Eventually a user will see all the sides of the UI of OneCommander enough times to be comfortable with all the panels constantly sliding around and auto resizing, and get comfortable with the names of their files and folders seemingly changing on their own, but it will take a while and that makes the learning curve on OneCommander very steep. Easy and intuitive interfaces are ones that don't change much in response to what the user is doing or if they do change in response to the user, change only one thing at a time (for example clicking on a menu can be aloud to drop down the menu, but shouldn't also scroll the page, highlight the aspects of the document that the menu can modify, and then pop up previews of those modifications all at the same time). (This is the same reason why one should keep animations in power-point presentations to a minimum: they distract from the content more than they highlight it). Every time something changes in the interface of a program, the user has to stop and reconsider what he's doing. The problem with this is that most people already have well defined work-flows that already work for them.ĭynamic UIs look cool, but they are generally a mistake. It's as if a series of application designers decided to make a point about how they think other people should structure their on-screen work-flows and they then made OneCommander to demonstrate their point. One Commander does not seem to be an application so much as an essay. One aspect of the dynamically reformatted interface is that one of the features of One Commander is to reformat and/or truncate the names of files intelligently to display in a smaller space as necessary.Īt least out of the box, zip archives are treated as files, not as directories. Similarly each frame for a level of the directory tree engages in such sliding and auto resizing every time the user navigated deeper or more shallowly in the tree structure or when the window resizes. If on the other hand, the window is resized to be narrower, the history pane is minimized automatically. So, for example, if the window is wide enough that it doesn't otherwise need the space the entire left side gets a history pane of all the paths that you have navigated to. Simultaneously, the window is dynamically resizing different aspects of the interface to try and make the best use of the window size. This interface was clearly designed around making sure the user would not need to move the mouse much in order to engage in folder navigation as the parts of the display that you are likely to need next slide away from the center of the screen so that the area you are working with stays centered. So the whole idea of OneCommander is built directly into it's unique folder navigation interface. There are a number of unique or interesting features: a drop list which functions as a visually interactive clipboard for moving and copying files from divergent sources integrated with a "task master" so that batch file operations can be managed, color-coded relative file-dates, "To-Do" lists based around every folder. (Thumbnail loading does not slow down the loading of the whole file list which is a point where many file-managers fail). The core functionality is there, and stable.Ī number of features that have become standard for 3rd party file-managers: tabs, integrated search, favorites, thumbnails, etc are all present. So here's a bit of a mini-review of OneCommander based upon my wholly subjective experience with it. (My favorites are Nexus File, A43, Explorer++, and Directory Opus). I'm a bit of a connoisseur of file-managers for windows.
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