Jon Jon Binks
11-19-2004, 09:13 AM
First, thank you for the incredibly detailed reviews of Directory Opus 8 and 6. As far as I can tell you have the only full review of DO8 on the web. Na Zdrowie!!
You cover all the FEATURES, but I was wondering why you don't highlight the PERFORMANCE as well. From my use of DO8 so far and DO6 before it, this is another major selling point. I find the speed of programs to be vitally important. So many programs are just plain SLOW and there's no good excuse for it (well, there's lots of excuses, mind you, just none I deem good, ha ha).
Especially file listers. I have surveyed hundreds of them and the single most common reason I dump them from consideration is poor speed. I test on directories with thousands of files and most choke - sometimes it takes them 10 SECONDS or more to come back to life, and sometimes they even barf when I try to scroll that many files. Ugh. Obviously not acceptable, and it's odd to me that most fileman progs are not tested in these ways.
The other big speed issue is in the file find/search area. Again, most programs either rely on the built-in Find which is not only slow but one of the most horrible interfaces ever, or they have their own equally inept find mechanism. Not so DO! It rocks. (Although I must note it is still squashed bugs compared to a journaling and fully-indexed file system such as that on the oft-lamented BeOS or now available on Linux also in Reiser, ext3, etc. I do my media work using Linux and when I search my 250GB drive I get instant results. Indexing is the wave.)
One other minor point. For more competing programs that are a tad more robust, perhaps mention TrackerV3, A43, Servant Salamander, SpeedCommander. None remotely touch DO but they're better than the ones you list, except Total Commander which is quite good within its limits.
You cover all the FEATURES, but I was wondering why you don't highlight the PERFORMANCE as well. From my use of DO8 so far and DO6 before it, this is another major selling point. I find the speed of programs to be vitally important. So many programs are just plain SLOW and there's no good excuse for it (well, there's lots of excuses, mind you, just none I deem good, ha ha).
Especially file listers. I have surveyed hundreds of them and the single most common reason I dump them from consideration is poor speed. I test on directories with thousands of files and most choke - sometimes it takes them 10 SECONDS or more to come back to life, and sometimes they even barf when I try to scroll that many files. Ugh. Obviously not acceptable, and it's odd to me that most fileman progs are not tested in these ways.
The other big speed issue is in the file find/search area. Again, most programs either rely on the built-in Find which is not only slow but one of the most horrible interfaces ever, or they have their own equally inept find mechanism. Not so DO! It rocks. (Although I must note it is still squashed bugs compared to a journaling and fully-indexed file system such as that on the oft-lamented BeOS or now available on Linux also in Reiser, ext3, etc. I do my media work using Linux and when I search my 250GB drive I get instant results. Indexing is the wave.)
One other minor point. For more competing programs that are a tad more robust, perhaps mention TrackerV3, A43, Servant Salamander, SpeedCommander. None remotely touch DO but they're better than the ones you list, except Total Commander which is quite good within its limits.