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!