Diskspace
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Microsoft is testing an ebook store on Windows 10
Microsoft has unveiled an ebook store in the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview, the first time it has dabbled in bookselling since its ill-fated Barnes & Noble Nook partnership. Beta testers will be able to purchase ebooks from the Windows store, then organize and read them in the Edge browser. "Windows Insiders in the US get to try out this experience today starting with this build and we expect to add more content over time," the company said in a blog post.
Daily Mac App: WhatSize
Getting to grips with the files and folders on your hard drive can be a chore, but the right tool makes it easier. WhatSize is a tool that combines the best of several disk visualisers into one package. WhatSize scans your disk(s) and reports on the size of your files and folders with a straightforward, color coded, Finder-esque presentation. From there you can click through folders, drilling down to large problem areas, identifying files and folders was you go. WhatSize can also give you a pie chart representation of your data with labels and concentric folder display. For instance, your home directory is held within the "Users" folder on the root of the drive, so the Users folder is displayed in the innermost ring, while your home directory is displayed on the next ring out. You can drill down by double clicking folders, or zoom out by double clicking on white space. It's simple and intuitive. There's also a table view that you can sort by file size, or you can scan for duplicates, which scans and compares your files, which takes a while (read: hours) if you have lots of files, but then allows you to easily see what's doubled up. WhatSize will also let you scan files and folders with Administrator status, allowing you to scan other users data on your drive. If you're looking for a comprehensive, simple disk space visualiser, WhatSize does the job admirably for US$12.99 and is available from whatsizemac.com. But don't take our word for it, download the free trial and give it a whirl. Thanks to Klajd Deda for the suggestion.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: GrandPerspective
Finding large space hogging files in a complex file system like that on your Mac can be difficult. GrandPerspective, a small open source program, aims to help you find and remove space wasters quickly and easily. GrandPerspective first scans a target folder, be it your entire disk or just your iTunes folder for instance. It can then build a treemap based on the file size and type, color coding the files in a user configurable mapping scheme, showing you your file system visually. From there you can identify those files and folders that are taking up the most space. Once you've found an unusually large file you can find out what it is by hovering over it or clicking it, with file information such as name, size and file type displayed in the right hand draw. You can then either delete that file directly from GrandPerspective (if enabled in the application preferences), or reveal that file or folder in Finder. You can also zoom the treemap in or out to get more detail, as well as re-scan at any time, either just the folder selected or the whole drive to update for any changes you've made. The color mapping can be changed to color like file types, extensions, names, levels or folders, which makes grouping similar files easy. Filters can also be used to scan your files for all sorts of things like file type, size, name -- you name it, there's a filter available. If you're looking to free up disk space on your drive, GrandPerspective makes it easier to find unwanted space hogs and is certainly worth the free download. Thanks to aliasnexus0 for the suggestion.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: DaisyDisk
Trying to find space hogs on your various disks can be a nightmare. DaisyDisk makes it easier by letting you visualize your hard drives with beautiful circular sunburst maps. There are quite a few disk space visualizers out there, Disk Inventory X, which we featured recently on the Daily Mac App recently, is a good example that uses classic treemaps to display your data. DaisyDisk, which we reviewed in March, uses a variation on the theme, by representing you disks as circular interactive maps. Zoomed out you see the whole disk at once, from there you can identify any large folders that likely harbor space wasting files. Clicking on one of the folders from the side menu or directly on the map will then take you into that folder and give you another map of the data this time just in that folder. You can quickly drill down and find large files, with gorgeous looking and well animated maps generated each time you click through. Once you've identified a possible candidate for deletion, you can use Quick Look to check out the file by hovering over it and hitting the space bar. If you think it's a file you can do without, you can delete it right from DaisyDisk by hitting delete or dragging it to the target in the lower right-hand corner. DaisyDisk is simple to use, scans your disks really fast and makes hunting for junk files quick, easy and fun. It's an incredibly slick program that's a must-have if you're doing a serious clear out. DaisyDisk is available for US$19.95 from the developers site and will run on Leopard and up, or is currently on sale for half price at $9.99 in the Mac App Store. Thanks to Niko JP 12 for the suggestion.
Google+ runs out of disk space, floods inboxes with notification spam
If you're one of the lucky ones who landed themselves a Google+ account, you might have felt a little less fortunate when your inbox was bombarded by repeated notifications. Vic Gundotra, the Goog's social mastermind, took to the fledgling service to apologize and explain what happened. Turns out the servers in charge of tracking notifications ran out of disk space for about 80 minutes -- causing them to repeatedly send and resend the same messages. In his Plus posting Gundotra admitted, "we didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have." Sure, it may have been annoying to get 17 alerts that your old college roommate added you to his circles, but we've got to give credit to Vic for owning this mini fail. The company better hope it can scale up capacity quick -- Google+ invites are still a hot property and it's got a lot of growing to do before it can truly compete with the likes of Facebook.
DaisyDisk 2.0 offers scanning multiple discs, in-app deletion
In a moment of great minds thinking alike, as TJ Luoma was writing up his Mac 101 on tracking down hard drive space hogs, I was contacted by the folks at DaisyDisk to see if I wanted to take version 2 of their data visualization software for a spin. The core of DaisyDisk is the same as when I first reviewed the software in July 2009. It took roughly six minutes for it to scan my 640 GB drive and display the results in a daisy wheel. The UI was rewritten on Core Animation and it shows. Animation is smooth, and colors are vibrant.
Mac 101: Six steps for tracking down hard drive space hogs
More Mac 101, our ongoing series of tips, tricks and helpful hints for new Mac users and curious veterans. "Your startup disk is almost full." This simple sentence can trigger all the stages of grief: denial ("That can't be right!"), anger ("This is a 500 GB drive!"), bargaining ("If I delete the podcasts, will you let me download the new iOS update?"), depression ("Ugh, this is going to take all day. Am I going to have to replace my hard drive?") and acceptance ("I can fix this!"). Before you rush out to buy a new hard drive, here are six simple (and free) steps that may help you reclaim "lost" hard drive space.
Friday Favorite: OmniDiskSweeper helps you track down where all your disk space went
"Where did all my disk space all go?" When I was in college, each student was allotted 4 megabytes ('mega' is not a typo) of disk space for both email and files. Granted, this was back in the early '90s, before anyone had heard of "www." or had even thought of ".mp3" or ".mp4". In 1995 I acquired a 1GB hard drive and felt like king of the known world. Sure, it was in a case about the size of a loaf of bread, but an entire gigabyte! All to myself! Today I have a Drobo which is in a case roughly the same size as that 1GB drive, but it has 2 terabytes of redundant storage -- 2,000x the space on that prime example of mid-90s storage tech. One thing hasn't changed: there's still never enough hard drive space. It seems to be as unavoidable as death and taxes. That Drobo? It's about 95% full. Enter OmniDiskSweeper, a freeware program by The Omni Group which will allow you to find where your diskspace has gone. Now, there are a number of different programs out there for analyzing your hard drive space: DiskInventoryX, GrandPerspective, Baseline, DaisyDisk, and WhatSize, to name just a few. Choosing one may be as personal as which Twitter client or web browser you prefer. I like OmniDiskSweeper for two reasons: it is free and it is simple. It uses the same "Column View" that I use in Finder, and automatically sorts the folders which use the most disk space to the top. For example, looking at the Drobo, I can see that about 50% of the space on that device is taken up by programs I have recorded using Elgato's EyeTV. You might also find files in unexpected places. A friend recently used OmniDiskSweeper and realized that he had tried to copy a bunch of files to an external hard drive, but something had gone wrong. Instead of moving the files to the external drive, they had just been moved into a folder in /Volumes/. OmniDiskSweeper makes it easy to delete files right through the app; simply select the file and click the big red "Delete" button. A word of warning! A warning dialogue box will appear, asking you to confirm that you want to "Destroy" the files. They will not be sent to the Trash (since the assumption is that you are running OmniDiskSweeper because you want to reclaim diskspace), they will be deleted immediately. The Omni Group made OmniDiskSweeper (along with several other utilities) free a few months ago, so if you looked at it and were turned off by a price tag, give it another look. It may not have as many bells and whistles as some of the other programs out there, but it's hard to beat OmniDiskSweeper for ease of use. UPDATE: TUAW reader "ithinkergoimac" comments below that OmniDiskSweeper may report incorrect (significantly increased) file sizes if you are using TimeMachine.
TUAW review: Sponge for Mac OS X
I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to accumulate junk on my Macs. I start off with a nice, fat, clean hard drive, and before you know it I'm starting to panic about running out of space.Sponge, from Dare to be Creative Ltd., is a US$26 program designed to look for the space-wasters on your Mac and help you get rid of them cleanly. There are other applications that do the same thing, Smith Micro's Spring Cleaning being the primary example of this. I actually shied away from cleaner applications since an earlier version of Spring Cleaning did a little TOO good a job a few years ago and rendered a Mac unusable until I reloaded the OS. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I decided to use Sponge to try to clean up my MacBook Air. It's a first-generation model with an 80 GB hard drive, of which 74.1 GB are actually usable. Since I was down to 16 GB of space, I figured that a quick cleaning might be in order. Read on for more about Sponge.
