Bugs / design glitches

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eXpiation
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Bugs / design glitches

Post by eXpiation »

Hey!

Here's a few things I'd like to point out:

1. Media in the preview window plays but it still continues playing (or actually it restarts) when the actual file is run. This causes the song/video to be played twice, creating an interesting but altogether not very useful "echo" effect ;) Though you can stop the preview manually, it gets tiring after a few repetitions. It would be much more intuitive to stop the media playing in the preview automatically when the actual media is launched by a proper player.

2. The Find Files feature doesn't work for me!
http://forum.zabkat.com/viewtopic.php?t=1664

3.1. Closing all the windows of xplorer2 does not end the process. Though this might be thought of as a feature, allowing faster startup, it does hog 10MB of memory for something that's closed, which I think is highly unnecessary. Though it is true the process ends if Alt+X is pressed, this is counter-intuitive, as I doubt a user would remember to press Alt+X instead of just the X button. IE, Mozilla and Explorer (if not running as shell) all take up a single process for multiple windows spawned from that process but the process ends automatically if all windows are closed. I suggest a similar take from xplorer2 or at least an option that would allow this.

3.2. Due to the above, the current implementation also loses user settings when the process is ended, even if by shutdown/logoff it seems. What this would mean is that, for example, if the user adds bookmarks in a session, closes all open xplorer2 windows and shuts down his computer, by the next time xplorer2 is started, none of the bookmarks/settings are saved. He would have to open up a new window of xplorer2 and press Alt+X prior to shutdown just to save his settings.

4. Related to 3, xplorer2 seems to favour a multiple-window config as opposed to 2xExplorer which by design favours single window operation though the user may wish to open multiple instances if it is his preference. This might be seen as a feature, but many features of xplorer2 enforce this style of usage (eg. opening a layout opens a new window instead of changing the current window's layout). For a user such as I, the two-pane-ness of xplorer2 is sufficient for everyday tasks and having to task switch between xplorer2 windows only proves to be counter-intuitive (just like IE windows). It would be great to have the option of single-window usage instead of being forced to use multiple windows.

5. More of a feature that can be kept in mind than a bug: the address bar currently holds a history. Wouldn't it be more efficient for the bar to have an auto-filename/directory completion as well as history (like explorer or the Run dialogue)? I remember having this discussion over 2xExplorer, but nothing seemed to come of it.

6. Another feature thing: bars. I don't know if this is different/reserved for the pro version but 2xExplorer had many bars like drive, sort and view bars. Here in xplorer2, all these seem to have been grouped into single buttons. I agree this does clean up the interface quite a bit but I think accessibility to these functions have decreased (design wise) since it requires an extra click and an extra target to find, as well as being unable to see which state the current view/sort is in as supposed to 2xExplorer where a single glance at which buttons are depressed will tell you what the current state is.

Other than that, great work! It's good to see xplorer2 moving on from the undeveloped, untouched alpha state it was in a while back.

Regards,
eXpiation
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fgagnon
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Post by fgagnon »

Hello, eXpiation, & welcome to the board!

Have you been here before under another name? I ask because it sounds like you've been using 2xEplorer for quite a while and are very familiar with its goodies and have your own 'best practices' to use them. Please frequent the forum & share your ideas.

Following are my comments on your post based on having seen beta versions of x2 in development:

re "1." -- i'm not a media fan, so I'm not bothered by what I can see might be an annoyance. (& Ctrl+Q is an easy preview OFF/ON toggle). Maybe that can be addressed in the future. It does sound like a good idea, but may be somewhat involved to robustly detect when another app starts playing the file-in-focus to know when to shut down the preview.

re "2." -- Your report is not the "usual behaviour" for x2. (The standard windows explorer find function should be invoked from the x2 "lite" version) Please identify the xplorer2 version you are running and your OS & any setup details that may be non-standard.

re "3." -- same observation as above. Your results are different. xplorer2 process should end when all windows are closed. (It does for me on XP -- & has in the past for me when I've checked on w2k & w98)

re "4." -- don't know why you think x2 favors multi-window operation. I only use one most of the the time. It can be cloned for heavy duty file managing, but not necessary, nor favoured IMO.

re "5." -- the addressbar does feature autocompletion of a sort (with up-arrow) to display next matching target in current folder. This is obviously a different list, so history was kept as a menu list.

re "6." -- yes, the Pro version has user definable toolbars which are highly customizable.
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nikos
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Post by nikos »

adding on what fred said:

1. my WMP doesn't repeat after playing one song, it just stops. Exactly how the stand-alone player does it

3. this can't be, you must have left some window hanging; alt+X just automatically closes all windows

5. to autocomplete paths press F1 while you're typing
eXpiation
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Post by eXpiation »

Hey.

Yes I was under kLy I believe but a while back and I can't seem to log on under the old name any more.

1. I don't mean repeat at the end, I mean it starts from the beginning again when the file is played by an actual player.

2. Can anyone recommend a good file finder? I used to use Find.exe that was with Litestep (I think it was part of the Powerdesk suite) but that doesn't take arguments properly. Arg! thx.

3. Ok, it doesn't do this any more, but it certainly used to. And I clearly remember not having a single window open. It seems unreproduceable now so I can't elaborate. Arg. I'll do some more stuffing around. thx

4. What I mean is that doing operations like changing layout automatically opens a new window instead of using the existing one.

5 & 6. Ok, got it. thx

Thanks for the reply guys :) Hoping to get the real version when it comes out.
champ
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Post by champ »

eXpiation wrote:2. Can anyone recommend a good file finder? I used to use Find.exe that was with Litestep (I think it was part of the Powerdesk suite) but that doesn't take arguments properly. Arg! thx.
Locate:
http://www.uku.fi/~jmhuttun/english/softwares.shtml
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/1044509669/1
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Jaykul
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Post by Jaykul »

eXpiation wrote:2. Can anyone recommend a good file finder? I used to use Find.exe that was with Litestep (I think it was part of the Powerdesk suite) but that doesn't take arguments properly. Arg! thx.
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/default.aspx
eXpiation wrote:4. What I mean is that doing operations like changing layout automatically opens a new window instead of using the existing one.
I agree on this one.
--
::Jaykul
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nikos
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Post by nikos »

layouts will be revised in a future interim v1.5 in autumn perhaps
eXpiation
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Post by eXpiation »

Thanks for the file finders :)

btw, Nikos, for 3.: I'm still getting this.

Image

This is of 2 task manager tabs copied and pasted side by side. It's again quite random since it doesn't happen all the time but a lot of the time.

Interesting to note here that Alt+X does close all the open windows but still doesn't end the process, so might have made a mistake about that in my previous post. I don't know.

thx
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Post by nikos »

how many x2 windows do you normally have open, and how many of them are browser (not scrap) windows?

how can it be that in 2 years of testing none of these problems has ever surfaced... and now all hell breaks loose? :(
narayan
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Post by narayan »

Actually I have seen this quite often with MS Office programs too, so this may not be related to x2 at all!

To be precise, despite closing all instances of a particular program, it runs in the background. There is no trace of it in the task manager, and yet it manages to lock things up.

If you remember, that's when we came up with "Wholockme" (download it from http://www.dr-hoiby.com/WhoLockMe/) as a work-around.
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Post by JRz »

Maybe X² has been used extensively and thus used a lot of memory. This all has to be disposed of on termination of the process. That can take quite a while even after the process seems to have vanished (especially when large search results have been used)
Dumb questions are the ones that are never asked :turn:
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Post by nikos »

eXpiation, how many threads does task manager show for the hung x2 process? If you can't see the threads column goto View | Select columns (a little bit like x2 this :))
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Post by eXpiation »

hey.

Narayan: Interesting to know that about some MS apps too. Maybe this is a Windows thing? I know Windows doesn't unload .dll's immediately after termination but this is a .exe. Or does that have absolutely nothing to do with this? Been trying to get that app but the site seems to be down. Will try again.

JRz: Can't be the process taking a while to unload. Was waiting like 10 minutes with no change in mem-usage etc. And don't think I was doing any extensive stuff anyways.

Nikos: I normally only have 1 open but occasionally 2 if I forgot I opened the last one. No scrap windows since this is the *Lite* beta ;)

About the threads: Arg! I didn't check at the time and I've got trouble reproducing the problem now as the process does terminate. Still seems to be random, though I know nothing is random :) Currently I get 6 threads for 1 open window but I guess that's standard. Will post as soon as I get the prob again.
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Post by MKairys »

JRz wrote:Maybe X² has been used extensively and thus used a lot of memory. This all has to be disposed of on termination of the process. That can take quite a while even after the process seems to have vanished (especially when large search results have been used)
I don't think so, JRz. The pages of memory that were used are marked available in the page tables but there is no actual "disposal" that would take any time.

I've also seen MS Office apps and others hang a thread as described. It happens when the thread is trying to creat a window and can't, usually because of a lock it can't get (with MS Word it's often a problem getting a hold of Normal.dot); and rather than time out it just hangs there. Sometimes you can't bring up a window in another thread (i.e. the app entire seems to be un-start-able) until you manually kill the hung thread.

I don't know what can hand an X2 thread - device access perhaps? I think you should track down the thread usage as Nikos suggested.
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Post by MKairys »

Additional thought: if the hanging thread is holding a file-system object you could see that with a tool such as Sysinternals' Process Explorer