Would you like a forum and/or a Wiki?

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

Posted in Feedback | 8 Comments

Began signing the commits I make to the source repo

I have started to sign the commits to the source repository using GnuPG and will expect the same from future contributors to the project (although OpenSSL with X509 certificates will also be accepted, of course).

It provides a level of trust and the possibility of additional integrity-checking for the source code. Starting with revision 300 on the master repository (on SF.net) this takes effect.

The commitsigs.py extension will be used for the purpose. It can be cloned from here.

Additionally I am keeping a clone on Bitbucket, for “backup purposes” 😉

// Oliver

Posted in Project news | Tagged , | 13 Comments

windirstat.info now also via SSL

The website is now also available via SSL. This also means that you will be able to use the contact page via SSL.

// Oliver

Posted in Project news | Tagged | 3 Comments

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 … :mrgreen:

// Oliver

Posted in Feedback | 30 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 | 9 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) :mrgreen:
2D icons
3D icons

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
3D icons
Download version
More variants
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Posted in Feedback | 31 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):

Black and white, plus icons - first proposal

About box as image, plus icons - second proposal

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” Mar?n

// 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:

Splash screen and logo

// Oliver

Posted in Feedback | 14 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 | Comments Off on MFT again

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 | Comments Off on MFT woes …

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 … :mrgreen:

// Oliver

Posted in Feedback | 10 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