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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: February 14, 2013, 04:11 PM »
In fact, it's perfectly possible to buy a decent MS Office (= 2010, = not the latest, very problematic version) for LESS than this D "Opus" costs.
-clean (February 14, 2013, 01:18 PM)

That does not seem true to me.

Even with academic discounts, I cannot find a version of Office 2010 (not the latest version, not being updated) that costs less than any version of Opus 10 (the latest version, regular and significant updates). Even if you ignore differences in the number of machines you can use, the old version of Office still costs far more than the latest version of Opus.

Office 2010 prices from Amazon UK, Opus prices from the GPSoft website using Google's exchange rates.

£299 Microsoft Office Professional 2010 (2 PCs)
£247 Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 (2 PCs)
£185 Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 (1 PC)
£125 Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 (3 PCs)
£82  Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 (1 PC)
£65  Microsoft Office University 2010 Academic (1 PC)
£46  Opus 10 Pro (1 PC + 1 Laptop)
£39  Opus 10 Pro (1 PC + 1 Laptop) with Academic discount
£20  Opus 10 Light (1 PC)
£17  Opus 10 Light (1PC) with Academic discount.

But, hey, if you want to buy a copy of Opus 9 (not the latest version) from us for £65 (the cheapest version of Office 2010 I can find on Amazon, and that requires proof that you're an academic) then I'm sure we can work something out!


Edit: I'll spare everyone the thread bump but, responding to the post just below this one, getting Office for €13 via the Home User Program is hardly relevant here. To qualify for that you must work for a company that has committed to paying Microsoft thousands and thousands in regular licence fees. Again, I'm sure we could arrange something similar if someone wants to throw that kind of money at us. The total cost of Office is still higher, however you look at it; with the HUP you get Office cheap because your company has already paid for the bulk of it. And most people don't qualify for it anyway.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 10
« on: February 10, 2013, 06:35 PM »
As I see the amount of "hate" that type of interface creates among users, I can imagine that GPSoftware is not likely to implement it soon. Personally, I wouldn't mind having to work with this type of interface at all. But I think the sales of this DOpus version would never cover for the amount of work GPSoftware would have to do.
-Shades (February 09, 2013, 04:58 AM)

You can do something very similar to that Opus 5 UI example (and I guess the GIMP UI, although I haven't used GIMP much so I may have misunderstood) in the Windows versions of Opus using floating toolbars. I think that's what they were originally added for in Opus 6 (the first Windows version). There may be some caveats that I'm not thinking of right now, but I think setting a floating toolbar to "Keep On Top: Opus Only" would be quite similar to what Opus 5 had. There's also a "same size buttons when not docked" setting for each toolbar under Customize -> Toolbars, which exists to let you make grids of buttons like Opus 5 had.

I wouldn't use floating toolbars for this myself, as I think it becomes fiddly when you have to manage the toolbar(s) as a separate window, but it might suit some workflows. Personally, I tend to open, move, resize, close windows quite dynamically so it would be a pain to manage the toolbars on top of that, but I know other people do things very differently and e.g. always keep particular apps in particular spaces on the screen, or use virtual desktops, etc. So what doesn't work for me might be great for someone else. The option's certainly there.

I do have one floating toolbar, but it's docked to the bottom of my second monitor, a bit like a second taskbar, and is used for launching various apps and documents that I used often enough to want quick access to but not often enough that I want them pinned to the taskbar itself.

The real prob with DO is elsewhere: It's considered superior, and whenever you ask for a function that isn't there, you get the answer, "it's possible", without anybody telling you which way it could be possible.
-clean (February 09, 2013, 10:03 AM)

We sometimes answer dozens of questions a day on the Opus support forum, going into great detail if it's needed, at least if the person asking has linked their account. (Sometimes when they haven't linked their accounts as well, but we don't always have time to help everyone in detail and it's only right to focus on the paying customers.)

If something can't be done then we'll typically just say so, too. (And if we thought something could be done but then, looking into the details, it can't or it doesn't work very well, then we'll correct our mistake and say sorry pretty quickly.) Opus does enough that we don't have to be shy about what it doesn't do. And while we're always working to make it do more, there are some things we don't want it to do, because everything is a trade-off in design and complexity, both for us when writing the software and for everyone else when using the software. (Even with those, we change our minds sometimes.)

From this and the Two Classes of Membership Here? thread, you seem to have a chip on your shoulder about Opus for some reason. I don't know the history, so maybe it's justified (apologies, if appropriate), but I'll just say that people would be more inclined to help you & consider your ideas if you didn't escalate every difference of opinion into insults and personal attacks.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Two classes of membership here?
« on: November 24, 2012, 02:31 PM »
Have a look at the forum policy (you must accept before entering the forum) at the Directory "Opus" forum. Isn't it illogical to pretend your sw is the best of its kind, and then not allow any mentioning of competition sw's, when it should be of much interest rather often to discuss the respective realization of a feature in similar sw? (x2, XY and SC all permit this kind of discussion, and I own a paid license for any of those - not for DO, and that's not a coincidence: If you allow sw developers to treat you like s*** - delete the paragraph here -, they will never cease to do so, hence the interest of buying 3 competing products instead of just 1. And then, DO ist not THAT splendid, e.g. compare processing of metadata in x2 and DO.)
-clean (November 17, 2012, 01:07 PM)

I'm the Opus forum admin these days, and I take issue with this.

Here is the wording of the relevant part of our forum rules (which have not changed recently):

These forums are not for the discussion of other companies' products unless they are directly related to the usage of Directory Opus. You may post about products which other users will find useful in concert with Directory Opus (e.g. tools suitable for integration into Opus toolbar buttons). You may post about products you are having problems using alongside Directory Opus (e.g. if you need help figuring out how to make Opus and another program talk to each other). Most other mentions of third-party products will be considered off-topic and unacceptable.

The forums have a "Coffeeshop" area where rules are more relaxed and off-topic discussions are allowed provided they are not spam, abusive, illegal, etc.

That rule is there so that people don't post questions about using Windows or Photoshop or whatever to our forum. They are there because people do it a lot, even with the rule there. (I imagine many people don't read the rules.)

People ask questions about general Windows usage and completely unrelated software on our forum because -- and they've said this themselves -- we tend to be better at answering questions than the support for the other software they were asking about.

I'm not saying we're better than the support for all other software, but we do engage with our users and spent a lot of time trying to help them. Some software authors don't even have support forums. Some have forums where posting is about as useful as firing your message into a black hole. (Ever had Microsoft or Adobe care that you're found a bug in their software, let alone actually fix it, let alone within several years of the report? We don't solve every problem, but some companies don't solve any problem, at least if you're Joe Public. So people sometimes come to us for those problems as well.)

People get used to us answering their questions and helping them, and forget that we are not a general "help you do anything with your computer" support forum. We sometimes answer those threads in our spare time but we obviously don't have the resources to do it all the time and for free, and we'd rather people went to whoever makes the software they bought to get support for it, rather than provide free support for someone else's software while whoever wrote it takes the money and ignores their users.

People can, and do, mention competing products on our forum. Where it's relevant we are fine with that. Where it's not relevant, and just someone having a cheap dig at us, it can be annoying. -- e.g. People fixate on a pet feature and say "program A does this so why doesn't Opus?" when that has little relationship to whether or not the feature is a good idea or a sensible use of our limited resources, and when there are a larger set of true statements of the form "Opus does this so why doesn't program A?" -- Even then, we don't generally do or say anything unless someone does it repeatedly and is basically trolling us and our forum.

And, as it says in the rules, we have an area where people can talk about more or less anything they want (as long as it's legal and decent).

We run a tech-support forum for Directory Opus, and the rule is just there to make it clear it isn't a tech-support forum for anything else.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Earning the 'daemon' inside DaemonTools...
« on: February 15, 2012, 02:59 AM »
I went off Daemon Tools when I noticed it installed a new root certificate authority on your machine, which essentially makes it possible for whoever controls (or gains access to) that root CA to sign any code so it appears to be from any publisher.

I don't know if it still does this as I haven't gone near it since then. I switched to Virtual CloneDrive which is free and works great, at least for my needs. (There are a few things DT does which VCD doesn't, but I don't need them.)

Daemon Tools is not the only tool to install a root CA but the one it installed seemed to be from a company who only created it to avoid paying money for code-signing, which isn't how things should be done. Code-signing certs are expensive, and the "proper" CAs can be leaked or tricked as well, but if every company creates their own root CA then the whole signing system is useless.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Is WinZip still worth updating?
« on: February 12, 2012, 05:36 AM »
Igor's incorrect about drag & drop, FWIW. Drag sources can provide the files via IStreams and do not have to write the data to temporary files. The data can be sent to the drop target directly from memory if you want.

Re Winzip, I installed it recently to test something and I was really, really impressed... by the amount of garbage they had managed to cram into the installer of what should have been a simple archive tool. It must have taken me 10 minutes to install the stupid thing, click through all the prompts about other software I didn't want and similar nonsense... Really incredible how bad it is now, even before you get to the program itself (which then tries to get you to install even more junk the first time you run it).

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