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Posted by Wayne K
Jan 25, 2014 at 03:22 PM
Achim,
Thank you for the additional details. You’re right about the gridline option; I missed that. Regarding editing the columns in place, I tried it again and it worked at first, but try this: create a new column (eg “Authors”). Now move the column to the left of the “Name” column. Now try to add an entry to the “Authors” column. I’m unable to do it on my machine. If I double-click the “Authors” column, it opens the file. That’s what I was running into last night when I concluded you can’t edit columns.
I also ran into this problem: after moving another column to the left of the Name column, as described above. When I tried to select a file, it would highlight only the information in the left-most column, and not the Name column. This made it difficult to see what was selected. But this behavior wasn’t consistent; sometimes it would behave this way and sometimes it would go back to highlighting the Name column.
Maybe these problems are caused by incompatibility with a Win 7, 64 bit system.
Posted by Wayne K
Jan 25, 2014 at 03:25 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>How about Snap DB?
>http://skwire.dcmembers.com/fp/?page=snap-db
>
>Never tried it but it looks very simple to use and seems fairly popular:
>http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25028.0
Thanks for the reminder, Dr Andus. I already it on my “Try Someday” list so this might be a good time to look at it.
Posted by Wayne K
Jan 25, 2014 at 04:37 PM
Dr Andus wrote:
>How about Snap DB?
>http://skwire.dcmembers.com/fp/?page=snap-db
>
>Never tried it but it looks very simple to use and seems fairly popular:
>http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25028.0
I gave it a try. There’s no way to import file links that I could see. I’d have to manually enter the information for each file. That’s not practical. It’s a nice little program though on first glance I’m not sure what it does that you couldn’t do in an Excel spreadsheet where you’d have many more options for formatting etc. Maybe the filtering is easier and it’s better at handling large databases.
Posted by 22111
Jan 27, 2014 at 05:01 PM
Wayne said,
“Ultra Recall was another program I found unintuitive. Again, that may very well be my fault.”
No, it’s not, it’s almost all there, but as for “availability”, that’s another question; it’s a classic example of a “coder’s” program, not an application designed by a “sw designer”... but it has been mentioned very often in this thread, and rightly so: It offers much more re file M (and re external file formats) than most outliners do today.
There’s also the opinion of “be it proprietary or not, I’m happy as long as it works” - I’ve got some prob with that, since any possible “exporting your stuff”, whenever you might deem that sensible, might become more or less impossible, because the heavier you rely on such functionality, the more “manual” (i.e. perhaps scriptable) work will have to be done then, on “switching systems” (that has always been my argument against cloning, too).
Windows Explorer has been mentioned, too - I should have another look into it since for the time being, there’s a paradox: MS did away with ADS, and then, Explorer, even in 7/8, relies on “columns”? Realized how, technically, then? Proprietary, again? That’d be the limit, as they say!
Wayne, since you mention DO and XY in a row, don’t leave out X2 there - I’m not fond of either of them (and I put in my arguments for that), but if you accept such a solution, I don’t see why X2 was in any way not as good as DO or XY here… and even, if you delve into it, X2 even does it BETTER than DO (both with ancient ADS), whilst XY’s system doesn’t seem to be compatible with anything. Btw., it would be interesting to know if DO and X2’s solutions are perfectly interchangeable in any system from XP to 8. (I once used X2 on a daily basis for this, and I just needed a VERY light macro to do it all very well, since (as you mentioned, too), DO’s respective functionality is much more cumbersome.)
Many tools I never heard of are mentioned here - thank you very much!
I just wanted to mention DiviFile here again. In fact, I didn’t trial it because from its description, I didn’t think it worthwile, but I was mistaken, since:
http://listserv.vt.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ASKSAM-L;4e19bdd3.1401
“There are two nice programs for creating and managing virtual folders: DiviFile (free, GNU) and Tabbles (free for personal use).
The DiviFile keeps tracks of the files even if those files are moved to different locations.”
This last feature, i.e. monitoring file moves, stands out from the crowd of similar tools (and is absolutely mandatory as I’m concerned) - so this little tool is certainly worth another, more thorough look, too.
Posted by jimspoon
Jan 27, 2014 at 07:13 PM
22111 - are you referring to Alternate Data Streams? It seems they have not been discontinued but are still in wide usage. Please see my “file metadata” thread which I just updated. (don’t want to hijack Wayne’s thread about Wincatalog and other programs that do what he’s looking for)