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1. 
   Review - XYplorer

   7.00.0000 (Apr 20, 2008)

   comeoffit wrote:
   --
   Yes, zridling, we shall agree to disagree. As usual, any feature you want would be a wonderful addition, but any feature somebody else wants--that you don't see an immediate use for--is "bloat".
   --
   
   Very well said mate. Zaine has been driving me mad for about a year now, slating things because he doesn't personally use them, and exaggerating everything else out of proportion.
   
   I have nothing against XYPlorer, so I'm giving it a 5 review even though I don't use it myself, as I am writing here to correct an earlier review and not to put people off XYPlorer. I urge you to try both XY and Opus and all the other file managers and see which suits you best as they are all different.
   
   With that said, I just have to correct some of the garbage in Zaine's post below about XY compared to Opus:
   
   No, it beats the living crap out of DOpus in every way from:
   
   > — features
   
   For this read "features that zridling uses", since however you count things Opus has more features than XY. About a year ago Opus added a couple of features which XY happened to have already and Zaine accused it of stealing them (a joke since none of the Opus developers have used XY and the ideas were obvious and standard across many programs), yet when XY later added several features which Opus had had for *years* Zaine sang its praises. Bias? I think so.
   
   > — cost
   
   That's true, but value is more important than cost. Whether Opus is worth more than XY is up to the individual and which feature they consider important.
   
   > — licensing
   
   From previous conversations with him, Zaine has a bee in his bonnet about any program which doesn't offer a lifetime licence. Apparently he expects full-time teams of developers to go on working forever without any further payment. Maybe that business model works for some combinations of growing markets or programs which don't get much time devoted to them, but it's not a common model at all however you look at it. To slate a program just because it isn't one of the few with a lifetime licence seems ridiculous to me. Nobody is ever forced to pay for an upgrade they don't value, either. If you buy a version of Opus it lasts forever.
   
   > — updates
   
   This is a lie, quite frankly. Opus gets updated very regularly and is worked on full-time. Since Opus 9.0 was released a year ago there have been 13 free updates which have included major feature additions at no cost. See for yourself here: http://resource.dopus.com/viewforum.php?f=1
   
   > — copy speed
   
   I have no idea what this is about. Opus copies at the maximum speed my hardware can move data at and I and others have done several benchmarks of it against other programs. Usually everything copies at the same speed because it's down to the hardware (so long as nothing silly is going, like with Explorer on Vista).
   
   Whenever someone has claimed that Opus copies slower than other programs it has *always* turned out to be due to them not testing things properly. For example, people usually copy files in Opus and then in the other program resulting in a lot of data being cached for the second program. When this is pointed out and they re-do their tests they find everything copies at the same speed.
   
   > — search
   
   Opus has a very powerful search/filter system which allows you to use almost any file attribute, as well as a simple mode for basic searches. As I have not used XY much and Zaine doesn't offer any specifics I don't know exactly how the two compare, so maybe he's right, but Opus's search abilities are very powerful and I don't trust his bias.
   
   > — UI
   
   Opus's UI is what you make it. It's very configurable. Beyond that everything is a matter of personal taste.
   
   > — cleaner coding
   
   I don't see how this is true. Opus buttons generally have a fairly simple syntax like running command-line tools have.
   
   > — installation footprint
   
   If you care about a couple of megabytes of HDD space more than features then by all means, but I'd say that is a crazy point of view from someone who is scraping the barrel to find reasons to tell other poeple they should use his pet program instead of another.
   
   > — memory use
   
   We've been through this in a long discussion on another forum, which Zaine apparently completely ignored even though it was a direct response to his claims. Unless you configure Opus to use lots of large background images and icons, or you're in thumbnails mode in a large directory, or some other situation where a lot of data simply has to be loaded into memory, Opus uses a similar amount of memory to most other programs. It certainly never uses so much that it causes a problem so, like the "install footprint" example, it is a complete non-issue in my opinion.

2. 
   Review - Directory Opus

   9.1.0.3 (Apr 20, 2008)

   Response to zridling's March 19th review:
   
   Opus is no more bloated now than it was in the last release, or the one before. As usual with Zaine's reviews, they reflect his bias towards his current pet program in a given area.
   
   The 64-bit version of Opus is a bigger download than the 32-bit version, but this is a combination of 64-bit code compiling to larger executables, and the fact that the 64-bit installer includes all of the 32-bit binaries so that people can export them to a USB device.
   
   If Zaine meant feature bloat rather than size-on-disk, then this is just another example of his his inability to be objective about what he values over what other people may value. A useless feature to one person is an essential feature to another. Opus is full of features and configuring it is more complicated as a result, but the benefit is that you can usually get exactly what you want. It's also telling that when Zaine's pet product gets new features he doesn't call it bloat but improvement.
   
   I apologise for the personal tone of this review-of-a-review, but if you look through Zaine's review history for this and other products you will see that he is best ignored, for the reasons I have stated above. He is rarely objective nor sensible in his praise and criticisms. Everything is good about his current pet program and everything is bad about the others, until the pet program choice switches to something else.

3. 
   Review - Directory Opus

   9.0.0.0 (May 6, 2007)

   Opus is the most-used program on my computer. I'd be lost without it and, for my needs and tastes, none of the alternatives even come close. Over the years I have become more and more involved with Opus, helping people at the forums, writing tutorials, writing plugins and helping GPSoft to test new versions and features. Many people see this activity and think I get paid to work on Opus but I don't; it's my obsession not my day-job. I absolutely love the program.
   
   Zridling's dozen reasons to dump Opus have been discussed elsewhere and many of them turned out to be simply untrue while others were a case of his personal pet features being given much higher priority over *hundreds* of other features that only Opus has. Let's be objective, though: Opus is not best for every single person (what program is?), so don't take my word for it or zridling's; try it and the alternatives for yourself and pick the one that best fits your needs.
   
   As for upgrade fees, Opus users only get asked to pay for new versions when there are *major* new releases with many significant new features, which happens about every 2.5 years. Nobody is forced to buy the new features and, over those 2.5 years, plenty of free releases with bug fixes and new features -- often significant ones -- are given away to existing customers. If you think $40 is too much to pay for the new features and 2.5 years of someone's work then that's your choice but most people who like and use Opus seem more than happy with what's on offer.