Software
Review of: |
| Do
you have any idea of how much space certain individual files are taking
up on your Hard Drive? Ok, Ok, Windows explorer will display a list showing
the size of individual files but can you visualize the file size in relation
to other files? Meet SequoiaView, a nifty freeware package that displays
a global overview of the entire contents of a hard drive. Without a global
overview of your entire file system, questions such as “Which directory
is taking up most of my hard disk space?” or “Why is my disk full?” are
difficult to answer for most of us.
SequoiaView, invented by Jack van Wijk, takes treemaps a step further by adding ridges each time a rectangle is subdivided. Visualize rubberized rectangles, each inflated with a bit of air pressure. Wow, I have some fat files eating up a lot of real estate on my HD. Moving your cursor over sections of the screen opens a small window identifying the file name. A closer look reveals WordPerfect Office 2002 is taking a modest amount of space (Fig 4) but a movie of Maui that my brother-in-law was editing is a monster, taking far too much space. It’s now gone. Each time you access SequoiaView, it does a quick scan of your HD. Files and directories can be selected, inspected and opened but cannot be modified within SequoiaView. Users can define different color schemes to facilitate identification of certain file types. Files can be filtered on name and size as well as creation or modification or last access date or any combination of these. You can download this freeware from the SequoiaView homepage. For serious PC users, this is a must-have utility.
Clarke Bird |
SequoiaView
is a disk browsing tool based on the principle of treemaps, developed by
Shniederman and Johnson in the late 1980's. Instead of showing a file system
as a long list of files and directories, they developed a technique to
display rectangles, with the size of the rectangle being proportional to
the size of the file. You can then display more information at once if
you use all available space.