I have to confess, I fell in love recently. Sounds weird? Right, it gets even more weird if I tell you that I fell in love with a file manager. The file manager is called Speed Commander (SC) and I am truly sorry to not have found it years ago. The respective project exists already for more than a decade.
So what’s so cool with it you ask? SC is shareware. This means you can try before you decide whether to buy it. Although I am developer of more than one OpenSource (and therefore also free – as in “free beer”) software, I usually try to balance between the effort required to write it myself and the time it would spare me to use such a program instead of the one I am using at the moment. The predecessor of SC on my machine was Turbo Navigator. Since it was written in Delphi or Borland C++ Builder, its Unicode support was non-existent. However, it was free (as in “free beer”) but not OpenSource. Neither is SC, in fact SC is commercial and ClosedSource. Nevertheless it rocks. This file manager is a joy to use. The only things that really distract me at the moment are the new program icons, the rest is better and some stuff I have to get used to.
Give it a try. In fact I think about porting the treemap code into an ActiveX and write a plugin for SC to show treemaps directly there. Of course such an ActiveX (COM) control would be accessible from any other application as well. The idea is to make WDS more modular and allow to share the code-base for the treemap between WDS and this ActiveX.
// Oliver