Aymeric on software

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  • It looks like it is no longer maintained.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.

DiskWave, MacOS X, My Software

I guess this is hardly news to anyone but me, since I have not written a single line of Java for the past 4 years, but apparently Xcode has dropped the support for Java projects.

As of Xcode 3.2.1, there is no way to create a command line or Swing application project which is fully managed by Xcode. There is still support for the Java syntax in the text editor and the java compilation tools are also installed, though.

One of the default project templates, JNI library, does actually let you create a project containing java files. However these files are compiled with ANT. This demonstrates that Xcode can still be used for Java development through the use of “external build systems”, but that’s it… Java is no longer a first class citizen in Xcode.

I guess this decision makes sense for Apple. The Cocoa bindings for Java have not been supported since MacOS X 10.4 after all.

Java, MacOS X, XCode

Today I have released the first public version of my latest toy, called MacExe. Its still in its infancy, but it works reasonably well on the machines I tested it on. Basically it is a piece of software that allows MacOS X Finder (explorer equivalent) to display Windows applications icons.

MacOS X, My Software