blog: future so bright, i gotta wear shades

[dunno]

Overwrite to oblivion is a cool idea

No, it is a bad and evil idea.

regarding the delete to oblivion, I don't think you understand the basic design philosophies of merge and overwrite as implemented by Unix, OSX, and MS. If I have "accidently" deleted something to oblivion I restore it from my external backup, no problem. Backups rule
besides, my bin would would have to huge to retain all the movies, photos and music which I delete regularly, which is why I use "Shift-Delete".

I agree with the sentiment that it's a users responsibility to have knowledge in how a application executes certain actions, yes there is the standard default action which is not volatile, but, if I use application xyz the onus is upon ME to further educate myself on it's feature set especially the volatile features, i.e. to RTFM...

I'm not very fond of reading the manual myself, as some posts on this site will verify

[Cosmo]

If I have "accidently" deleted something to oblivion I restore it from my external backup, no problem.

As you said already, you do not use the recycle bin. But the bin is a part of Windows and a huge part of Windows users (the majority?) use it. Don't tell them, that they must act as you do. They also do not tell you, that you have to change your usage.

And regarding the manual (leaving out the fact, that no one knows the content of the manual for the new features): Believing, that a user reads in a some-hundred-pages-document for searching, that surprisingly(!) the sync-feature does not use the bin is completely unrealistic. How can somebody expect this, who "is not very fond" doing so?

Not to question, that regularly backing up is an important thing when handling with computers. But backups and recycle bin are 2 different things, none of both is a replacement for the other. Not to forget, that Nikos claimed the bin as a replacement for the in x2 missing undo feature.

[Kilmatead]

* Actions > Split file dialog includes a standard size for RapidShare uploads (100MB)

Just for the fun of it, I tested this (who's thorough?) and x2 dutifully took a 51GB file and generated a happy 525 100MB files from it.  Exactly how necessary this setting is, however, is questionable as WinRAR already provides the ability to create split archives - and if RapidShare is known for anything, it's the sheer number of split RAR's it hosts (auto-reintegrated during extraction).

As an observation, since RapidShare is a brand name, they would probably appreciate you giving them a couple of capital letters: RapidShare, as their website suggests.  Just a thought.

Another observation, the above task took a fond 25 minutes - during which time x2 did not "refresh", and was incommunicado) so the progress bar is rather pointless for large tasks.  Why isn't this split off as a background process, such as Move/Copy?  (Spawning another x2 process was the only way to check it's progress.)

And just for equilibrium, when splitting a file the dialogue provides a possibility to search for target folder... but when merging it only provides a target file (redirection to folder is manual only).  Functional, yes - elegant? Hmm...

[nikos]

as usual for the rare tasks you just clone a new xplorer2 window with ctrl+N and have your "background thread"

the merge part also accepts paths if necessary e.g. c:\merged_file.exe

[Cosmo]

What really bothers me with the split feature is the still missing batch file. If x2 would create a batch file, that would merge the splittet parts, this could be used to give the splittet parts to somebody, who does not have x2. At now the recipient of the splittet file has to type a copy-command in the console and many users are not able to do so. (Other option would be a simple EXEcutable, which does the merging job. The German file manager Idoswin comes with such a merging tool.)

Until this is solved, the little tool Splitter light (only a few KB in size) does the better job; it creates the batch file and can also easily be added to the send splittet files.

[Cosmo]

Nikos, please correct this. The problem is still there in the current beta.

Another thing, which bothers me since a long time: Wherever in x2 you have to set a value (e.g. defining an advanced rule with a creation date for a file), where you can change the value with 2 arrows up/down (in German this is called "Drehfeld", translated "rotary field", can someone please tell me the official English word for that?), you have to click the down arrow to rise the value and the up arrow to lower the value. Not only is this against all logic (and again and again I at first click the wrong value), it is contrary to all other programs, where in this kind of field "up" is really "up" and "down" means in fact "down". Please use the next version to correct this.