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.

My point wasn't that it never happens but that it's rare and I don't see any signs that it's going to become so common that commercial software ceases to exist.

You seem to have substantially changed your stand now.

-nosh (April 22, 2007, 09:45 AM)

I don't think I've changed my stance at all. Re-read what I said originally:

I'm not sure there will ever be a collision between free and commercial software. Free software tends to be very small, simple programs that don't get significantly updated often and only do one or two simple things. That isn't bad, I use and love a lot of those programs and I've written and given away several myself, but when someone wants to make something really good, polished and powerful it soon turns into a full-time job. There's only so much you can do in your spare time. At that point you've got to start earning money from your software or the harsh realities of our capitalist world will swallow you up and spit you out.

(What really does annoy me is when people do try to sell those small, simple, spare-time software products. It seems cheap to me and, even if it's more costly to me personally in terms of my time vs my money, I'd rather write my own version of a small tool than pay someone money for something that only took them a day to write. Usually there's some other tool that'll do the same job for free, and that's alright.)

There are some very good, polished and powerful free programs but they're exceptions, IMO. They're also often funded by large companies with an agenda of killing off other products in the market.

-Nudel

If I seem to have changed stance then please explain why and I'll either admit my mistake or explain what I meant, but I don't think I've done any such thing.

Either you're extremely naive or you're simply in denial if you think good freeware that does more than one or two things is a rare commodity. I could give you a list of top notch freeware apps on my system that are as good as or better than any commercially available software.

Azureus and Utorrent are damn good programs that perform complex tasks and perform them well.

-Nosh

Downloading BitTorrents is hardly what I would consider a complex task. Both those programs do one thing and do it well. (At least, uTorrent and BitComet do it well. I have not used Azureus.)

I wouldn't categorize Firefox as a simple software that just does one or two things either, it's the most used app on a lot of PCs.

I never said Firefox was simple and I've said multiple times now that Firefox is one of the exceptions that has full-time employees working on it. Have you actually been reading what I have said, or are you just skimming it and posting a reaction to what you think I've said?

I'm sure a lot of folks on this forum will be able to mention great free IDEs that they use for developement.

-Nosh

I take it you're talking about Eclipse? IBM funded its development originally and even now it's still funded by a consortium of companies who stand to gain from there being a good, free tool in this area. It isn't something written in someone's spare time for free; people get paid to write it and my point is that that is unusual.

Is it just another exception then? Wait a sec! We're seeing quite a few exceptions here... maybe it's the rule rather than the exception.

-Nosh

If you want to argue that it's not that unusual then that's fair enough and I guess we just see things differently or are concentrating on different products which matter more to each of us. My opinion is that these "free but funded" projects are unusual, and are not going to extend into every area of computing, because there are only certain things where a company gains an advantage from funding something that they then give away free.

Maybe you are arguing that that such funding of free/open products is actually an inevitable result of competition and/or monopolies and something that will become the norm. If so, that's something I hadn't really thought about until now, and it's an interesting idea that's well worth discussing. You might be right there, eventually, although I think it is very hard to predict and there will likely be many areas where no company does such a thing.

If, on the other hand, you are arguing that people are going to write worthy replacements for all the existing big and good commercial products in their spare time at the weekends then I find that highly unlikely, based on my own experiences of trying to write code in my spare time and on what I've seen produced by others. The big and good free stuff has funding behind it.



Let's look at the stuff I use regularly on my own PC, pretty much in the order they are in my apps toolbar:

Directory Opus: Shareware/commercial. No free/open file manager comes close. (IMO no commercial one does either, but that's clearly a matter of opinion and personal preferences.)

Firefox: Free, but funded by two or three large companies with the agenda of preventing Microsoft from "owning the web".

Windows Mail: Free (with Windows), but given away by MS. MS have several items on their agenda here: To promote their OS. To stop people using someone else's mail client. To make it easier to upgrade to a non-free MS mail client. (I used Thunderbird 1.5 (free but funded) for a while but I got sick of certain bugs and, apart from the spellchecker which I miss, I never saw much difference between Thunderbird and Outlook Express (now called Windows Mail in Vista). I'm tempted to try Thunderbird 2.0 that just came out as I believe some of the problems I had with 1.5 are no longer an issue, but I'm sick of moving my mail back and forth between formats, to be honest. I don't need a more complex mail client so I stick with a free one.)

TextPad: Shareware/commercial. (I haven't tried every other editor but I've tried a lot of them and most of them suck, IMO. The editors that don't suck seem to other shareware/commercial ones, although ScinTilla has potential (but has also not yet spawned an editor that I actually liked). The other commercial editors might be better than TextPad now but they don't seem to add enough features that I care about to make it worth my while buying them, configuring them and getting used to them. TextPad has flaws (mainly the lack of Unicode support) but is generally very good at what I need it for so I've stuck with it.)

mIRC: Shareware/commercial. (mIRC also has flaws, like the options dialog that's straight out of 1985, but since it gained multi-server support several years ago it is undoutedly the best IRC client by a long shot, unless there's one I haven't tried. The others don't even feel like Betas.)

KeePass: Free/donation. Does one particular job well.

NewsLeecher: Shareware/commercial. Does one particular job well. This is one where I'm surprised there isn't a free tool that's as good, but it's so much better than the free alternatives that it was well worth the small price.

uTorrent: Free. Does one particular job well.

PuTTY: Free. Does one particular job well.

Remote Desktop: Comes with the OS, but does cost extra since you can only host RDP from Pro/Business/Ultimate versions of the OS, so safe to say it's commercial.

Virtual PC: Used to be commercial. Free now. Not open. Free because MS and VMWare are competing with each other in the high-end VM space by giving away their  products in the low-end VM space. (I know VMWare is supposed to be better, but all I want to do is run a web browser in a VM and VPC seems to use a lot less memory and doesn't install lots of services and other stuff. I've tried both and prefer VPC for my particular needs.)

Photoshop/ImageReady: Commercial. The Gimp seems to be the only free alternative and I didn't like it last time I tried it.

Media Center: Commercial. There are some free products in this area which sound okay but are not as good IMO (e.g. you have to keep a client app open else your TV won't get recorded, while MC has a recording service that works so long as the PC is booted), unless you want to look at running Linux (which isn't an option for me and PVR software on Linux isn't something I know enough about to have an opinion).

Media Player Classic: Free and open. Does one particular job very, very well.

foobar2000: Ditto.

Exact Audio Copy: Ditto.

iTunes: Commercial. Sucks. But gives me gapless playback and games on my iPod. (Two things that are also delivered by the Rockbox firmware which is a very impressive effort and something I was very glad existed when it was the only way to get gapless playback on hardware with a good amount of storage. But also, IMO, an example of something where people work on what they feel like for fun without concerning themselves too much about what "needs" to be done to make it a really polished, user-friendly and "complete" product that you don't have to be a geek to use.)

Acronis TrueImage: Shareware/Commercial. The only alternative I know of is Ghost which is also commercial. This is something I could see being developed by an open-source team, though, so maybe one day.

ImgBurn: Free. Does one thing well. (I miss stuff from Nero and would happily pay money for Nero again if it hadn't become ultra-bloated (VoIP in a CD burning suite!? WTF!?!?!?!?). Sadly, only the ultra-bloated Nero supports Vista so I have ditched the product.)

Visual Studio: Commercial. Rocks. Yes, there's Eclipse, but VS is still best for C++ and C# which are the languages I care about. (To be honest I wasn't a big fan of Eclipse when I started writing Java again for 6 months of 2006 but Eclipse isn't a bad program, I guess. Either way, Eclipse is/was funded.)

Process Monitor / Process Explorer: Free. Do one thing each very well. (Owned by MS now, FWIW.)

Resource Hacker: Free. Does one thing well.

Inno Setup: Free. Does one thing well.

Axialis IconWorkshop: Shareware/commercial. Best tool for creating icons I've seen. I'm not aware of another commercial tool that works anywhere near as well, let alone a free one. It is the kind of tool that could be written by spare-time developers, though, I expect.

TechSmith Camtasia: Commercial. Camtasia isn't without fault but it is good. There are more expensive products in this space but they didn't seem to justify the extra price. The free screen/video-capturing apps I tried were all crap.

WindowClippings: The basic 1.5 version was free. Now 2.0 is on the way and is going to cost money, so that the guy behind it can justify the amount of time he's spending on it. It'll only be $10 though so I'll be buying 2.0 as soon as it's ready. Does a bunch of things that other screen grabbing apps don't do, although it works both ways as TechSmith's GrabIt also has a few features which WC is missing. (GrabIt is also 4x the price.)

Various games which are irrelevant I guess, but all commercial.

Messenger: Free but funded by MS to attack/obtain the market share of other IM clients. I'm not a big fan of IM -- I wish everyone I talked to was on IRC FFS -- so I'd never pay for an IM client, but having just Messenger seems to let me talk to everyone I know who isn't on IRC so I put up with it.

NOD32: Shareware/commercial anti-virus. The only free products in this space that I'm aware of are limited versions of commercial products, I assume released as marketing (like the idea of Adobe giving Photoshop away free so people recommend it at work, sort of) or to stop you going to the competition. Maybe there's a free, unfunded anti-virus tool that I don't know of but if so then I'd wonder how they guarantee quality and response time without paying people full-time. Perhaps it could be done, with enough keen volunteers.

That's quite a mixture but the trend seems to be that the free stuff I use only does one or two things and the stuff I've paid for tends to be big and complex and unlikely to be replaced by something free any time soon. (There are exceptions, like NewsLeecher and IconWorkshop, which I can imagine being replaced by a free tool one day. And there's the stuff like Firefox and Virtual PC which are free but are given away by companies with agendas.) I'm just a geek, too. I don't even have Office installed at the moment (haven't bothered since I moved to a new PC), or an accounting package, CAD software or whatever else someone might need to do their work. (I guess Photoshop and Visual Studio are my main, big "work" programs.)

I'll state my point again: Big, complex, polished open/free replacements of all current commercial software is unlikely because it needs funding, and funding only happens when some company has an agenda that is served by giving away software that they pay to be created.

fb2k is great. It demands that you put some time into setting it up but it works great and it actually allows you get the UI you want.

It's sad that Winamp, with its millions of ugly and functionally-challenged skins designed by people who think hiding buttons in strange Photoshop filters makes a good UI, never provided me with a UI that I liked half as much as what I got out of foobar2000 with half an hour of tweaking from a fresh install. (After discovering columns_ui and the album-art plugins, of course.)

I'm glad there's at least one media playback application for Windows that doesn't have to look like it came from outer-space (but can if that's what you want).

Here's my fb2k config. It's simple and it's exactly what I want.