I ran across three awesome new system utilities this weekend, during my coding marathon.
The first is Xplorer2 file explorer by http://zabkat.com/. I’ve actually been looking at various other file managers, installed, used, and uninstalled several trials, and this one just blew me away. You get a dual pane file manager, tons of shortcuts, integrated ftp, and so much more. The quick file viewer/editor itself is incredibly useful. There are tons of cool features, more than I could hope to explain in a single blog post, so just go try it. There’s a free “lite” version, and a trial of the full version. After using the trial for a full day, I pulled out my credit card and parted with the $29 for the license.
In the help files for Xplorer2, there’s a productivity section with various tips on how to be more… well, productive. It references a bunch of programs, two of which I installed and really love.
The first is unlocker, available at http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/. Ever have a file you want to change or delete and you get a message saying that it’s being used by some other program? So you close the file. And still get the message. Sometimes you have to close the whole application that had the file open to release the lock. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. Unlocker lets your right click on the file, and get a list of processes (generally it’s just one) that have locked the file. You have various options to remove the lock, quit the program, or perform various file operations like delete right there.
I found unlocker really useful when using the Service Capture map to file feature. If you map a swf, sometimes Service Capture will lock the swf so you can’t publish it in Flash again without shutting down and restarting Service Capture. It doesn’t always happen – maybe one time in ten – but it’s annoying. Unlocker makes getting around that a little easier.
The final tool is PowerMenu. This adds several new items to any window’s system menu. The first two allow you to set an application’s priority and transparency. Those have limited usefulness to me, but the next two are great. First, you can make any window “always on top”. This is just awesome if you are using some kind of trace panel. You run your app and then dig through your task bar, or frantically control-tab looking for your trace panel. Now you just keep it on top, make it smaller and off to the side when you aren’t using it, but when you need it, it’s right there. The final option is “minimize to tray”. This lets you minimize any application window to an icon in the system tray rather than a slot on the task bar. Useful for those apps you need to have running, but don’t need to look at often. Reduces the clutter.
Anyway, those are the toy’s I discovered this weekend. Now my pc has a few more things to keep track of, but it seems to be handling it ok, and makes my life easier. I’d be really interested in other similar tools like this that other people are using.
Have you tried Directory Opus (http://www.gpsoft.com.au)? I’ve been using it since the Amiga and I couldn’t use a PC without it. That unlocker tool looks wicked, I’m downloading it now. Thanks!
i saw directory opus, but at about twice the price, i shied away.
Hey Kieth: Just to add a bit of balance, Afloat (http://millenomi.altervista.org/Afloat/) will allow you to create ‘always on top’ windows for Mac OS X with optional transparency, and Spirited Away (http://drikin.com/spiritedaway/en) is essential for keeping your monitor free of unnecessary clutter, much like Power Menu’s minimize to tray feature.
Oh, and Directory Opus? Man that takes me back. I used to worship Directory Opus on my Amiga 600/1200. Didn’t realise it was still around, but I might check it out for nostalgia’s sake.
Heh, I’ve been using xplorer^2, Unlocker and PowerMenu for a while now and I am loving it! 😀
Directory Opus was also my main tool on Amiga. When I first came to PC there was no DirOpus so I started using Windows Commander (now Total Commander) which I’m still using. Xplorer2 looks very promising but I miss a couple of features like better FTP support, more clear multi-rename tool (the one in TC is awesome) and I still haven’t figured out how to zip several files with XPlorer. I will keep an eye on that tool! 🙂
I tried TotalCommander for a while too. Looks powerful, but a little too hard core for me. I didn’t like that it disabled your right click stuff for files. Maybe that’s configurable, I don’t know.
You mean selecting files/dirs with right button instead of left? Yes that can be configured. If XPlorer improves some more, I’ll probably switch as it looks more polished to me.
unlocker is really usefull thanks.
i use total commander, it has tons of features
Directory Opus ++
Hey Keith, take a lot at this little program: http://www.visualtasktips.com/
It’s cute an pretty useful 🙂
Not sure if you’ve tried Launchy but it’s really nice for quickly launching programs without worrying about the start menu or the quick launch bar or anything…
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve actually started a new site and may review some of these there:
http://www.101reviews.net
I just tried xplorer2. Pretty cool. I’ll probably buy it, though I could not for the life of me figure out how to get the FTP to work.
just type an ftp address into the address bar on top:
ftp://username:password@ftp.mydomain.com
One thing is that if your user name or password contains an @ symbol, use %40 instead. So if your user name was me@mydomain.com:
ftp://me%40mydomain.com:password@ftp.mydomain.com
After that, you can bookmark your ftp site and use it like any other folder. Very cool.
I also found that if you have Service Capture running, xplorer2’s ftp dies.
Similar to xplorer2, but maybe some features missing like ftp (not sure about this one), is XploreXP (http://www.explorerxp.com/). I use it everyday and works pretty well, also, it’s freeware.