News and discussions around WinDirStat
WDS shows a certain item labelled “<Unknown>” and recently someone posted a comment asking for details:
i think it would be nice to put in the faq or in help or in some docs what’s in the “unknown” space
sometimes it’s an huge amount of space… like 700 or more MB … i think it could be the “system volume information” but… what mysterous things are within this space? he he he…
Tonight I re-released the installer for WDS 1.1.2 once more to include the Dutch translation which I had forgotten to include in the last update from September. So if Dutch is your mother tongue and you’d like to get WinDirStat in this language as well, install WDS over the existing 1.1.2 version to get support for Dutch.
Finnish and Estonian are in the works. The translators have already sent these translations to me - however, I did not find the time to fix the files and include them, yet.
Again, this re-release is only for Dutch (and Belge) people. You won’t miss anything if you don’t need this language.
// Oliver
PS: Feedback about the Dutch version is welcome. I guess some strings don’t fit again. This will hopefully be fixed with the next major release of WDS, since I intent to use dynamically sized dialog elements that fit the content for any supported language …
Diese Woche am die c’t 21/06 raus und WinDirStat ist auf der CD enthalten und in einem (sehr kurzen) Artikel erwähnt. Genau weil ich schon vor Wochen von einem c’t-Redakteur angeschrieben wurde, gibt es überhaupt ein deutsches Setup.
// Oliver
Hi,
some days ago I created a mailing list (it’s actually only an alias diverting messages to all who are in the destination field) for the betatesters and sent the first message. If you did not receive one but already wrote a mail to me this is definitely a mistake on my side. Drop me another mail and I’ll send you the introductory message as well as put you on the list.
Thanks,
Oliver
This week c’t 21/06, a German computer magazine was published along with WinDirStat on the CD. Although the brief article misspells it as WindDirStat I am very glad it is featured there. Especially for this reason I had also prepared a German installer some weeks ago.
// Oliver
We are currently in search for beta-testers.
The next final release will be preceded by a semi-public beta-test. I’d like anyone who is interested to reply here or contact me through the contact form on the website. There will be a beta-website that will be password-protected. You will be able to download the latest build there and report issues or see which issues have been solved in which build.
Contact me here
// Oliver
We’d like to thank the donators for every donation we received. If you are curious: 10% of the donations go to Sourceforge, Paypal claims a fee too and the rest will be invested into either directly project related matters (for example a cool designed logo?!) or into books which provide us with knowledge that is of course also used to develop WinDirStat.
// Oliver
Hi,
I saw a raise in number of downloads after my announcement yesterday. However, it is not necessary to download WDS again if you already have it installed. The version contained in the re-released packages is still 1.1.2!
A beta phase will soon start and I hope that some of our users can be found who are interested in testing WDS, so that the upcoming release will be as great as any previous ones.
// Oliver
Today I made a re-release of 1.1.2. This only affects the installer and the ZIP archive. The source and consequently the binary files - inside the archives and the installer - have not been touched.
As I mentioned earlier there have been reports of corrupt archives. To mitigate the problem I just re-packed the ZIP files once more using WinRAR instead of 7-ZIP. This should be more downward-compatible. I removed the old setup.exe from the ZIP archives as it is not supported anymore.
The installer is now the preferred deployment method and supersedes the old setup.exe. German support has been added to the installer, since WinDirStat was chosen to be included on the CD of a famous German computer magazine. Otherwise this support would have been added with the next major release.
// Oliver
In the last week, an article of the Chicago Tribune caused a lot of trouble. The author of the article mentioned WinDirStat, but linked to KDirStat from his article. Many of the readers tried to download the KDirStat archive, but were disappointed that it did not work. This was only natural, though, since the archive was meant for KDE running on Linux.
So what is KDirStat then? Whoever read the about box of WinDirStat will have noticed, that Bernhard was inspired by KDirStat and wrote WinDirStat. So if you will, WinDirStat could be considered a clone or port of KDirStat, although neither description really fits the relationship. However, the projects KDirStat and WinDirStat are not otherwise related except for the aforementioned relationship. Continue reading ‘KDirStat is not WinDirStat …’
Of the feedback we get, one of the most often asked questions is what to do with a “corrupt archive” error. The generic answer to this would be: download the file again and retry. However, I have the suspicion that 7-Zip might create ZIP files which appear as corrupt to older unpackers. In this case downloading the file again won’t change anything …
For users having this particular problem I recommend you download our installer. Should, for some strange reason, this installer be downloaded and report a corruption, this really means a download error occurred. In this case downloading it again should really solve the problem. An alternative of downloading the installer would be to download an update of your packer/unpacker software from the vendor or use a free program such as 7-Zip.
// Oliver
Today I got a question from one of our users. As you might know it is often hard to imagine such questions for someone developing software, since developing naturally means you are very familiar with the system for which you write the software.
Therefore I am grateful for any hints what may be wrong with our software or where to add a hint how to use this or that. Here is the question:
This is on a Windows 98 […].
When I would try to open the program I would get a message that the file was too large for Notepad and would I like to open it with Wordpad. Responding YES I get pages of what looks like programing language.
Continue reading ‘Notepad won’t open the WinDirStat archive?’
Just wanted to collect some of the links to WinDirStat from bloggers (or similar sites) to send trackbacks to them and notify them of the existence of this blog 
Where there was an article, not just the link to us, I included it in the following list Continue reading ‘Links to WinDirStat … and back ;)’
In this blog the WinDirStat team is going to make announcements concerning WinDirStat releases (beta and non-beta) as well as raising issues and discussing with the WinDirStat user community.
If you want to be notified of new releases please subscribe to this mailing list. This mailing list has not seen any posts yet and will be very low-traffic.
Very likely I will soon create and announce another mailing list intended for beta testers. There will also be a beta tester website in future where the beta testers will find informations and downloads and can issue bug reports and so on.
// Oliver