TxQuickView v1.20 - Universal file viewer plugin (Shareware)

[Sven]

TxQuickView is a universal file viewer plugin for Total Commander. It embeds Windows Media Player, QuickTime and RealPlayer for multimedia files and show all information (including ressources) for executable files. The viewer for Delphi forms can be easily extended with your own derived Delphi classes by adding them to TxQuickView.ini. TxQuickView hosts the Internet Explorer for viewing HTML and PDF. If a folder is selected in TC, TxQuickView displays a tree view with subfolders and their sizes.

Supported formats:

• Images: AWD, BMI, BMP, BW, CAL, CALS, CDR, CDT, CEL, CIT, CLP, CMX, COT, CPT, CUR, CUT, DCX, DIB, FLC, FLI, GEM, GIF, HAM, HRZ, ICN, ICO, IFF, IMG, JFF, JIF, JMX, JPE, JPG, LBM, MIL, MAC, MSP, OFX, PAN, PAT, PBM, PC2, PCD, PCT, PCX, PGM, PIC, PNG, PNM, PPM, PSD, PYX, QFX, RAS, RGB, RLE, SAM, SCx, SEP, SGI, ST, STW, SUN, TGA, TIFF, UDI, WPG, ZBR, ZMF
  
  Multimedia: CDA, AIF, AIFC, AIFF, ASF, ASX, AVI, WAV, WAX, WM, WMA, WMD, WMP, WMV, WMX, WPL, WVX, MPEG, MPG, M1V, MP2, MP3, MPA, MPE, MP2V, MPV2, MID, MIDI, RMI, AU, SND0, VOB, SWF (with WMP9), MOV, QT (with installed QuickTime), RAM, RM (with installed RealPlayer)
  
  Documents: DFM (Delphi forms), HTM, HTML, RTF, WRI, Text, PDF
  
  Documents with installed MS-Office: DOC, WK1, WK3, WK4, WPS, XLS
  
  Executable files: EXE, DLL, OBJ, LIB, DBG, SYS, CPL, DRV, OCX, AX, BPL, EXP
  
  Font files: FON, FNT, OTF, TTF

Minimum requirements: Windows 95/NT4 with IE5, Windows 98 or higher

Download: http://www.sp-download.de/plugins/TxQuickView.zip

Installation: Simply extract TxQuickView.zip to your Total Commander directory and add the TxQuickView.wlx as a lister plugin.

Settings: TxQuickView saves it settings in the registry under [HKCU\Software\SpeedProject\TxQuickView].

I will release TxQuickView as Shareware (60 day trial version). After 30 days an information dialog is shown when the plugin is loaded.

Happy viewing.

[Jon Canale]

I like it. I understand your link to SpeedCommander - it seems this viewer is one of the very good aspects of that product. I just had to turn off the PDF viewer and send it to "Dump", because I have IE download those files instead of viewing them. After that, it was great.

There is no information in your download, or in the "About" dialog, as to where to go for registering, or how much is the cost. Is it on the SpeedProject site?

[icfu]

Bugs:
4,N,P,etc. aren't forwarded to Lister window on first use. Choosing the option from menu is needed to switch.
Scrolling of text is sluggish.

Besides that a very nice plugin and the best SpeedCommander has to offer, but of no real use to me especially because all of its features are already available for free and better realized (way faster) in the more specialized competitive products. Particularly imagine plugin outperforms your plugin extremely.

MediaPlayerClassic or dsview plugin
IrfanView or imagine plugin
IEView plugin
Office plugin

Any chance that plugins which are not free are listed in a separate category with price in topic title (kudos to TucknDar who proposed that), maybe 'news from competitors'?

On return service I'd like to see a Total Commander corner on Speedcommander website where all (or at least the ones TxQuickView covers) the freeware plugins for TC are listed of course .

Icfu

[Clo]

2icfu
 Hello!

...Any chance that plugins which are not free are listed in a separate category with price in topic title (like Clo proposed),...

• Huummm, It was an idea of user TucknDar, I just supported this idea.
• Otherwise, I agree about your whole reply... but I prefer XnView - that is only a detail, of course-

VG
Claude
Clo

[Sven]

@Jon Canale: I started with the plugin yesterday, so there are no information about registering available at the moment. I also don't know the demand for such plugin, maybe the TC users only want to use freeware plugins. TxQuickView only shows a nag screen after the first 30 days, so there is no hurry atm.

Bugs:
4,N,P,etc. aren't forwarded to Lister window on first use. Choosing the option from menu is needed to switch.

TxQuickView does not handle these keys. I thought that Lister window subclass the plugin and its child windows to filter these keys.

Scrolling of text is sluggish.

In which viewer?

On return service I'd like to see a Total Commander corner on Speedcommander website where all (or at least the ones TxQuickView covers) the freeware plugins for TC are listed of course .

To see, how many functions are already included in SC without plugins?

I don't want to discuss SC here, TxQuickView does not contain any advertising for it. If a plugin for TC must be free of charge, Christian can easily delete this topic. I did not see any regimentations in the lister plugin interface guide.

[Maxwish]

If a plugin for TC must be free of charge, Christian can easily delete this topic. I did not see any regimentations in the lister plugin interface guide.

Back2Life for TC was the first commercial plugin and IIRC Christian did not object at all and it was allowed to be discussed in this forum.

BTW: nice plugin, and it will be interesting to see if there is a market for non-free plugins. An alternative would be to keep the product free and accept donations. I have seen some plugin authors do that. It would also be interesting to know if this actually works...

[icfu]

TxQuickView does not handle these keys. I thought that Lister window subclass the plugin and its child windows to filter these keys.

Like I said, it doesn't work on first use only! Let's say, mark more than one pic and press F3. Pressing N does not work first. But it starts to work after you have pressed File-Next one time.
I have no idea what is responsible for this behaviour. All I know is that other plugins either work without any problems at once (like imagine) or you can manually enter the keys on which the plugin should react in ini-file (like IEview, forward '4' for example).

In which viewer?

In your viewer. Can't reproduce that right now anymore, looks like something else was wrong, sorry...

To see, how many functions are already included in SC without plugins?

Good one!
Unfortunately the disadvantage is that improvements and innovations are dependant on one developer only. The feature diversity of TC plugins is impossible to implement in SC, not because of quality but because of a lack of time.

Nope, actually my interest is to differ the plugins created for the benefit of others (for free) from the plugins created for own benefit (money).
Although there are no official limitations I don't wanna have the plugin subforum devalued by surreptitious advertizing.
At least it would be fair if commercial plugins would be marked with a $ symbol or somewhat like that.

Icfu

[Sven]

Like I said, it doesn't work on first use only! Let's say, mark more than one pic and press F3. Pressing N does not work first. But it starts to work after you have pressed File-Next one time.

Perhaps a focus problem, TxQuickView contains several windows. Maybe Christian can check this live in the debugger.

In your viewer. Can't reproduce that right now anymore, looks like something else was wrong, sorry...

I know. TxQuickView has some different file viewers, so I wanted to know in which file viewer this behaviour occured.

At least it would be fair if commercial plugins would be marked with a $ symbol or somewhat like that.

I updated the topic title.

[icfu]

I know. TxQuickView has some different file viewers, so I wanted to know in which file viewer this behaviour occured.

I cite myself:

Scrolling of text is sluggish.

So I suppose it was your text file viewer then. Anyway, still not able to reproduce, maybe some resource prob here.

Thx for topic change, looks ok now.

Icfu

[jb]

Thank you Sven for making my whish come true so fast!!!
The whole day I was busy and I looked forward to try your plugin, but now the link seems to be broken.

[Sven]

Sorry, but our download server is unavailable at the moment (hardware problem). I will send you the file via eMail.

[jb]

Thank you very much again, great job!
Basically TxQuickView V1.00.3793 works fine on my computer. There are just a few things that I would like to mention:

1. TxQuickView seems to loop endlessly on old Word 95 documents (nearly 100% CPU load). As far as I know you are using the converters of the installed MS-Office (I'm using still Office 97). Maybe you could add some kind of watch dog that stops the thread if it goes wild.
2. TxQuickView seems not be absolutely stable yet. Once TC reported "Access violation at address 66114C17. Read of address 00000004. Please report this error to the Author, …"
3. It would be nice if some or all settings could be set from the menu of button "Betrachter ändern" (Change Viewer), in particular the option stored in HKCU\Software\SpeedProject\TxQuickView\1.0\MxQuickView\PictView\\AlwaysFitToWindow
4. It would be nice to have an option to disable the tree viewer. Seems to slow down navigation sometimes.

Nevertheless I'm very impressed. It's just the start!

[Sven]

1) Could you email such a Word document?

2) Can you reproduce this? What viewer was affected?

3) Right-click in the bitmap viewer and select "Immer automatisch einpassen" ("Always Fit to Window Size"). The check-mark attributes in the menu are not set at the moment, because TC does not support the PreTranslateMessage- and idle management of MFC.

4) The folder tree is always scanned in background, if you move the caret the scanning should be stopped immediately. I don't know if TC scans the folder too. On some network folders I have even a delay with disabled TxQuickView. However, an option to disable is not hard to implement.

[jb]

1) Could you email such a Word document?

In the meantime I searched and viewed dozens of old Word 95 documents, but only the very first one has the mentioned problem. The problematic file can be opened normally by Word 97. It is very simple (no graphics, no tables) and has only 26KB. I cannot mail it because it is confidential.

2) Can you reproduce this? What viewer was affected?

I will try to pay more attention when it happens the next time.

3) Right-click in the bitmap viewer and select "Immer automatisch einpassen" ("Always Fit to Window Size"). The check-mark attributes in the menu are not set at the moment, because TC does not support the PreTranslateMessage- and idle management of MFC.

OK. First I looked only at the "Einstellungen..." (Options).

4) The folder tree is always scanned in background, if you move the caret the scanning should be stopped immediately. I don't know if TC scans the folder too. On some network folders I have even a delay with disabled TxQuickView. However, an option to disable is not hard to implement.

I think it is rather a new problem that is related to TxQuickView itself or to the cooperation between TxQuickView and TC.

[JP]

@Jon Canale: I started with the plugin yesterday, so there are no information about registering available at the moment. I also don't know the demand for such plugin, maybe the TC users only want to use freeware plugins.

Usually people prefer things that are free. And I think your plugin is expensive. TC costs U$21-28,00 (21,oo for students, my case) and your plugin costs 20,00. It's too much just for a viewr, especially when you can get a good one for free, like Xnview. This is just my opinion., but commercial plugins'authors should think about TC price and plugin price.