Hi everyone,
Storm! has joined the team and provided us with a new logo and splash screen. Have a look. And please comment:
// Oliver
Archive for the 'Feedback' Category
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
STOPzilla, an antispyware is catching the most current WDS installation package as Zlob.YU. While one should never take this too light-hearted, the first reaction of the user who contacted me was of course rather in the direction of an accusation. Nothing wrong with that, if it would have turned out to be true. Not at last I am an AV researcher and developer. Although probably SF.net would be to blame if something like this happened, because all downloads run via them, this would be horrible for my reputation as well.
So, what now? First of all I want to reassure everyone, that the two download samples from different SF.net mirrors that I have taken are not infected, but still reported as Zlob.YU by STOPzilla. Since all mirrors are supposed to be in sync and I got the first report two days back, all mirrors should have the infected file version by now - if there ever was any threat. Instead the fact that only STOPzilla finds it, points to a false positive and I am going to contact the vendor about it.
Second, you need not trust me on that, instead I suggest to visit Jotti and VirusTotal, although these are also not 100% reliable in the end, the heuristics and signatures of different AV scanners are used to examine your file, which gives you a fairly good hint as to whether the file is infected or not.
// Oliver
The short answer is: yes.
The long one is: there is no reason why WDS wouldn’t be Vista compatible. However, depending on how you start it (elevated or not) you will not be able to see certain parts of the file system (which is just the point with the elevation model). Naturally WDS, running under your credentials will have the very same problem, so you should expect to find a - potentially large - chunk called
Please search this blog for further information on the
// Oliver
A user sent us the following registry script via the feedback mailing list. Thanks!
Copy and paste it into a text file and save the text file with the file extension “.reg“. Make sure to modify the path in case you have a non-english system or in case you installed WDS into a different folder. Also make sure to use double-backslashes within the double-quotes.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat Here] @="WinDirStat here ..." [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\WinDirStat Here\command] @="\"C:\\Program Files\\WinDirStat\\windirstat.exe\" \"%L\""
// Oliver
Update: fixed version of the same script by Adnan Zafar.
Today I got a complaint email, so I thought no problem, answer it friendly and things will somehow be solved. The email contained the following text:
I was told to go to Source Forge to download the WinDirStat program. Fortunately I found this website by myself via Google because when I went to SourceForge.net I was never able to find the program even after I paid my son (who is 32 years old) to find it. After about 3 hours he gave up also. But he did find some interesting programs and games NONE OF WHICH we were able to download or purchase.
In conclusion, your source forge website is to darn difficult to find anything on. And when you go to download, he takes you to multiple screens — but none do the download. I wanted to emial you at Source Forge, but can’t complain there either. Does anything work at that website. You could not pay me to go back.