REVIEW: DIRECTORY OPUS 5
                                                                                  By:  William Near 

Directory Opus 5

GPSoftware P.O. Box 570 Ashgrove, Queensland 4065 Australia +61 7 3661402 - Phone/Fax zzgperry@mailbox.uq.oz.au

The most powerful file management solution for the Amiga.

Micro R&D 721 'O' Street Loup City, NE 68853 (308) 745-1243 - Phone (308) 745-1246 - Fax

I paid US$70, this includes $5 S&H and a $5 C.O.D. charge.

Any Amiga with a hard drive and running at least Workbench 2.x can use Directory Opus 5 (DOpus 5). I would recommend at least 1 MB of free FAST RAM to operate this program.

Amiga 2000 (Rev 4.4), ECS chip set, GForce '030 accelerator @ 50 MHz., 2 MB CHIP + 8 MB FAST memory, Quantum LPS270S hard drive with Trumpcard Professional controller, Picasso II RTG board, Workbench 3.1

The DOpus 5 package consisted of a shrink wrapped, 174 page, spiral bound manual with 1 floppy disk inside.

DOpus 5 uses the standard Commodore installer utility, so, as usual, installation is a breeze. Upon launching the installer, you are presented with several choices of install methods: Start DOpus 5 on boot, Start DOpus 5 iconified, Use DOpus 5 as Workbench replacement, and Don't start DOpus 5 on boot. All of these are self-explanatory, except use DOpus 5 as Workbench replacement. If you choose to use DOpus 5 as a Workbench replacement, your LoadWB command will be renamed and a startup file for DOpus 5 will be put in its place. After selecting one of the install options for DOpus 5 the script creates a DOpus 5 drawer on the hard drive partition you selected and copies the appropriate files there. Finally, an assign line is added to your User-Startup script. One final note, if you are using a ROM switcher and you have renamed the original Startup-Sequence then you must rename the original Startup-Sequence so that the DOpus 5 install script can find it; otherwise, you will get an error and have to abort the install.

If you are use to the look and feel of DOpus 4.x then you will immediately notice that DOpus 5 is a complete rewrite of its predecessors. The interface is almost completely new and fresh. DOpus 5 opens its own screen, of your choice, which strongly resembles a Workbench 2.x+ screen (a backdrop picture can even be used!) Most of the same pulldown menu choices are present with several DOpus 5-specific additions. Icons for all devices appear just as on Workbench. I had icons for my Boot and Work partitions, as well as the RAM Disk appeared on the main screen with the initial startup of DOpus 5. Also, a floating palette of buttons for performing various tasks and a RAM Disk Lister appeared on the screen. At this point, you are ready to go! My honest first impression was, this looks confusing!

Upon exploring the new features and look of DOpus 5 I quickly realized just how powerful this version is. The confusion I felt with my first look at the new utility quickly faded as I began to use it.
You can click on any of the device icons that appear on the screen and open a floating Lister window. Each Lister window has a Title Bar which displays the device name and the amount of free space left on that particular device. Directly below the Title Bar is a Status Bar which displays: the number of selected directories out of the total number of directories displayed, the number of selected files out of the total number of files displayed, and the number of bytes selected out of the total number of bytes displayed. To the immediate right of these are the Lister Command Menu and the Device Gadget. These allow you to perform various actions on the selected files from a pulldown menu, as well as directory manipulations. The final item on this line is the Status Gadget which displays the state that the Lister is in i.e. SOURCE, DESTINATION, or OFF. You can change the state by clicking within the Status Bar. The last area before the actual file listings is the Lister Tool Bar which is full of various icon presentations for file and directory manipulation. The icons are: DeviceList/CacheList, Parent/Root, All/None, Select/Toggle, MakeDir, Copy/CopyAs, Move/MoveAs, ReName, Delete, Show, Play, Protect, Comment, and DateStamp. The icons of the Tool Bar are accessed by the left and right mouse buttons, also actions may be assigned to the middle mouse button. The Tool Bar can be customized any way you like, including the addition and subtraction of icons.
The area of the Lister that actually shows the files and directories of the selected device can be customized as well. You can select the order in which the items are sorted and what part of the file's attributes are used for the sort order. The Lister's display can also contain as much information or as little as you desire. At the bottom of the Lister is a window where the complete path is shown. You can manually type a new path if you so desire. Maneuvering around in the Lister window can be accomplished by: holding the right mouse button down and moving the mouse pointer up/down/left/right (the listing will scroll to follow the mouse pointer's movement), using the cursor keys, using the numeric keypad's Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys.
The pulldown menus on the DOpus 5 main screen consist of the following options (I've included short definitions where appropriate):
• OPUS
  • BACKDROP
  • EXECUTE COMMAND
  • ABOUT
  • HIDE
  • QUIT
• LISTERS
  • NEW
  • CLOSE
  • MAKE SOURCE
  • MAKE DEST
  • LOCK AS SOURCE
  • LOCK AS DEST
  • UNLOCK
  • TURN OFF
  • UNLOCK ALL
  • CLOSE ALL
  • EDIT
  • EDIT LISTER TOOLBAR
  • EDIT LISTER MENU
  • TILE (arranges the displayed Listers to fit equally within the main screen)
    • HORIZONTALLY
    • VERTICALLY
  • CASCADE (cascades the displayed Listers within the main screen)
  • SNAPSHOT
  • VIEW AS
    • NAME (just like the WB function)
    • ICON (just like the WB function)
    • SHOW ALL (just like the WB function)
• ICONS
  • OPEN (same as double clicking on an icon)
  • INFORMATION
  • SNAPSHOT
    • ICONS
    • WINDOW
    • ALL
  • UN-SNAPSHOT
  • LEAVE OUT (you can leave any directory or file out on the main screen)
  • PUT AWAY
  • SELECT ALL
  • CLEAN UP
  • RESET (restores the icon's positions according to the last snapshot)
  • RENAME
  • FORMAT DISK
  • DISK INFORMATION
  • PROGRAM GROUPS (you can make a separate icon which holds related programs within it. This is very similar to the WBStartup drawer in that programs can be launched from here without having the entire program's related files located in this drawer. You could make a Program Group that held all of your word processors, paint programs, etc.)
    • NEW
    • DELETE
    • REMOVE PROGRAM
• BUTTONS
  • NEW
  • LOAD
  • SAVE
  • SAVE AS
  • CLOSE
  • EDIT (pull up the custom buttons editing palette)
• SETTINGS
  • CLOCK
  • CREATE ICONS (choose whether or not to add icons to new directories)
  • RECURSIVE FILTER (create a filter that acts recursively on files within subdirectories)
  • ENVIRONMENT (control over: screenmode, backdrop pattern, colors, global format for Lister displays, etc.)
    • EDIT
    • LOAD
    • SAVE
    • SAVE AS
    • SAVE LAYOUT
  • OPTIONS (control over: Caching, Copy, Delete, Hide Method, Icons, Locale, and special Lister format for specific directory paths)
  • EDIT
  • LOAD
  • SAVE
  • SAVE AS
• FILE TYPES (edit File Types used by DOpus 5 and WB 3.0/3.1)
• USER MENU (edit the User menu's contents)
• USER (customized user menu)

• Full Drag and Drop support for highlighting directories or files and then dropping them in another Lister to be copied or unarchived etc. You can also just drag these directories or files outside of the Lister and drop them on the main screen for easy access.

• The middle mouse button has full support for a wide range of functions associated with Buttons and Tool Bar icons, providing you aren't using a Commodity such as MultiCX which enables the middle mouse button for switching between screens.

• Floating button bars make it easy to customize your DOpus 5 layout with only the most needed functions which aren't supported, or conveniently accessed, by an icon on the Tool Bar or a menu choice in the User menu.

• ARexx support.

• Data Type support.

• The mouse pointer sensitive help function will pull up an Amigaguide document specific to the item you are pointing at when pressing the HELP key.

• Enhanced Search requestor which supports simple and complex searches.

• Enhanced Pattern Matching which supports simple and complex searches.

• The ability to change the DateStamp of any file or directory.

• Your old DOpus 4 configuration can be imported into DOpus 5. The look of DOpus 5 will change to look just like the old familiar DOpus 4 if you choose to do so. Frankly, this defeats the purpose and power of the new DOpus 5. I don't recommend it.

I miss the CPU usage display on the main title bar.
The ability to set a window close delay has been removed. This means that you have to either add a close gadget to any window that shows output from a DOpus 5 function i.e. LHA dearchiving etc., or add an AmigaDOS WAIT command to that particular function's activity. It was easier to just set the close delay under DOpus 4. When selecting a Backdrop for use on the DOpus 5 main screen, you must select the desired image from within your Prefs/WBPattern requestor and then use SaveAs. If you just select any old image from the DOpus 5 Backdrop requestor, it won't work.
You have to type in a lengthy registration number that locks the copy of DOpus 5 on to the hard drive to which it was installed. If you copy the program to another drive or use a hard drive defragmenter (ReOrg etc.), you have to reregister the program by typing in the registration number again!
I have experienced crashes when working with DOpus 5 with my Picasso II board and Workbench 3.1 setup. Closing the Button Paint Palette with its close gadget will cause a GURU every time on my system.

Directory Opus 5 is very powerful. It offers a fully multi-threaded, internally multitasking suite of programs. You can have multiple destination Listers open and be copying files etc. to each destination Lister from the source, formatting multiple floppies, unarchiving or archivng files, editing files, etc. -- all at the same time! Any of these individual tasks can be aborted without affecting any of the other tasks which are running concurrently.
DOpus 5 offers a fresh new look and a functionality heretofore unheard of on the Amiga platform. The author is easily contacted via Email and he replies promptly, usually within one day. I strongly recommend that any power user of the Amiga get this program -- it's well worth it.