First public release of DiskWave
I have not been blogging a lot lately. The truth is that I have been busy coding.
WhichSize DiskWave is a freeware for MacOS X 10.6 (hence Intel Macs only for now) that can recursively size the directories on your drive. This allows to quickly identify and reclaim wasted space.
It is freely available here: http://diskwave.barthe.ph/
DiskWave was basically hacked in a weekend, but this is not a new idea. I already worked on a similar project, back in 2004, after discovering OmniDiskSweeper. I was appalled by the terrible performance of OmniDiskSweeper and quickly realized I could do a better job. So I learned Cocoa, ObjectiveC, the Carbon APIs, and came up painfully with a prototype only to discover that another software named WhatSize was free and worked very well. I also had a tricky memory leak due to a bug in Cocoa API. So I quitted.
Fast forward to 2010. OmniDiskSweeper is no longer a shareware, but its performance is still bad. WhatSize is no longer a freeware. The old freeware version of WhatSize I have is a PowerPC version, but since I moved to Snow Leopard, I felt like I did not want to install Rosetta. So here is DiskWave.
So this time, I did my homework, and it does not look like there is a suitable alternative. Here is the list of similar tools (on MacOS X) I came up with:
- OmniDiskSweeper.
- Freeware (formerly shareware)
- Slower because it relies on Cocoa APIs. It also consumes a lot of memory.
- Does not have many more features than DiskWave. I hope to catch up pretty soon…
- WhatSize
- Shareware (formerly freeware)
- Same speed. Consumes a little bit more of memory, because it supports another feature that requires it
- Does have many more features than DiskWave. Some of them, I never intend to get: fat binaries removal, locale removals, etc…
- The thing that annoys me is that you can size/browse only one drive at a time.
- DaisyDisk
- Shareware
- New kid on the block. The visualization is really awesome but… I do not find it that practical.
- If I ever wish to play with CoreAnimation, I may add an animated sunburst view.
- GrandPerspective
- Opensource
- Seems to work well and is properly maintained. But I do not like this kind of visualization.
- DiskInventory X
- Opensource
- It looks like it is no longer maintained. I do not fancy the GUI. Same as GrandPerspective.
DiskWave being in its early infancy is somewhat limited in terms of features. I hope to gradually upgrade it. If you have ideas of features you would like to see added, just let me know.
Reference:
- DiskWave homepage: http://diskwave.barthe.ph/
Update April 12th 2010:
- Renamed WhichSize into DiskWave after receiving complaints from id design, inc.