usb etc)
- Filters out CD Drive (they're shown on another toolbar for me)
-tanis424
sounds great!
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Oh gosh oops, I only saw 4wd's reply when I posted my last. :-[ I didn't see the posts by Innuendo and tanis424 which pretty much answered my new questions. :-[
I was just reading tomis reply now, wondering where he quoted tanis from :-[ :-[ :-[
Thanks guys for the help and sorry for not looking properly.
And thanks tanis that info is great. I got the multifunc to work on the drives, just wondering can that be applied to a favorites folder to get the right click/left click actions, somthing like this :
Go "v:media"=multifunc
or does multifunc only apply to drives?
btw 4wd I love the ideas of your drive bar. I set the root menu up to add program files / program files x86 / program data as well. Love it, thanks for sharing. :P
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The multifunc is only for Drive buttons. You can easily create your own three way buttons which perform LMB/RMB/MMB functions. There are a number of tutorials and example buttons on the resource centre which should get you started.
The GO command has an OPENINDUAL argument, as well as OPENINLEFT/OPENINRIGHT. The OPENINDUAL arg will perform pretty much as the multifunc in that the lister will be forced into DUAL mode by it.
You could set up the 3 button as follows:
LMB
Go "V:\Media"
RMB
Go "V:\Media" OPENINDUAL
or
LMB
Go "V:\Media" OPENINLEFT
RMB
Go "V:\Media" OPENINRIGHT
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Thanks for the help tanis that works exactly as I was after. :Thmbsup:
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btw 4wd I love the ideas of your drive bar. I set the root menu up to add program files / program files x86 / program data as well. Love it, thanks for sharing. :P-Lefax32
No problem, I don't tend to set up a lot of dedicated buttons for paths otherwise I'd probably spend more time trying to remember which button is what path :)
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Dopus comes with "multi-level undo". I assume that refers to the size of the undo stack. Does anybody happen to know how many levels there are?
Thanks,
Don
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Dopus comes with "multi-level undo". I assume that refers to the size of the undo stack. Does anybody happen to know how many levels there are?-DonL
10 according to the Output Window and the DOpus.chm help file.
I can't see anything in the prefs to change the number of levels.
Considering the fluid nature of files and directories maybe it's not worth implementing more than that since you can undo a multiple file/dir action with a single undo.
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Dopus comes with "multi-level undo". I assume that refers to the size of the undo stack. Does anybody happen to know how many levels there are?-DonL
10 according to the Output Window and the DOpus.chm help file.
I can't see anything in the prefs to change the number of levels.
Considering the fluid nature of files and directories maybe it's not worth implementing more than that since you can undo a multiple file/dir action with a single undo.
-4wd
Thanks.
I could see a use for more levels. If I rename 20 files here (one after the other, not mass rename) and later 20 files there, it might come to my mind that the first 20 files should not have been renamed the way I did it.
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If I rename 20 files here (one after the other, not mass rename) and later 20 files there, it might come to my mind that the first 20 files should not have been renamed the way I did it.
-DonL
Thank goodness at least one other person works as I do!! ;D
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If I rename 20 files here (one after the other, not mass rename) and later 20 files there, it might come to my mind that the first 20 files should not have been renamed the way I did it.
-DonL
FWIW, there is a separate log that would (if configured to) record the old + new names in that situation. You can set that log to retain 1,000 (or more) operations if you want, and it'll retain them across reboots. Obviously it'd be a pain to undo those renames if they fell off the end of the undo-log, but it'd be possible by manually looking up the old/new names from the (other) log if it came to it.
If you think you'll run into the problem a lot then it won't help much but if it's a "just in case" thing then maybe it's enough. I use it very rarely but it has saved me a couple of times when I wonder where the heck I moved a file two days ago. :)
(Ofc. this log can be turned off for those who don't want it recording everything they do.)
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FWIW, if someone is interested:
Directory Opus 9
Deal Available: 2 FEB ’10 TUESDAY at http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/directory-opus-9/
Deal Price: $45.93 (32.67 Euro)
You Save: 40%
List Price: $76.55 / 85 AUD / 54.31 EUR
exchange rates at 26.01.2010 from http://www.xe.com/ucc/
Opus licensing is easy and simple. It is machine-based not user-based.
Purchase an Install Licence for each machine on which you install the program
This license is only valid for the 9.xy branch launched at April 27th 2007,
currently there is 9.5.2 recent from January 7th 2010. See http://www.gpsoft.com.au/history.html
There will be an discounted upgrade to Directory Opus 10.
USB and FTP cost $10 AUD extra each. See https://www.gpsoft.com.au/DScripts/order.asp
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wonder is version 10 around the corner . . .
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wonder is version 10 around the corner . . .
-tomos
Indubitably , Watson, indubitably...
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If they lower the prices, they (probably) have a good reason for that. v10, hm. Maybe released with some serious price increasement. :P
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If they lower the prices, they (probably) have a good reason for that. v10, hm. Maybe released with some serious price increasement. :P
-Tuxman
Well, believe it or not, Dopus is far from being the most expensive file manager out there. Check out the prices of PentaWare's offerings (http://www.pentaware.com/pw/Buy_Now.htm)...
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I presume this is the reason why no-one knows them, right? :D
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I presume this is the reason why no-one knows them, right? :D
-Tuxman
Who?
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You see? :D
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If they lower the prices, they (probably) have a good reason for that. v10, hm.-Tuxman
It's not GPSoft themselves lowering the price; it's a reseller, and only for one day, so doesn't really indicate anything except that you can get it cheaper from one site for one day if you want to.
(GPSoft themselves did just have an end-of-year sale but they do that almost every year.)
Maybe released with some serious price increasement. :P-Tuxman
Not sure why you'd infer that from this. :)
wonder is version 10 around the corner . . .-Tomos
Depends how big your corners are. :) v10 is in development but it's not coming out tomorrow or anything like that. (More than that, I can't say. In fact, I don't know.)
FWIW, v9 is still being supported and updated w/ free fixes & features, almost 3 years after its release. Last update was 3 weeks ago and the free 9.5 point release which added Win7 support was about 3 months ago.
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I have to say that I purchased DOpus 9 over two years ago, thinking it was pretty darned expensive but I had such good recommendation for it - I think from Darwin - so I purchased a license plus a USB Export license. Two plus years and all updates have been included and I love it to boot; heck, I can't complain.
Jim
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Made this video:
How to bring up Direct Folders menu by double clicking in Directory Opus (http://www.nichereviewblogs.com/videos/How%20to%20bring%20up%20Direct%20Folders%20menu%20by%20dbl%20clicking%20in%20Dir%20opus/)
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Directory Opus 9
Deal Available: 26 AUG ’10 THURSDAY at http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/directory-opus-9/
Deal Price: $44.68 (34.78 Euro)
You Save: 40%
List Price: $76.61 / 85 AUD / 59.67 EUR
exchange rates at 19.08.2010 from http://www.xe.com/ucc/
Opus licensing is easy and simple. It is machine-based not user-based.
Purchase an Install Licence for each machine on which you install the program
This license is only valid for the 9.xy branch launched at April 27th 2007,
currently there is 9.5.4 recent from June 3rd 2010. See http://www.gpsoft.com.au/History.html
There will be an discounted upgrade to Directory Opus 10.
USB and FTP cost $10 AUD extra each. See https://www.gpsoft.com.au/DScripts/order.asp
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This might indicate that ver 10 is right around the corner. It's about that time.
I love DirOpus and think it is worth the high price but, be warned that the upgrade costs are usually quite high also.
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This might indicate that ver 10 is right around the corner. It's about that time.-edbro
I don't think the deal is related to Opus 10. On the previous page someone said the same about a similar deal from the same people in January.
I love DirOpus and think it is worth the high price but, be warned that the upgrade costs are usually quite high also.
In the past, when new versions came out people who bought the old ones recently were given more discounted upgrades. People who bought really recently got upgraded for free. I can't speak for GPSoftware and say for sure what they'll do when Opus 10 is finally ready but they seem to understand it's good not to punish people for buying at the wrong time and good to reduce the amount of second-guessing people have to do about upgrade timing.
(With that in mind, in general the upgrade prices are not high when you consider how often you're asked to pay them, which is every 3-4 years for a substantial update (with lots of free, and sometimes substantial, ones in between). It's not one of those products where you get charged for a minor update every year like clockwork. :) What they give away free between version-changes is better than the updates many companies ask people to pay for.)
Of course, there are times when buying gets you more free updates than others but it you do buy when Opus 10 is imminent then you'll probably get a very discounted, or even free, update.
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Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the upgrade price is too high. I'm a fan of the software and upgraded from ver 8. I bought ver 8 at a discount offered here for DC members. I remember that I paid as much for the upgrade as I did for the initial (discounted) purchase.
If I thought the upgrade price was too high then I would not have upgraded.
When it does come time to upgrade it will be interesting to see what the roadmap is for the next version. Truthfully, ver 9 does everything I need it to do. I upgraded from 8 to 9 because ver 9 was Vista compatible and 8 was not. I wonder if there will be any compelling feature that will make me upgrade. (who am I kidding? I'm a sucker for always having the latest software!)
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Directory Opus 9
Opus licensing is easy and simple. It is machine-based not user-based.
Purchase an Install Licence for each machine on which you install the program
This license is only valid for the 9.xy branch launched at April 27th 2007,
currently there is 9.5.4 recent from June 3rd 2010. See http://www.gpsoft.com.au/History.html
There will be an discounted upgrade to Directory Opus 10.
USB and FTP cost $10 AUD extra each. See https://www.gpsoft.com.au/DScripts/order.asp
-BuBBy
Unless the licensing has changed you are permitted to install DOpus on one main computer and one portable/notebook computer with the single license.
I purchased this in September 2007 so that is three years and a whole lot of updates, some fairly major, without any additional cost. I feel like I have gotten my money's worth!
Thanks!
Jim
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Unless the licensing has changed you are permitted to install DOpus on one main computer and one portable/notebook computer with the single license.
-J-Mac
I don't think it has changed and I don't think multi installs are authorized. You can buy a single license or a dual license. The dual license obviously costs more but you can then install on 2 machines.
From their site:
The single install Licence allows you to install Directory Opus on a single computer.
You can also buy a USB export license which allows you to export a licensed copy to a USB drive. That is only $10 more.
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I got the USB export license a couple of years ago when they got all strict with the computers at my old job. it works great.
I will admit that the DOpus pricing is relatively expensive compared to its competitors. On the other hand, it's also relatively more powerful than the competitors. So I kind of have no problem paying it whenever the time comes. That's the thing with good software, I don't mind paying for it if it's the best and I'm using it a lot.
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I don't think it has changed and I don't think multi installs are authorized. You can buy a single license or a dual license. The dual license obviously costs more but you can then install on 2 machines.
From their site:
The single install Licence allows you to install Directory Opus on a single computer.
-edbro
The license changed a year or two ago. See here (http://www.gpsoft.com.au/order_intro.html):
Please Note:
* Multiple-install licences are only for use at a single site. The use of Opus at multiple sites requires purchase of separate licences for each site. Volume site discounts are available - please contact sales for details.
* Single, Dual and Five Install Licence packs include one free personal laptop Licence for the registered owner. In addition to the number of licensed installs the registered owner may install Opus on a single, personal laptop owned by the registered user.
* Emphasis by me.
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Thanks 4wd. I think it must have been longer than that because that was shown to me back in 2007 when I purchased DOpus. I sent an email to support asking about it and was given a link directly to that or a very similar clause. I just purchased a single license plus a USB export license back then.
Thanks!
Jim
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I never realized that. Good to know.
I think their wording could use some work. The one statement seems pretty unambigous; "on a single computer". I certainly consider my laptop a computer.
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Thanks 4wd. I think it must have been longer than that because that was shown to me back in 2007 .....-J-Mac
Probably was, time becomes more fluid when you're retired :)
I think their wording could use some work. The one statement seems pretty unambigous; "on a single computer". I certainly consider my laptop a computer.
-edbro
If you only have laptops then I guess you can install a Single license on two laptops you own, (in theory). I've a Dual license and have it installed on my desktop and my two laptops.
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That's the thing with good software, I don't mind paying for it if it's the best and I'm using it a lot.
Right on. 8)
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The license change (to permit a single license to be used on both a laptop and a desktop) occurred when DOpus went to version 9. When I bought version 8, I bought a dual license so I could put it on both. I was expecting to have to upgrade the dual license, but I found to my delight that the policy had changed and that I could buy a single license upgrade and use it on both. So whenever version 9 came out is when the change occurred.
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I like DOpus a lot but I'm still pretty disillusioned by their approach to upgrades in the past:
they gave a fair upgrade price for a limited timed after the new version is released. After that time the upgrade price was increased to around 90% of the full price. I dont think this is a very nice way to treat your customers....
I think an upgrade price should be just that - a fixed price to upgrade from one version to the next. It's fair enough to give a lesser reduction (or none) from an older version again.
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I like DOpus a lot but I'm still pretty disillusioned by their approach to upgrades in the past:
they gave a fair upgrade price for a limited timed after the new version is released. After that time the upgrade price was increased to around 90% of the full price.-tomos
FWIW, the time limit (before the upgrade discount was reduced) was 2.5 years after the previous purchase, which doesn't seem too bad to me.
I dont think this is a very nice way to treat your customers....
If you haven't bought something from someone for 2.5 years, are you really still a customer of theirs? :)
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Well, yep. I, for example, am a lifetime customer of some without having paid for a very, very long period. :D
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I like DOpus a lot but I'm still pretty disillusioned by their approach to upgrades in the past:
they gave a fair upgrade price for a limited timed after the new version is released. After that time the upgrade price was increased to around 90% of the full price.-tomos
FWIW, the time limit (before the upgrade discount was reduced) was 2.5 years after the previous purchase, which doesn't seem too bad to me.
I dont think this is a very nice way to treat your customers....
If you haven't bought something from someone for 2.5 years, are you really still a customer of theirs? :)
-Nudel
I take your points but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth (and yes I stand by my definition of an upgrade: "I think an upgrade price should be just that - a fixed price to upgrade from one version to the next."
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I stand by my definition of an upgrade: "I think an upgrade price should be just that - a fixed price to upgrade from one version to the next."
-tomos
Fair point but if I were you I'd start saying goodbye to upgrade pricing - where Microsoft go other developers generally follow (look at product activation as a really bad example) and MS is dropping upgrade pricing on flagship products such as Office. What's the betting that Windows 8 won't have upgrade pricing.
A lot of smaller companies feel they have to offer upgrade prices because the big companies do - once they don't feel that pressure I'd guess upgrades either won't exist or will be much less generous.
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(look at product activation as a really bad example)-Carol Haynes
It's all about the implementation for me. I use a few games & apps (plus Windows itself) that use activation and I don't mind it at all because it doesn't get in my way and is reasonable (e.g. usually allows re-activation if you don't do it too frequently, so you can reinstall you machine every so often even if you forget or are unable to deactivate things).
I did cause Windows to deactivate once when I was troubleshooting some hardware (added/removed something enough times that it decided something was up), but that was resolved with a 5 minute phone call, even though it was midnight on a weekend, so it didn't bother me.
On the other hand, there are products I want but will not buy because of the DRM. e.g. Some Ubisoft single-player games now require that they can talk to authentication servers constantly; if the server or your net connection has a hiccup (or god forbid you want to playing the game because the net is down and you have nothing else to do!*) then the game exits. That's taking things too far and I won't pay for it.
(*Then again, that problem affects things like Steam -- you need to be online to start it unless you've planned for offline usage in advance -- but I still buy games on that. Steam's DRM does annoy me in some ways but it also provides a lot of convenience on the flip-side so it's sort-of even, I guess.)
For me, it comes down to "does it get in my way or bog my machine down?" If it doesn't then I don't mind it. I know other people feel more strongly, though. Maybe they've run into issues that I haven't.
and MS is dropping upgrade pricing on flagship products such as Office. What's the betting that Windows 8 won't have upgrade pricing.
Wow. I had to look that up to confirm it. I hadn't heard about it and thought surely there was some caveat or something, but you're right.
That seems really wrong to me, unless what they've done is reduce the full-version pricing to what the upgrade pricing used to be, in which case it's to the customer's advantage (or no different for people upgrading) and fine.
(But otherwise, they're effectively asking people to pay full-price again for something that they already own a large part of. That seems especially poor with Office where, aside from the 2007 update, new versions typically don't change that much stuff that people actually use.)
Maybe it was just that home users don't tend to upgrade Office in the first place so why bother with the upgrade SKUs. :)