Usenet Explorer

The save dialog is really annoying, it costs a lot of time. Create new folder - bam - just names "New folder". Ok, right click, rename - but then the focus jumps to the parent folder! Argh. Cick again on the right folder. If you have to do this 20 times a day it's really annoying.

You can create a default folder for each newsgroup. That might be an idea?

If you are afraid that folder will become to messy, you might try a nice little program called "Newsdigger".

It searches folders you specify for Rar-archives and par-files and shows them as a single line (for each post) showing number off archives and whether it's (probably) necesarry to repair or not.

It's a simple interface wich allows you to check/repair with quickpar and extract the archives with winrar without the use of explorer.

Development has been stopped (as far as I know) but it works well enough.

You can find it at: http://themole.users.balpol.tudelft.nl/newsdigger/
(The interface is in dutch, but the programm itself is quite selfexplanatory...)

I'll try with "dldone" now.

jd wrote:The save dialog is really annoying, it costs a lot of time. Create new folder - bam - just names "New folder". Ok, right click, rename - but then the focus jumps to the parent folder! Argh. Cick again on the right folder. If you have to do this 20 times a day it's really annoying.

Alex - This continues to be a problem and really is one of those constant annoyances that we all have with every application out there. But, I noticed something today that might help fix it easily - if view an article that contains an attachment, say, an mp3 file, the contents of that article includes an icon for the file. If you right-click on that icon in the message itself and hit "save," a different kind of save dialogue is used - this one is MUCH better and has never resulted in the "new folder" bug that so many users have complained about. Would it be tough to use this same dialogue when saving attachments directly from the group/folder view pane?

I hope that this idea helps to solve this issue. Thanks again for all of you work!

I didn't notice that other type of save dialog. Good work.

Btw, if you first click on the folder where the new folder should be created under, than you have no problem with creating the new folder and renaming it.

this is the file save dialog, you cannot choose a directory there unless you supply a file name.

what i'm thinking i'll just adopt the newspro browse for folder dialog for saving attachments as an option in the next version, it seems microsoft is not in a hurry and after 5 years it was too early to rely on the system, i only need to revise the code, if you need network path starting with \\ you'll have to switch to the windows dialog or create a mapped drive.

mmm, not sure if this is the best option. I remember Newspro took very long (up to a minute) to do the first save. It looked like it scanned the whole drive before I could choose a directory.

The Newspro dialog is good, with the big buttons, but it works very slow on a drive with many files. After the first save it works faster. Is it possible to change that behavour before implementing?

can you compare the speed with first opening the dialog in ue and newspro? - i think it should be about the same, i noticed the first opening of the windows standard folder dialog is slow too, probably it does similar things on initialization.

alex wrote:i noticed the first opening of the windows standard folder dialog is slow too, probably it does similar things on initialization.

Windows has a terrible tendency to make things look all nice and pretty. One of the things is when you open a directory selection dialogue box. In XP, you can customise the icons of each directory to one of your choosing. Whether or not you do this, Windows will scan a file, 'Desktop.ini', inside each of those directories that appears listed in the dialogue box to see if there is a custom icon specified. So, with a lot of directories the scanning will take longer. After doing a quick search I found this.

The reason it takes less time after that first initial opening of the dialogue box is that Windows (luckily) caches the icon data to a file in 'C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\Local Settings\Application Data' called 'IconCache.db'. This is why sometimes when you change an association for a file type, the icon may stay the same as the old application rather than the new one since it's still reading from the cache. TweakUI (from Microsoft PowerToys) has an option on the repair section to 'Rebuild Icons' which clears IconCache.db.

the question is to compare the time of opening in the first time of the standard windows and newspro folder dialog (i think i increased opening speed in newspro at some stage), i'm just busy in indexing, but anyway it can be added as an option, maybe there is some third party other solution, i don't have it in the library i'm using, they use in their samples the standard dialog, the link to, which sounds like "something express", was (you? - J.) given on the forum some time ago was to delphi and C# library, not C++ i'm using here.

Developer Express is what I mentioned before but it was in reference to a visual progress example for the download tab in UE mentioned in this thread.

I knew you wouldn't be able to use their libraries but since I was familiar with DevExpress (I prefer Delphi myself) I used it to describe what I thought the original author of that thread was looking for, especially since that image looks so similar to UE's tabs.

Well since I use UE i redesigned my download harddrive structure. It is still slow on initial save, probably due the reason Josef describes.
But i can't figure out if UE does this faster or slower than Newspro because the changed circumstances. So maybe it is the same in UE.

Isn't it possible for UE to not use this method as Josef describes but just choose a save location and/or create a new folder?

Then everyone would be happy (exerpt for the icon-per-folder freaks:-)

alex wrote: if someone knows direct me to the code (Visual C++ compatible, it is like a simple function which takes path a parameter and returns resulting path), if i would have nothing left to work on i could write it myself.

Are you using Visual C++ .net? This is the code I use in Visual Basic .Net. It should be easy to convert to C.net.

Dim FolderBrowserDialog1 = New FolderBrowserDialog
FolderBrowserDialog1.Description = "Starting Directory"
If txtFileName.Text <> "" Then FolderBrowserDialog1.SelectedPath = txtFileName.Text
If FolderBrowserDialog1.ShowDialog() = DialogResult.OK Then
txtFileName.Text = FolderBrowserDialog1.SelectedPath
End If

yes, but we'll end with the same standard dialog then?

it doesn't matter what language, if it calls the system browse for folder dialog it will be the same.

alex wrote:yes, but we'll end with the same standard dialog then?

it doesn't matter what language, if it calls the system browse for folder dialog it will be the same.

This is the dialog box displayed from the above code: