davepermen

the advantage of the new layout would be to be able to see much more files on widescreen displays (espencially 1280x800 which a lot of notebook users have) while not having to miss the defragmentation image, which shows the disks state. i hate widescreen displays (much less usable real estate by default, as we normally always read and work from top to bottom), but defraggler would be a n app that would perfectly fit into the needs of a widescreen display to show it's information the fullest. but having it as an option (split vertical / split horizontal) would be great, too. just forget the tabs. they are useless and stupid.

or at least, add the option to have file list as the first tab, opened by default. then again, remove the tabs. they're useless. i like the program and it feels quite well in RC2, but the gui is very bad designed, much too much unused spaces here and there, much too much gui-interfacing needed to get to the infos you want, and do the stuff you want. i've shown an idea of a simple paint.net rework of the old gui to support widescreen displays more, and removed much unused space as well. this is in the other thread about RC2.

http://davepermen.net/Defraggler_QuickAdjust.png Thats the idea. Further I'd suggest removing the menu from the top and putting it down to the other buttons, open up the menu on click on the Action Button. The List with the Disks should be a ComboBox (dropdown), and on the Side, there could be additional info about the current selected disk. This would further reduce unused space. Statusbar could be removed at the bottom and moved to the additional info at the top-right as well. I can mock this up later in visual studio. I really like defraggler. I just think it doesn't really have the perfect ui yet. And the direction, in which it gets developped, is definitely the wrong one. Looking a bit bloaty right now.

I suggest removing the tabs as well, going back to the old layout, and then add the option to not have a horizontal split, but a vertical split. it would be much more efficient space usage for widescreen displays, as most are nowadays. That way, the file list would be completely from top to bottom, and the fragmentation-display would have quite a big view area, allowing for a good detailed view what's going on. Oh, and some options would be nice, like, not reporting that some files could not be defragmented. I can see that in the file list myself (It could get highlighted, thought). I can set up a fake image to show my idea.