Screen shot!

Hey, wanna see a quick screen shot of FolderSizes? Still banging away at it whenever I can find time (ok, mostly at night and in the wee hours of the morning).

[screen shot no longer available]

Click the thumbnail image above to enlarge.

GDI+

Doing the FolderSizes graphing in GDI+ has been a very interesting experience.

GDI+ essentially provides an object-oriented framework for the old Windows graphics device interface, which was accesses primarily by straight Win32 API calls. I find the new model much more usable over all; it simply now feels like a real C++ interface.

The graphing within FolderSizes has become quite refined at this point; I create an off-screen bitmap object into which I draw directly, and then dump it to the screen all at once. This "double-buffering" method creates a very quick-drawing effect, with no flicker when the window is resized or redrawn. This also allows me to easily draw into a bitmap image context which can then be saved to disk, or copied to the Windows clipboard. I've already got support for .jpg, .bmp, and .png (skipping .gif support due to licensing restrictions).

This thing is now in fairly usable form. Email me if you'd like to take a peek at it. I don't have an installer developed yet, but you just need to unzip some files into a folder and run an EXE.

Developing FolderSizes

At this point I have a functional alpha build of my FolderSizes program (not sure that this will be the final name of the product).

For those that are interested, FolderSizes is a Windows application, developed in high-performance C++, that allows users to select a folder or drive on their system, which initiates a folder scan in a separate thread. It then reports the total size of each subfolder and its contents. In addition to reporting folder size results in a listview, it also dynamically draws a graph using GDI+. I've also got some other features in the works, such as HTML exporting, a hard drive size monitor window, and more.

Ah, writing C++ is so much fun. :)

Anyway, I intend to give away this utility as freeware, as soon as I get the bugger finished up. Soon I'll be looking for beta testers.

FolderSizes Concept

Ah, you know, we've all been there. You wake up one morning and find your system running slower than ever, with files of all types and sizes lying around eating up your valuable disk space. Applications, movies, image files, MP3 files, you name it - you've got stuff everywhere, some of it valuable, and much of it not. So you grudgingly accept the fact that someday, somehow, you're going to have to roll up your sleeves and delete some of those monster files in order to regain some hard disk space and/or personal sanity.

So perhaps, from within the deep recesses of your disturbed psyche, a logical question begins to form. What files and folders are using up all my disk space?

It's a simple question, isn't it? Alas, it seems to be one that your Windows operating system, with its high-minded expectations of unlimited spacial resources, does not help you to answer. There is not a simple way to determine which folders and files have grown fattest. Oh sure, you can launch Windows explorer and right-click every single folder on your hard drive(s), and record their size. But this is tedious at best, and absurdly time-consuming at the very least.

What you need is a tool that can systematically scan the folders on your system, determine their system, and then present you with the results.

This is what FolderSizes will do.