Messages

26

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: April 01, 2008, 06:08 AM »

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.)

27

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: December 18, 2007, 01:07 PM »

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 (December 18, 2007, 09:58 AM)

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.

28

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: December 09, 2007, 05:38 PM »

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 (December 09, 2007, 05:19 PM)

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/

29

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: December 09, 2007, 03:18 PM »

Well... there are two installers, and the one for the 64-bit version (22MB) is 33% bigger than 32-bit version (14.8MB)  So the size hasn't even doubled 

-Darwin (December 09, 2007, 12:18 AM)

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.

30

General Software Discussion / Re: keeping/saving cloned files

« on: October 21, 2007, 02:51 PM »

I guess namsupo already covered most of this and his reply got in before mine, but here's mine anyway in case the little ASCII diagrams are helpful. :-)

Hardlinks would be ideal for me if their behavior was consistent.
Unfortunately, because they don't always work, I've had to find other ways of achieving similar results.

-Armando (October 21, 2007, 01:57 AM)

Their behaviour is consistent. If it wasn't it would be very worrying for a filesystem feature! :-)

What isn't consistent is how you (indirectly, via the programs you use on your files) are interacting with the hardlinked files. A hardlink to a file is simply an additional filename which points to the same data that the original filename pointed to.

When you create a file normally you are, without knowing it, effectively creating a hardlink which associates a filename with some data (the file contents):

FilenameA -> [Data1]

If you then create a hardlink you will have two names both pointing to the same data:

FilenameA -> [Data1] <- FilenameB

Hardlinks point to data and not to filenames! FilenameB is pointing to the same data as FilenameA but it is not actually pointing to FilenameA. (That would be a symbolic link.) If the meaning of FilenameA changes it has no effect whatsoever on FilenameB.

If you delete FilenameA but leave FilenameB then you're left with this:

FilenameB -> [Data1]

If you now create a new file and happen to call it FilenameA then it's a completely separate file. There is no connection at all between FilenameA and FilenameB:

FilenameA -> [Data2]
FilenameB -> [Data1]

So when Word deletes the old file and then saves a new file with the same name that's what happens. If Word instead overwrote the old data with the new data, without deleting or creating any files, then the problem would not occur.

Of course, you often cannot change how a program saves its files. (Sometimes you can, sometimes it's out of your hands.) So using links like this isn't a good idea and can lead to confusion. Links in general can lead to confusion and shouldn't be used gratuitously. (Symbolic links and shortcut files are less of an issue). But while I recommend that people don't use the things when it isn't necessary, the way hardlinks work is completely consistent and well-defined.

31

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9 - How to..?

« on: October 02, 2007, 04:34 PM »

but what I'm looking for, ultimately, is how to make Opus REMEMBER this setting. In other words.. whenever I'm looking at a folder full of music files, I want to see the bit-rate, or even description because I kind of like the latter even better. I don't have to see description always, (though I suppose it wouldn't hurt, either), but only when I'm looking at folders with music in them.

-moerl (October 01, 2007, 07:15 PM)

The Folder Formats FAQ over at the Opus forums is well worth reading as it explains this and a bunch of other essential things.

32

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager

« on: September 17, 2007, 03:30 PM »

Poor folder tab implementation.  Panel dividers don't behave as I want.  Quickview only in right panel.

-JohnFredC (September 13, 2007, 09:50 AM)

The folder tabs have improved a hell of a lot in Opus 9 and the free updates that followed it. As far as I know all the features anyone has asked for are in now, including locked tabs, temporary tabs and all that stuff.

Not sure what you mean about the panel dividers, and the preview pane ("quickview") works for both left and right (or top and bottom) file display but only displays what's selected in the most recently active one. I guess you want two preview panes in the same lister or something?

If you haven't already, do mention anything you want to GPSoft, else they won't know people want them! With the folder tabs, though, I suspect whatever you want has already been added.

33

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your preferred File Manager

« on: September 17, 2007, 03:23 PM »

Dopus has tremendous capabilities if you have the time to dedicate your life to figure out all the inane nuances required to configure it.   

-jdd (September 13, 2007, 11:07 PM)

Opus has a support forum where just about every question gets answered so it's not like you have to work out everything yourself. (I know because I answer a lot of the questions there.)

34

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« on: September 09, 2007, 09:56 AM »

BTW, You can turn off Virtualisation via the Local Security Policy control panel. Local Policies -> Security Options, then the last item in the list: "User Account Control: Virtualize file and registry write failures to per-user locations".

35

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« on: September 09, 2007, 09:47 AM »

Can you give an example of a real problem that virtualisation has caused? It seems to affect settings and other files written by programs more than it affects any documents explicitly saved/edited by the user.

I agree that a message might have made sense saying "it looks like this program is crap, do you want to enable virtualisation for it?". That'd be annoying for the first day or so but after that they'd all be set up... Then again most users would just click Yes without understanding the consequences, so what difference does it make? People who understand what's going on can simply look in the virtual store folders to see which programs have been affected.

I disagree that UAC itself is bad. I think UAC is a good system and is designed in the only way it can be. The problem is how the APPLICATIONS use UAC, and especially Explorer. The amount of prompts that Explorer displays is ridiculous but that's the fault of Explorer, not UAC. UAC is actually quite flexible and, I think, well designed. Explorer of a load of crap, but then it always has been. Try Opus for fewer UAC prompts (e.g. 1 prompt when you create a folder in a protected location, instead of 4 with Explorer) as well as for a timed administrator mode (like on the Mac). All of that is done via the UAC mechanism without using any hacks or undocumented tricks. Explorer gives UAC a bad name.

36

General Software Discussion / Re: Stay Away From Microsoft VISTA

« on: September 09, 2007, 09:40 AM »

IMO, programs should not be modifying files in any location that gets virtualised in the first place. If it causes problems then the program was probably wrong to start with, and had been wrong for a long time (NT4). (I still run plenty such programs, though, and I'm glad they worked by default when I switched to Vista.)

Adding manifests to things is usually easy (there are some exceptions, like InstallShield exes) and programmers have had to do that since XP, anyway, in order to get the new-look controls. It's just another line in the same manifest file.

The virtualisation stuff can be confusing, I agree, but I think it makes sense given the alternatives. Hopefully it can go away in the next version of Windows after Vista forces developers to *finally* pay attention to the rules about where to store data (which, when ignored, usually meant those programs didn't work without admin rights in NT4, Win2k and XP).

The only thing like this that I feel MS messed up with is the way 64-bit works. Apparently with the aim of making it as easy as possible to recompile apps with hardcoded "System32" paths and so on (which should not be hardcoded in the first place; there's an API to get the system directory), they've given us a weird OS where different apps see completely different folders/registry and 32-bit binaries are in directories whose names end in "64" while 64-bit binaries are in directories ending in "32". God knows what 128-bit Windows will look like.

Maybe MS were worried nobody would port apps to 64-bit if it wasn't trivial but it turns out people are having to port anyway as their users are going to 64-bit Vista (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes just because 64 is a bigger number than 32, heh). It also turns out that doing a search & replace for "System32" in your code (or even making the code call the API like it's supposed to) is a trivial job compared to inspecting and testing for all the other 64-bit errors that come from bad pointer casts (almost always due to the archaic way Win32 casts everything to LPARAM/WPARAM/BOOL/etc.).

37

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: August 08, 2007, 04:04 AM »

Open up Properties for dopus.exe. Is it digitally signed by GPSoftware?

-Nudel (August 03, 2007, 03:26 AM)

I'm at work now, but will check when I get home.

-moerl (August 03, 2007, 10:22 AM)

Dude, you work long hours.

38

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: August 03, 2007, 03:26 AM »

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 (August 02, 2007, 06:00 PM)

Open up Properties for dopus.exe. Is it digitally signed by GPSoftware?

39

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: July 16, 2007, 02:22 PM »

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.dopu...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.pretentio...emp/fakecomments.png

Left browser posted the comment 11 days ago and still has the cookie. The right browser doesn't have the cookie.

40

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: June 15, 2007, 03:13 AM »

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.dopu...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.

41

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: June 12, 2007, 07:39 AM »

So, it looks like there will be no upgrade discount for DC members, right?

-urlwolf (June 12, 2007, 05:48 AM)

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.

42

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: June 12, 2007, 02:55 AM »

The only negative that I have is DO feels bloated when compared to xplorer2.

-barfarf (June 11, 2007, 09:47 PM)

In what way?

43

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 11, 2007, 06:03 AM »

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.dopu...iewtopic.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.

44

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 08, 2007, 01:14 AM »

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 (May 07, 2007, 10:14 PM)

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.

45

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 07, 2007, 05:25 PM »

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 (May 07, 2007, 05:13 PM)

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. )

46

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 07, 2007, 04:21 PM »

Could this whole ADS not being copied business have anything to do with the following option in Opus?

-Hirudin (May 07, 2007, 01:19 PM)

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.

47

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 07, 2007, 08:54 AM »

An update (Opus 9.0.0.1) just came out.

-Nudel (May 07, 2007, 05:06 AM)

Strange - 'Check for updates' doesn't find this - do you have to manually download and install this update?

-Carol Haynes (May 07, 2007, 07:11 AM)

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.

48

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 07, 2007, 06:39 AM »

I use ADS intensively to keep info of hundreds of movie clips (in mpg format).

-tslim (May 06, 2007, 01:15 AM)

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?

49

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 07, 2007, 05:06 AM »

I would like to select it, press a hotkey (or use a context menu) and create an archive named "temp 20070427.zip".

-Nomadin (April 27, 2007, 12:51 PM)

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.dopu...iewtopic.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.dopu...iewtopic.php?p=22621

50

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« on: May 06, 2007, 04:36 AM »

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.