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May 2012 M T W T F S S « May 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Links
Cleanup actions, who uses them right now?
Hi folks,
who of you uses the cleanup actions or even created their own? How complex are they? How difficult would it be for you if they got replaced? I suppose I would provide some rather trivial migration path, but I’m curious. Surprise me … 
// Oliver
Posted in Feedback
21 Comments
To build WDS from the repo …
… you’ll have to have a 7.x SDK registered for any Visual Studio version before 2010. Currently I build with Visual Studio 2005, but solutions exist also for 2008 and 2010.
The reason for this new limitation is that I implemented the progress inside the Windows 7 taskbar buttons.
Side-note: preliminary elevation support exists and I will try to finish that up over the weekend. Thanks to Chris. Once that stands, the next step is to work on limiting the memory use.
More to follow soon,
// Oliver 
PS: I used the 2D-icon set for now. It looks quite good also and since it’s not a release version it doesn’t matter too much. Oh, and the icon is partially responsible for why there were issues with VS 2005, too. If you have problems with the icon set in VS 2005, try copying the rc.exe and rcdll.dll from the SDK bin folder into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin (or wherever you installed your VS 2005).
Posted in Alpha, Pre-release, Project news
8 Comments
WinDirStat icons
Hi folks,
tuqueque sent me the logo project just recently. So tonight I sat down to play a bit with what we got. Since I’m not quite so brilliant with graphics, I had to rely on a little help from IconWorkshop to get this done. The (3D) result, to me, looks pretty convincing for Vista/7 style … however, even the 2D version looks quite nice.
Behold (oh, and click for full resolution)
Which version(s) would you prefer? Should I go for another color instead (see previous post)? Do you think that the 3D-effect should not be shown at some of the resolutions where it now exists or be shown at resolutions that are now flat?
For those who want to test it on their desktop or in some folder, please download the 2D-version and/or the 3D-version by right-clicking the links in this sentence and then using the “Save As” functionality of your web browser. Yes, just opening it in the browser may not yield the desired result
Thanks for your input,
// Oliver
PS: Please note that I went for the gray one intentionally at 16 colors. It simply looks better than any dithered and scaled down version of the colored logo …
PPS: The stuff is all in the repository.
Updates:
More variants
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23 Comments
Another logo proposal
Hi folks,
here is another logo proposal from Venezuela. Frankly, I find it more original than the logo suggested by Storm!. In a strange way it condenses the meaning of what WinDirStat does into a symbol. However, I found there were some demeaning comments about Storm! who also put his time and work into creating his logo. Perhaps you folks could consider that all of this is done in our spare time and in all these years there was only one patch sent to us from outside the team. So please: keep it real
Anyhow, here are the logos and icons as suggested by tuqueque (click for full resolution):
The logos scale neatly as they are in a vector-format.
Please comment. It seems it was put under Creative Commons Attribution, but since there exist variants of that license, I’m going to check back. Until then, for your consideration.
Logo design by Robin “tuqueque” Marín
// Oliver
PS: Given that the MFT parser I’ve been working on requires admin privileges, I was considering to use the different icon colors as indicator as to what mode it is running in (e.g. with admin privileges or not). I’ll have to test it in Vista and 7 to check the feasibility, though.
PPS: Yes, I heard you. I am working on an alpha release that will have some of the new functionality (and a x64 version) so people who have been yearning for updates will have something to check out and provide us with feedbacks. Sorry for the long silence.
Posted in Feedback, Project news
13 Comments
Splash screen and logo
Hi everyone,
Storm! has joined the team and provided us with a new logo and splash screen. Have a look. And please comment:
// Oliver
Posted in Feedback
13 Comments
New project member
Please welcome our new project member Juan (aka neglox)
// Oliver
Posted in Project news, Uncategorized
2 Comments
Need feedback
So far WDS has proven to be fairly stable, but there are people who claim to have seen mysterious crashes every now and then. Now my question: if I was to implement a method in WDS that allows me to get a crash dump (or call it “snapshot”) of WDS at the moment of the crash, would the users be willing to send that information or not?
Yes, there may be sensitive information included in that it might also contains file or folder names. Otherwise no sensitive data will be transmitted. Windows Error Reporting (WER), which is part of Windows at least since XP does the same in a semi-transparent way to Microsoft (and commercial third-party vendors through Microsoft’s WinQual).
I want your thoughts.
Thanks,
// Oliver
Posted in Feedback
13 Comments
MFT again
In order to implement this feature, there is a clear tradeoff: memory. The memory usage will, at least temporarily, spike more than it currently does. However, given that Microsoft surely has put a lot of thought into the structure of the MFT we can at least assume that the respective data is stored efficiently.
// Oliver
Posted in Beta, Uncategorized
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MFT woes …
Just a few comments on my progress. As it appears there is no way to get access to a volume unless one has administrator rights (or – presumably – the volume ACL was changed?). That, of course, creates the problem that the speedup is only available to admins.
However, I think that WinDirStat is mostly used for administrative purposes anyway, thus it will be fine to limit the speedup to this part. Please note that this does not mean that running it as unprivileged user wouldn’t work anymore, but even now this yields biased results …
BTW: the speedup is quite astonishing in my experiments so far.
// Oliver
PS: Yes, I’m talking about read-only access to the volume …
Posted in Uncategorized
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C’mon, keep it real guys
Recently I got an email asking for a trimmed down English-only version of WinDirStat. To be honest I was quite flabbergasted and upset. After all both developers involved in WinDirStat are native Germans, so why not make it a light version that is German-only? I think everyone knows and accepts that English is the lingua franca of the modern world, but by the number of speakers you shouldn’t underestimate Mandarine either. The author of said mail had an English name so we can safely assume he was a native speaker of English. But why the assumption that a light version (he was referring to PortableApps as well) has to be English?
In fact besides the <Unknown> issue the translations were the next biggest issue for me. Why? Because the current system doesn’t allow users to translate themselves and maintain those translations independently from a developer who will have to link the resource DLL for that language. This is something that needs fixing, not the availability of those languages in the installations.
So, sorry. For the moment I’m not up for such an English-only light version. But after all it’s OpenSource … patches are welcome. But then there are these more pressing issues which really ask for patches …
// Oliver
Posted in Feedback
9 Comments
Exploring …
After a user has provided feedback with a potential way of increasing the speed of a scan manifold, I’m currently exploring the USN journal as well as using the MFT (on NTFS drives only) in order to enumerate the contents of a drive or subfolders on it.
// Oliver
Posted in Feedback
4 Comments
Will resume development now
Although I’m not fully back to normal, I’ll start development again and hope to have a version ready around September.
// Oliver
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
Forced technical break
I dislocated my right shoulder a few days ago and will therefore not reply to emails or work on WDS in the next three weeks – minimum.
Update: I’ll undergo orthopedic surgery on 27th of April, which will most likely prolong the break.
// Oliver
Posted in Uncategorized
3 Comments
More FOSS-like release-cycle
When the project was still under Bernhard’s rule, he was always going to release only versions that had passed his test plan. I hope to break this tradition soon and release more often and release earlier. My goal is to put all of the code-base under a testing harness that will allow me to verify and validate much of the functionality without too much manual interaction required. This means you will see unstable versions tagged as “alpha”, “beta” or “RC” (release candidate) as well as stable releases. It is on you to decide whether you want to contribute to the development by testing any of the unstable versions, or whether you want to stick with the stable releases only.
Please note that I will follow these guidelines:
- alpha (may become a weekly or nightly build) is a very early version of a future release. Neither is it guaranteed to work properly, nor at all on your machine. Also, new features in such a version may be unstable. As an example, a saved scan may not be loadable in a “beta” or a stable release of this version.
- beta means that the version is reasonably stable. Features available in a beta may disappear in the stable release, or change considerably.
- release candidate (RC) is a version of the software that has the full set of features (“feature-frozen”) of the anticipated next stable release. One of the RCs will eventually become the actual stable release if no bugs/issues have been reported within a certain time frame.
- stable releases are what you already know from WinDirStat.
// Oliver
PS: Once I am done with the migration of the translations to XML (see previous post), I will release a first alpha version that has the multi-selection feature activated. It will also have an optional online update-check. Before a beta I want to include an improved mouse-navigation as well as a save/load feature to save time and not having to re-scan a directory structure every time. I personally also liked the proposed ignore feature.
Posted in Feedback, Release, Uncategorized
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Translations in XML
Hi,
just wanted to let everyone know that I am currently working out a format for what’s now the resource scripts in XML. You can find a first draft version in revision 174 in the Subversion repository. As you can see, you will have the translations “side-by-side”, which should also make the job of translators easier. Since the encoding of the XML files will be UTF-8, all languages should be just fine, as all natural languages and several artificial languages (such as Klingon) are covered by the Unicode standard of which UTF-8 is one incarnation.
If any of you has ideas for how to improve the current XML format (more additions will follow throughout the next few days), please let me know here in the comment section, via our contact form on the website or in a tracker or the discussion forum at SF.net.
Rationale: it has been increasingly difficult to manage the translations (be it new translations, edits of existing ones by native speakers or changes in the GUI by me). Therefore I was for a while now looking into moving to a more manageable solution that will not require the translator to contact the developer, let alone have the developer “compile” the translation. Of course even with the new system it will be necessary that I include a new language in a future release, but there will be more flexible means of updating languages via the internet and translators will be able to contribute in a very flexible fashion as well.
// Oliver
PS: The XML parser (TinyXML with TinyXPath) will also be used to save/load a scan.
Posted in Feedback, Translation
2 Comments
Oh boy … (update)
The migration to Subversion apparently did have some cost attached to it. Just found out that for whatever reason the resource scripts have been garbled. Hmpf …
Update: Actually the culprit must have been one of the editors used two/three years back, according to the history. It only affected those languages with real diacritic characters (e.g. Polish) and completely different alphabet (Cyrillic/Russian) that could not be fit into the 1252 ANSI code page (the default on my system). This website from Microsoft really helped to find the correct matched for each code page. Hoefully the UTF8 version of the resource scripts is now correct. Parsing the strings inside string tables was pretty straightforward, but the PITA will be the controls in dialogs (which also need to be extracted). Just to explain briefly what I am going to do: all the resource DLLs will be replaced by a text file (most likely XML, as the saving of reports is another good reason to use an XML library already). This will allow anyone with basic understanding of computers to contribute translations (or pieces thereof) without having to know the (slightly convoluted) syntax of resource scripts (.rc files).
// Oliver
Posted in Translation, Uncategorized
4 Comments
WinDirStat 1.3
Since we have some subscribers, I thought I’d let you know that the work has been resumed very officially and that first steps towards a version 1.3 are in full progress.
What I plan to introduce are …
Source code level:
- const-correctness
- Namespaces (new own namespaces and proper usage of existing ones)
- C++ typecasts where possible
- Moving #defines to real C++ constants where possible
New features:
- Update check that can be enabled by the user to receive notifications
- Better mouse navigation
- Save a scan and load it later
- Save report into file (perhaps different formats)
- Proper handling of WOW64 environments
- Explicit Windows Vista symlink handling
- Configuration from different sources (incl. .ini file)
- Native x64 version
- Update: A brand new logo that has been created for and donated to the project (I will likely post a preview soon)
Features that will be removed:
- Support for Windows 9x/ME will be dropped in this upcoming release. Affected users can use the last 1.2 version …
- Support for Windows NT 4.0 may get dropped
- The feedback (bug report) dialog will be replaced by a link to our website where you will be able to enter descriptions of undesired behavior or simple praise
- The send report by mail feature will be removed, instead you will be able to save reports to at least one computer-readable and at least one human-readable file format
// Oliver
Posted in Uncategorized
38 Comments
WinDirStat fan art
Just recently Bernhard received fan art, from a WinDirStat fan and forwarded it to me. We got the permission to put it up on the website by the author, so I am doing this now and here. The image (thumbnail below) shows the patterns of a cushion tree map, nicely shaded so it will work well as a wallpaper. And guess what, that’s what it’s meant for. It fits perfectly to a dual-monitor setup with a resolution of 1280×1024 on both screens. Seems like to appreciate its full beauty you’ll have to grab your copy
Go ahead, right-click and choose “Save target as”:
Thanks to Mathias for sharing it with us.
// Oliver
Posted in Feedback, Uncategorized
3 Comments
Poll about the future of WinDirStat
Good news first. Development on WinDirStat has officially resumed.
Now the question. I know as a matter of fact that there is demand for a 64bit version of WinDirStat. However, since 64bit implies Unicode, there is no need to handle this specifically as long as the compatibility requirements ar Windows 2000 and above. Nevertheless, as you know we actually do have an ANSI version. My proposal would be the following:
- I’ll try to keep compatibility as much as possible, even for Windows 9x/ME.
- Emphasis will be put on Windows 2000 and above – meaning it will be native Unicode.
- The versions offered will stretch 32bit (x86) and 64bit (x64) with Unicode. ANSI may be made available separately.
- New features will only be available in the Unicode versions, but bugs will be fixed in the old one and selected features may be migrated back.
I’ll add a poll soon at this place (possibly as a new post, so people who subscribe to the RSS feed get to see it).
// Oliver
PS: Feel free to comment on this post.
Posted in Feedback
23 Comments