admin wrote:
Mesh,
help me stop my wondering: Why do you go into this labour of working out a Dual Pane Proposal for XY instead of using one of the numerous DP file managers that already exist?
Don
For years, I used PowerDesk. It was basic, but it served my needs. It finally reached the point earlier this year, where the bugs and lack of development and support tipped the balance and I decided it was time to find a new file manager.
I researched what's out there at the moment, and I looked into or evaluated most of the promising ones that appeared to have the features I wanted and needed (which included dual pane support). They all failed to meet my standards and requirements. The two most promising ones on my initial list were Directory Opus and Xplorer2.
Directory Opus had a lot of features, but they were not well implemented. Actions and behaviors that should have been intuitive, set by default, or easy to access instead took many people hours to find and use. And one of the dealbreakers for me was how it was set to run - unlike most other file managers, Directory Opus was not used as a standalone app. It was designed to always run in the background - this, to me, was a poor choice for the developers to make, and I was unwilling to use a file manager designed that way.
Xplorer2 seemed to be where I was heading - until I looked into it more closely. While it had an ambitious set of features, it was not well coded. There were a lot of bugs that should not have been there, and it lacked the polish of a well cared for application. When I came across a bit of information that the developer had lost interest in it as a project, this made sense to me. Clearly, it didn't make the cut - and it appeared to be set up to go the same route as Powerdesk.
So, I went back and looked at the second tier of my list - apps that looked promising, but didn't have the full set of features I was looking for. XY was on this list, and I'm extremely thankful that circumstances led me to evaluate it.
With the sole exception of dual pane, it had everything I wanted in a file manager - heck, it had everything I look for in any application. It was well thought out, well implemented and polished. It was well cared for by you, the developer - with regular and prompt attention to bug fixes. You take feature requests seriously, whereas many developers take them as a personal attack, and you do your best to implement those feature requests if they make sense to you as something worthwhile.
In short, it's not just the existing codebase, but your attention and relationship with your users that make XY so special and set it apart from most apps I have come across.
That's what makes it worthwhile to go through what it takes to see dual pane implemented in XY. As much as I want dual pane, it's not worth having it bundled with an inferior application, inferior support, and inferior development.
Most things that are worthwhile take effort - and despite the obstacles, you've offered to make that effort as a developer. The least I can do is meet you halfway and make whatever effort I can contribute as a user to see this through. You and your program are worth the effort, and worth the wait (although, as a developer, you've already sold me - and I'll be purchasing a lifetime license later this week).
), because I realize how much Don puts into XY and I want to do whatever I can to help the cause...that includes the numerous hours that I've spent extracting the change logs into the blog, mainly to make it easier to access...and working to get XY some publicity in the media, and back on wikipedia, etc.
) on this "project".
