XYplorer Beta Club

Albeit late, I find myself liking the size circles!
Is there any chance the inner diameter can be directly proportional to the actual size and not fixed for a certain range?

+1

How should that work/look?

I was simply thinking that if we have, let's say, a 10 MB file and a 50 MB file, the radius of the inner circle of the bigger file should be somehow 5x bigger than the one of the smaller file. BUT, admittedly, it's nearly impossible to achieve that, given that the circles are 19 px in diameter, there simply is not enough resolution.

So, an idea could be this: the background circle still gives the order of magnitude of the size, like now, while the inner circle is replaced by an indicator like this (without the numbers of course)
So you can better differentiate different file sizes, since you're not working with linear sizes (that require more pixels) but with angles.

And if I can give add more cents to all this, why don't you add all the customizability we are seeing in Age Spots to Size Circles? You know, to make it par, for consistency. We could define our own size classes (background circles) and all the colors, and perhaps even toggle between linear and logarithmic mode for the inner spinner (because that's how the human brain processes numbers).

Well, I'm not so convinced. I think the strength of the size circles is their simplicity with is achieved through drastic simplification. What you suggest turns it from *seeing* back to *reading*.

Also there is already the option to use Size Bars, which have higher resolution.

Customizability: Yes, that could be done later. You are the first to ask for (at least that weren't many).

The "problem" with bars is that they require too much space. Circles are perfectly compact instead.
My idea is simply this, "wrapping" a bar around a circle. Just that. There's no reading involved, because the indicator gives a good representation of the size but it's still not accurate enough to give you a "reading". Imagine this: you have a music library of flac files, ranging from 5 MB to 90 MB, and you sort them by size. With the indicator you can quickly see if there's something very big or very small.

Darn, I can't find the original thread on "size cycles" to read up again the meaning of the nested circle colors. Does someone has the link for me?

Anyway, I support Marco's idea.

Additionally
After Don said Yahoo! I've re-tried both Circles-of-Zen again.

Well, the Age Circles are visual overload and stealing precious screen estate with my specific usage scenario (just two selectors: < 1h, 1h > AND < 24h), so I'll stick to my Color Filters.

But the Size Circles together with Flexible (Round Up) are indeed an improvement. However, with the rounded size numbers I wish the tooltips would support the Flexible notation. It's making not much sense to ease the visual side of things but enforcing to re-do the conversion math in return.

Filehero wrote:Darn, I can't find the original thread on "size cycles" to read up again the meaning of the nested circle colors. Does someone has the link for me?

No link, but code. This is a custom column definition that perfectly replicates the size circles:

admin wrote:No link, but code. This is a custom column definition that perfectly replicates the size circles:

Thanks Don.

Could the existing formats be applied to the info tips?

Sorry?

admin wrote:Sorry?

could the file size info tips also support the Flexible format?

Currently, circles + Flexible (rounded up) ease my live significantly (exactly as descrived in your release notes), but once I want to know exact sizes I only get the atomar bytes number -> Now have to do the math on my own again.

But the Flexible format is already shown in your list. Why show it in the info tip again?

admin wrote:But the Flexible format is already shown in your list. Why show it in the info tip again?

Space. With Circles on I'd like to replace Flexible with Flexible (Round Up) to keep the space col as small as possible.

It's not essential, I just thought maybe you could re-use existing code w/o much work.

I currently find it neater as it is now.

admin wrote:I currently find it neater as it is now.

Okidoki.