Friday, November 16, 2007

Thanks for the support

Oh yeah, thanks for all the nice mails I've received from people who love the program! I started this program mainly for myself (couldn't understand why no one else had done it this way), and I'm glad so many other people feel the same way.
It was great to see my question answered on Raymond Chen's legendary blog, The Old New Thing:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/10/29/5750353.aspx
The answer ("because it creates too much network traffic") is overly simplistic, but makes sense from a Microsoft point of view. They'd rather be safe than sorry. Still, the Mac has a built-in folder size option, off by default, but easy to turn on. In the comments, I notice that many people who don't use the program claim they wouldn't want to lose resources to the feature, because they don't use it anyway.... not noticing their own circular logic.
Also, I put a new Donate button at the bottom of the main page. Feel free to use it if you like. If you want to use the program for free, go ahead - I don't see why you shouldn't get to use a program that already exists just because you don't want to pay for it. This is my return for the years of amazing things I've enjoyed for free online. When copying and distribution is free and infinite, property rights are meaningless.

Version 2.4 Released

Finally, 2.4 is ready for download. Check the changelog or the source code for new features and fixes. One much requested new feature is disabling drive types. Now you can disable folder size for your network drives. Or disable it for your USB drive if it's not unmounting properly. But you might as well leave them all on, because it uses less memory now. If you could look what is in all the memory it's using, it would be mostly strings of paths. These are now all relative paths instead of absolute paths. It's still storing every relative path twice, so it could be cut down quite a bit more.
Finally you can download a 64-bit version! I've had it working for a while, but wanted to finish other changes before making install packages. It's kind of a pain to manually make installers, and make sure I haven't screwed up anything in the code. After I posted the 64-bit version, the next day I noticed that I posted the wrong file, that had a bug with logging into network drives. I updated the file without changing it in any other way, which is not a nice thing to do according to the MSI rules, but I didn't want to update all those files too. Hopefully no one will notice. It will be interesting to see which package is more popular!
I don't know if there will be a Vista version. An Ubuntu version is looking more likely.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

New Release Imminent

Hey, thought I'd finally post something here about the status of the new version. I'm doing some final testing now on version 2.4! There are some new features (64-bit support, disabling drive types, new translations), some bug fixes (fixed size updating with moving folders), and some optimizations (should use less memory), so hopefully there's something for everyone. However, I haven't fixed some of the bigger issues - Vista support, and the scanner performance problem with too many files in one folder. But I should get this nice collection of fixes out. So I'll probably do a few more days testing before calling it done. There's nothing worse than posting a new version, then finding a critical bug immediately, and then fixing it requires updating all the version numbers again. So, check back for updates in a few days...