The Inquisitor ET 1.0
August 25, 1999

What it is:
This application allows you to easily determine how your hard drive's space is being used. It displays a pie graph of the folders and files on the hard drive, allowing you to compare at a glance their relative sizes. You can add items to the graph by drag-and-dropping them onto the window, or through the "Add..." menu item. You can drag the graph around to see it from different angles, or click on one or more items to get some statistics, such as the amount of space taken up compared to the amount of data stored, the number of files, the average file size, etc. (shift-click to select multiple items) Double clicking (or pressing command-return) replaces the current graph with the contents of the selection, and pressing the "Go Up" button (or pressing return) returns to parent folder. Delete or Backspace will remove the current selection from the graph. You can also type the first few letters of the name of a file to select it, much like the Finder.

You can tell when the Inquisitor has finished calculating file sizes because the spinning arrows in the lower left hand corner will stop spinning and gray out. An italic label represents a folder, a red label represents a folder whose size is still being calculated.

Under the Hood:
The program is multithreaded, which allows you to get an idea of what's going on before it is done processing. The only way to determine the size of a folder is to add up the sizes of all the files and folders inside, which can take a little while on today's large hard drives. However, The Inquisitor does this significantly faster than the Finder's "Get Info" command, if only because it's not as nice to background processes. Since this has been primarily a learning experience for me, I tried to include support for some of the other new technologies, such as the Appearance Manager and Navigation Services. (and I was greatly helped in this by Graham Cox's MacZoop framework - Thank you!)

How to Crash:
1. Add a file to the graph from a removable drive (network, zip disk, cd, etc.)
2. Eject that drive

Why? For the programmers among you, I'm not receiving disk events, and I'm not sure why. Yes, I'm using the everyEvent mask. If anyone has any ideas, please write me & I'll see if I can get it to work.

That is the only bug I know of at this time. Please report any problems you might discover at ejt@andrew.cmu.edu.

System Requirements:
A PowerPC processor, Mac OS 8.?
I'm not sure if it will work with anything previous to 8.5, but it might. It almost certainly won't run with System 7.
I started a Cocoa rewrite for OS X, but this has been indefinitely postponed until I complete my degree and get a job...

Cost:
Free! Consider it my payback to the community for the great support they've given me. However, a post card or other encouraging feedback is very inspiring... just think, you have the power to influence the style of a budding young programmer! ;^)

Feedback:
After putting so much time into this, if there's some extra feature that will make this program useful to you, tell me and I'll try to put it in.

Legal stuff:
As usual, I take no legal responsibility for this software, use it at your own risk, blah blah blah, usual disclaimers apply.

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

Download:
132K (stuff5)
179K (binhex)

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