Long Path Support

Support for long paths (ie paths greater than 255 characters) has been an increasingly requested feature and so I’m really pleased to see it added to the latest version of FileLocator Pro. Since FileLocator Pro does sometimes rely on the Windows shell for functionality such as file context menus it’s possible that, until Windows fully supports long paths, not every aspect will function perfectly but any issues should be the exception and not the norm.

File paths in Windows are more complicated than most end users realise but fortunately Windows hides much of the complexity, if you’re interested in some of the inner workings I recommend you read this blog post: DOS to NT: A Path’s Journey.

Although Microsoft has been adding long path support to Windows 10 it’s actually quite a difficult problem. Many third party applications have the value (commonly called MAX_PATH) hard coded since the Windows API documentation specifically refers to it. Therefore it’s potentially troublesome for Windows 10 to simply switch on long file support by default, those third party applications not expecting paths longer than MAX_PATH might start crashing with buffer overflows, or worse if the overflows are maliciously targeted.

Please try out the long path support in FileLocator Pro and, as always, if you find any problems please report it to Tech Support.

Password reset

As part of our continued investment in customer data security we’ve moved to BCrypt password hashing for the main MyAccount authentication. Unfortunately this means that all previous passwords are now obsolete and have been reset. You can request a new password here:

https://secure.mythicsoft.com/info/resetpassword

Agent Ransack 2016

I’m really pleased to announce that Agent Ransack 2016 is now available.

Agent Ransack Download Page

It’s always a tricky balance deciding what new features to add to Agent Ransack and which to keep for the Pro (ie FileLocator Pro) user. Which new features will make Agent Ransack a nicer all-round product for the average ‘lite’ user without overloading on the extra features and control that the ‘pro’ user needs. I think Agent Ransack 2016 has found this balance, I hope you do too. So, what’s new?

FileLocator Pro Version 8

It’s been a while coming but… FileLocator Pro 8.0 is now available for immediate download!

FileLocator Pro Download Page

Indexing

In a FileLocator Pro QA “Does FileLocator Pro create an index for searching?” I once answered:

“No FileLocator Pro does not use file or content indexes and for very good reasons. While indexing can certainly improve the speed of searches in certain circumstances there are many drawbacks. These drawbacks include …”

and I go on to list resource issues, syncing issues, security issues and more. So it might seem surprising that I’m now announcing that FileLocator Pro v.8 supports indexing. Yes, I know, I’m still a little surprised myself.

However, and this is a really important point, it’s not the type of indexing component that’s always running in the background. If you don’t use the feature then you won’t notice it because it’s effectively disabled by default. It won’t be running in the background consuming valuable CPU cycles and it won’t be building secret indexes consuming valuable disk space. It won’t do anything until you ask it to.

That’s because it’s not intended as a Desktop Search replacement instead it’s more for searching large repositories of fairly static data.

Merry Christmas!

How is it already the end of 2015? Boy, times flies by when you’re having fun.

Looking back over this last year my Mythicsoft highlight of 2015 was the decoding of the 2013 OST format. After, literally, years of trying to coax Microsoft into providing us with the information we gave up and just did it ourselves. I won’t deny I’m still slightly annoyed we had to spend the extra time on what turned out to be such small differences but it was a very satisfying end result.

So what’s going to be the highlight of 2016 I wonder? Well, it’s easy… FileLocator Pro version 8! It’s been a long time in the making, the first prototyping of one of the new features goes back to 2011. To be honest, I had really hoped FileLocator Pro v8 would have been released in 2015 but the good news is that it’s very close. And because of the delay we’ll be extending the one year upgrade period so that anyone who purchased v7 in 2015 will be eligible for a free upgrade to v8.

One small admin note: Technical Support over the Christmas period will be available but the responses might be slightly slower than what you may have normally received.

Which just leaves me, and everyone at Mythicsoft, to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

 

What is Desktop Search?

An enthusiastic customer recently sent us an email:

Hi guys, please include the keywords “desktop search” on your home page so people may actually find your product when searching for a desktop search program. (All your competitors are named things like Google|Yahoo|Windows Desktop Search.)

Hope this little tip will help you and your users!

It’s really nice to receive comments like this, people WANT us to be found, but I’ve never really thought about FileLocator Pro or Agent Ransack as Desktop Search products. So, what is Desktop Search? A quick search of the Internet highlights a large number of different uses:

Desktop Search vs Mobile Search: Distinguishing between Internet searches that are performed by someone sitting at a traditional Desktop computer as opposed to someone searching the Internet using a mobile device such as a smart phone.

Desktop Search vs Internet Search: Distinguishing between someone searching files on a local computer as opposed to someone searching the Internet.

Other: And then you get some examples that really confuse the terminology. Bing Desktop is a Microsoft desktop app that allows people to quickly search the Internet, via their desktop. Google Desktop Search is (was) a desktop app written by Google for searching files on their local computer.

So, what do I think Desktop Search is? Well, let’s break it down…

OST 2013 File Format – The missing documentation

With the release of Outlook 2013 the format of the OST file changed significantly enough to break FileLocator Pro’s OST reading code and for some reason Microsoft refused to divulge the changes (I’ve personally spoken to or emailed several different Microsoft employees on this issue, at least half with ‘Senior’ in their job title, and while they all initially seemed responsive they ultimately said it would not be possible to share the information). So eventually we decided to roll-up our sleeves and dig down into the binary content and figure it out for ourselves. Here’s what we found…

Agent Ransack’s early years

If I’m honest Agent Ransack was an accident. After reading an article by Brian Kernighan (co-father of C and Unix) in 1999 on regular expressions I decided to play around with my own regex engine. However, to really test it out I needed a framework to throw lots of data at it so I created a basic C++ application (initially called FileLocator) that would run through all the source files on my computer and match it against the regex engine. And it worked!

Feeling really pleased with myself I had a look on the Internet for other regex engines and realized that there were some MUCH better implementations. I found one by a guy named Henry Spencer and plugged that into my search framework. It not only worked, it was REALLY fast.

Windows keyboard shortcut for snapping

A few weeks back a colleague showed me a keyboard short-cut that I’ve been using constantly since. It’s concerned with how to snap windows using just the keyboard. It’s really simple:

WinKey + Left arrow

WinKey + Right arrow

Even better, if you have multiple monitors repeated ‘snapping’ moves the window across the monitors. Brilliant.

Performance

At the end of March there was a new update for FileLocator Pro titled March 28th Performance Release. The significant performance enhancement was concerned with how FileLocator Pro handles Boolean searches, especially when concerned with wildcards or word boundaries. It’s not such a big deal when searching for one or two keywords (modern processors are SO much faster than standard HDDs that the performance bottleneck is reading the data not searching it) but with faster SSDs (or cached data) and large keywords lists the performance improvements of the new Boolean searching routines really make a difference.

Keep checking the Version History page because there a plenty more upgrades on the way!