WinDirStat Blog

Hey folks,

being users of WinDirStat and perhaps having contacted me through the contact form or other means, would you like to see a Wiki and or forum for WinDirStat instead of merely the trackers and the mailing list (which is virtually dead, except for the very frequent spammers, which you wouldn’t get to see because the whole list is moderated).

A forum may offer a more lively discussion among users and may be a little more exposed than the mailing list is. This way I’d also spend less time supporting users because you folks could – by merit – become “community” moderators and help newbies or in general help other users. Last but not least this might be one way to share cleanup (and soon other scripted) actions. For the latter a Wiki may be more suitable or even just in addition. The forum AFAIK isn’t tied to the SF.net accounts if we run it on SF.net, but the Wiki would, I think. I only remember faintly from Enchanted Keyfinder.

Whatcha think? Let me know in the comments. Thanks and get well into the year 2013.

// Oliver

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

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:

Changed as requested by Lozzy

Download version

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Hi everyone,

Storm! has joined the team and provided us with a new logo and splash screen. Have a look. And please comment:

// Oliver

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