TC 8 vs 7

[Beano]

2barduck
And if reading the history-file is to much for you then TC is obviously the wrong tool for syou

Sorry Mate... but it's this kind of arrogance that keeps me from visiting these forums more often. CharlesF asked a relevant and polite question, and was insulted in return. It's a shame.

I have been using TC for almost 20 years and love it, but I find it annoying that there's no summarised "what's new" on the site I can quicky read before deciding to upgrade. Sure I can spend time reading pages of the change log but I just want to know what's the major new features.

[krstatzar]

Changes are so minor and there are no new features. No new features no major release I think. I love TC but this is the worst major update ever.

[karlchen]

Hello, krstatzar.

Changes are so minor and there are no new features.

This statement is not correct:

The major new change which Total Commander has brought - and this had been requested by users frequently in the past - is the genuine 64-bit edition of Total Commander.

As Balderstrom has shown a large number of smaller improvements (=new features) have been added to Total Commander 8.0 as well: list of added features

No new features no major release I think.

The major reason for developping and releasing Total Commander 8.0 x32 and x64 has been explained above. New features have been added, too.

I love TC but this is the worst major update ever.

This is your personal point of view. I feel free to disagree.

Cheers,
Karl

[umbra]

Changes are so minor and there are no new features. No new features no major release I think. I love TC but this is the worst major update ever.

I beg to differ.
The 64b version of TC is a major improvement - a better integration with Windows is very important to me. Plus it has a nice side-effect: many plugins, that have been neglected for some time, have been finally updated during their conversion for TCx64.

About the minor new features - yes, they are small, but some of them improved my experience greatly. You know, beauty is in the details.

And this is by no means "the worst major update ever". 8 months of beta testing and a few hundreds of bug fixes seems impressive to me. This is one of the most stable versions ever. And, sadly, that's not something you see these days very often.

Yes, there are no new major features, but all those improvements combined definitely justify calling TC 8 a major release.

[Balderstrom]

Significant fixes and additions to Multi-Rename-Tool, and Synchronize Dirs: incl. ability to rename files in MRT, Move files directly in SyncDirs.
Updates to Lister, incl: View Folders, and native JPG handling.
WM_Messaging for Script-writers --- which hopefully will be expanded in the future.
GUI Fixes and additions, incl. Ability for Mouse users to inline rename files.
Among other improvements and additions.

There's never been a reason to NOT upgrade TC; further the Betas are almost always stable enough to use in a production environment. TC does not bloat itself; almost all updates are backwards compatible.

Just because SirSilva is a self-righteous arrogant ******** is no reason to avoid the boards.

As Gregory House might say, grow a pair
Cheers.

[umbra]

And to the original topic:
A clear list of changes/fixes between two stable versions has been requested several times. And local forum members always replied (often not exactly nicely) that one should look into TC's help or history.txt. But that's not what people are asking for.

The helpfile contains only autor's picks, what he thinks might interest the user, not all improvements or changes.

On the other hand, the history.txt file contains also things that are irrelevant to people, who want to upgrade.
They don't care that beta 16 fixed a bug that was introduced in beta 13 and that beta 53 improved a new feature that was introduced in beta 51. They just want to know, what is different int the new stable version. And currently there is no way, they could (or want) to parse that kind of information from history.txt. I'm not saying to abandon that file, it's very useful for power users and testers, just not for people that want to upgrade.

[Beano]

@Balderstrom: Ok thanks for the response

Let me as ask in a different way, has some of these features been added, improved, or maybe announced for a future release:

1) File Queue (copy, mode, etc) improvements

2) Folder merge (and maybe flatten)

3) File list support (open a text file as file list in TC natively and not via a plugin)

4) Revamped user interface (icons, menus, dialogs, etc)

I have developed my own external utilities for 2 and 3 but would prefer internal support instead. 1+4 seriously needs a overhaul.

Thanks in advance

/B

[Sir_SiLvA]

And to the original topic:
A clear list of changes/fixes between two stable versions has been requested several times. And local forum members always replied (often not exactly nicely) that one should look into TC's help or history.txt. But that's not what people are asking for.

The helpfile contains only autor's picks, what he thinks might interest the user, not all improvements or changes.

And for that was the history-reader coded by ts242 which has been pointed out more then once...

[umbra]

And for that was the history-reader coded by ts242 which has been pointed out more then once...

I use that software and it's nice. But I'm not aware of a feature, that would show only what has changed since the last stable version. And I've no idea how it could implement such a thing. At least a quarter of history.txt's entries are fixes for bugs, that never existed in previous stable versions - maybe you should read my post again.

[Balderstrom]

@Balderstrom: Ok thanks for the response

Let me as ask in a different way, has some of these features been added, improved, or maybe announced for a future release:

1) File Queue (copy, mode, etc) improvements

No features, but I believe there has been a speed improvement. Features are coming AFAIK in 8.1 or so.

2) Folder merge (and maybe flatten)

Not sure? DirSync does folder merges. Always has. And TC's SubDirBranchView flattens folders, you can even select specific folders and only flatten those --- I've yet to see any other filemanager do that as cleanly.

3) File list support (open a text file as file list in TC natively and not via a plugin)

DiskDir.wcx or ExtendedDiskDir.wcx while not native, considering DiskDir.wcx is written by Ghisler, can technically be considered native --- and all you need is for the text file to follow the format that DiskDir expects, e.g.

Code: Select all

C:\Users\Self\AppData\Roaming\GHISLER\PLUGINS\wdx\TWinKey\
History - Copy.txt	4237	2011.11.1	0:31.22

4) Revamped user interface (icons, menus, dialogs, etc)

No observable changes to the UI beyond fixes for 64bit that were caused by Lazarus compile.

[Phred]

CharlesF, umbra,

Here's a reply from the author to a similar request of mine.
(Note that there's a few power users here who have a congenital inability to empathise with less intensive users and who are fairly quick to deprecate questions that they see as idiotic. It's best to ask them to leave the thread, or to just ignore them.)

The list:

New functions and fixes in Total Commander 8.0 beta 9:

- Compare by contents (x64 only): Support for files >2GB
- Lister: Auto-rotate jpg images loaded via GDI+ to the angle stored in the EXIF information
- See history.txt for all fixes

New functions and fixes in Total Commander 8.0 beta 8:

- New options in the search&replace section of the Multi-rename tool dialog box: 1x (only first occurrence) and [E] (change extension or not)
- Lister: F3 now also works with folders (mainly interesting with plugins)
- Synchronize dirs: "By content" option now also works with packer plugins which support the "search by content" option
- See history.txt for all fixes

New functions and fixes in Total Commander 8.0 beta 2-7:

- These are bugfix releases, there are no major new features
- See history.txt for all fixes

New functions and fixes in Total Commander 8.0 beta 1:

- This is the first 64-bit version of Total Commander. There will also be a 32-bit version later in this beta test. 64-bit programs can only load 64-bit libraries (dlls), and since all plugins are dlls, the plugins need to be converted to 64-bit too. Therefore it's not recommended to use this version for every day work until a majority of plugins has been ported to 64-bit.
- Enhanced progress dialog handling: Progress is now handled asynchronously, so it will no longer slow down any file operations. Especially the copying, moving and deleting of many small files should be much faster now. Also the number of files and bytes handled and the total files/bytes are shown now.
- Lister: Show jpg, gif and png images in Lister without plugins
- Search function: In field "Search in", a list file can be specified like this: @c:\path\searchfile.txt. The file must contain one file/dir name per line, absolute or relative to the location of the list file
- Multi-rename tool enhancements: Allow backslashes in name field, directly create sub-folders for moving files
- Draw new style (Windows Vista/7) expand/collapse icons in tree
- Copy directly from FTP or virtual folders (e.g. the desktop) to file system plugins
- "Skip all" in "copy as admin" function
- Use new Explorer method on Windows 7 to show file time stamps (not changing between summer and winter), can be changed via wincmd.ini (NewTimeZoneMethod)
- See history.txt for all additions and fixes


It would be nice to see changes categorised or even provided as table data for a simple database program (is there one..?) so that we could look at the records grouped and sorted by our particular way of considering them.
But that would need a sub-committee, which we don't have.

Anyway, HTH

[Sir_SiLvA]

It would be nice to see changes categorised or even provided as table data for a simple database program (is there one..?) so that we could look at the records grouped and sorted by our particular way of considering them. But that would need a sub-committee, which we don't have.

Sorry but TC is NOT a Car where you can say:
"Oh look its the new Nissan wich drives 10km faster now and uses 10l less gas"
TC is a piece of Software where you allways have list like this:

Version 4.33 (Release date: 2012-03-28)
- Improved rotation speed for 1 BPP images
- New Advanced Batch dialog option: Change order of operations
- New Thumbnails window option: Try to load EXIF-Thumbnail for JPG files
- Simple Drag&Drop feature from Thumbnails window added
(Load files from Thumbnails in another programs/editors)
- Selection: hold ALT key pressed during drawing to make a proportional selection
with the inverted ratio from "Create Custom selection" dialog
- New effect added: Horizontal Shift (Effects browser dialog)
- New option in "Decrease color depth" dialog: Convert 24 BPP to RGB-565
- New option in Resize dialog: Auto adjust DPI based on new sizes
- New option in Add-Text dialog: Adjust font size to current zoom-in size
- Support for JPEG-XR format (HDP PlugIn)
- Possible Thumbnail/Resample problem on Win7-64 bit fixed
- DIB-RLE bug fixed (reported by Parvez Anwar via Secunia SVCRP, thanks!)
- JPG-2000 PlugIn crashes fixed (by Parvez Anwar/Secunia and FuzzMyApp, thanks!)
- ANI/EMF/JPM loading bugs fixed (reported by FuzzMyApp, thanks!)
- SGI bug fixed (reported by Gynvael Coldwind, thanks!)
- Some new Admin INI file options added (Toolbar, Browsing, Delete); see FAQs
- Several PlugIns are changed/updated, please install the newest versions:
Download from: http://www.irfanview.com/plugins.htm
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Version 4.32 (Release date: 2011-12-15)
- Improved Resampling (Speed; Lanczos artefacts: thanks to Marcel Lancelle)
- New feature: Add watermark image (Edit menu and Advanced batch dialog)
- Improved zooming: CTRL + wheel (keep mouse coordinates) and centered zoom
- Support for WebP format (Weppy format, PlugIn, reading + saving)
- Support for PDN format (Paint.NET format, PlugIn, thanks to Martin Osieka)
- Support for XCF format (GIMP format, PlugIn, thanks to Martin Osieka)

AIMP v3.00 Build 976 (30.12.2011)
=================================
+ Basque localization was added
* Localizations were updated
* Player: Radio station name is now set automatically on starting playback, if it has not been set before by the user
* Tag Editor: Track number is no longer stored in the ID3v1, if it value more than 255
- Fixed: Player - part of the next track sounds in the end of current track, if "shuffle" mode is active
- Fixed: Player - "A-B Repeat" function drops playback position to beginning in some cases
- Fixed: Tag Editor - buttons in footer panel doesn't display, if height of the screen less than 600 pixels
- Fixed: Tag Editor - the table doesn't update after using tag autofill function
- Fixed: Plugins - last.fm plugin doesn't start scrobbling sometimes
- Fixed: Small bugs and defects

AIMP v3.00 Build 970 RC 3 (23.12.2011)
======================================
* Added ability to install skin from Skin Chooser Dialog
* Help in English was added

Now TC has even a LogView for its history-file written by ts242
(https://sites.google.com/site/ultratceditors/tc_log_viewer)
wich allows it to not display the fixes so you see whats new...

ofc its a long list cause TC is a Jack of All Trades-Tool so if its to much too ask to read that read the help-file...
If EVEN that is to much and to complicated for you the shortform is:

TC 8 main purpose is to completly rewrite it for a new compiler to release a 64Bit Version
because people cried for it

[Hacker]

Sir_SiLvA,
Well, the main point is that usually TC versions have a What's New section summarizing the main changes between versions, excluding all the betas. TCv8 does not have such a section, only one which includes all betas. It's confusing, unnecessary and basically defeating the purpose.

Roman

[umbra]

2Phred
That's just a quote from TC's helpfile. It doesn't contain changes/fixes only a few improvements.

Note that there's a few power users here who have a congenital inability to empathise with less intensive users and who are fairly quick to deprecate questions that they see as idiotic. It's best to ask them to leave the thread, or to just ignore them.

I've got no problem with that. As you may notice, sometimes I'm quite irritating myself.

It would be nice to see changes categorised or even provided as table data for a simple database program (is there one..?) so that we could look at the records grouped and sorted by our particular way of considering them.

Basically, history.txt combined with TC Changes Viewer already provides a nice overview (and filtering). Except - it's a nice overview for a developer or tester, not for a customer.

2Sir_SiLvA

Now TC has even a LogView for its history-file written by ts242

I guess you meant TC Changes Viewer.

But I have one example especially for you:
How is a customer, who wants to upgrade from TC 7.56a to TC 8, supposed to know, that he will no longer be able to edit a file with some external application, if he's comparing it with something else using TC's Compare by Content? He won't find this information in the helpfile nor on the website. The only way of finding out is looking into history.txt at line number 152 and decrypting "Fixed: Compare by content, files > 1MB: Open file with "deny write" option to avoid problem with file mapping (32/64)". It's not just a bugfix for a serious issue, it's also a considerable change of behavior. It's something, an upgrading user should be notified about, not buried together with dozens of fixes for bugs that don't even exist in his version of TC. Well, I feel I'm starting to repeat myself.

[Sir_SiLvA]

2Hacker
I dont see it as confusing but logical to see what changed over the public betas...

2umbra
You see that your example is flawed dont you?
a) you expect someone to use such a deep in function and
b) you expect him on the otherhand not to be able to read the history file
(PS: and YOU consider it a change of behaviour in Chris opinion its a Fix and hes the author so only HIS opinion counts...)

Sorry guys I stand to my point if you want to know more then written in helpfile read the history.txt and that should be expectable of all TC users as you only do it once....