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

I thought it was better than the normal error messages you usually get on websites.

-nite_monkey (December 13, 2007, 04:44 PM)

Wonder if whoever does maintenance for YouTube 24/7 thinks the same...

I worked once as an outhouse (opposite of in-house, pun somewhat intended) language specialist for a localization company. The project manager asked me one day to sit in on a meeting with one of their clients, a three-letter big BIG BIG IT corporation. As the meeting progressed, the PM kept asking one essential question, which he rephrased in multiple configurations, viz. "I need to know your timeframe, so I can ready the resources". What resources, thought I - doesn't he know how many keyboards and coffee cups they have? Only after a while did I figure he was talking about me (and a bunch of other outhousers).

Soon after I upped my rates :)

Ed: Which also reminds me of this episode of Dlibert:

PHB: I have been saying for years that employees are our most valuable asset. It turns out that I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset. Employees are ninth.
Dilbert: I'm afraid to ask what came in eighth.
PHB: Carbon paper.

.marek