Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!plaid!chuq From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Disk Catalog programs? Message-ID: <59987@sun.uucp> Date: 14 Jul 88 23:37:20 GMT Sender: news@sun.uucp Lines: 62 Can anyone make recommendations on good Disk Catalog programs? I'm currently playing with a number of different ones, and I'm relatively unhappy with all of them. The ones I've tried: o Diskfinder by W&M. A commercial DA. o A couple of different HyperCard Stacks o d'Librarian, the early, public version of the commercial program DiskRanger. One of the things I want is the ability to sort all the disks together in various ways -- especially by name, so I can track down duplicates and old versions of things. Others would be by date and by type, but they're not as important. I also want to be able to print both a text and an (optional) formatted version of the reports. Multiple libraries would be nice. I'd like one of all my PD stuff, another for my distribution floppies. It should be reasonably fast, and allow me to update a disk when I change it, easily add/delete disks, etc, etc. None of the stuff I've looked at is close enough for me to want to use. Here's what I don't like about what I've used: o DiskFinder doesn't do reporting. If you want to look up a specific file, fine. But create a listing to carry with you? nah. DiskFinder does one other thing I consider instant death. It writes on all the floppies. It not only keeps a data file in its Diskfinder folder on the hard disk, but it writes out to each floppy as well. I won't let ANYTHING write random files on my distribution disks, thank you. Also, it references all disks by number, rather than by the disk name. That's a lazy-programmer's way of doing it. 0n the other hand, I really like the idea of doing it as a DA, since it's soooo convenient. o the HC stacks I've seen are generally slow, and have all sorts of interesting quirks and very weak reporting. No way to generate full reports, either. o d'Librarian. I don't know how much better DiskRanger is than this version, but I hope it's been fixed to not crash. d'Librarian also has limitations on # of disks and # of files that make it useless to me. It's also quirky. So what do you folks recommend? If I can't find anything I like, what I'll probably do is write a HyperCard stack to do it my way, so other folks can take a look at it and declare it slow, quirky and with wark reporting... chuq -- Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ I don't work for no 'Toon!