XYplorer Beta Club
And so I did, for the most part. I think I've mastered about oh, 25% of the functionality. But as it is, I can do my daily things, which are different for everyone, about 10 times faster at least. I'm not kidding. Quicklaunch is my buddy, and so are locked tabs and their color properties.
Labels, are you kidding me on how ridiculously awesome those are? I have, at any time, 5-10 customer tickets open. I need to keep old ones for a while; some are semi-active. I can color code all that? Holy....
Branch view is absolutely the GOD of features. How on earth do people not demand this in Windows Explorer? There are operations I can do with this in seconds that fellow developers are just not even doing because their tools are garbage.
The ability to tie age of files to a background color is ridiculously useful. It gives me instant feedback that yes, my IDE is dumping DLLs into the right place, NO MISTAKE POSSIBLE. sorry about the caps.
Overall, XY has become a skin graft. Perhaps some other products could do some similar things, but my thing about XY is, it's a vision not a build. It keeps getting better but it never strays from its path. It's cohesive.
And frankly, I can't even tell you what could/should be better. I'm not annoyed by *anything* XY does. It just all makes sense and is super accessible. And fast.
And that's with having explored maybe 25%. I won't ever explore the 100% because I don't need every part of XY, but I'm very, very impressed.
Last but NOT least, I want to talk about the licensing. I purchased a lifetime license pro. That's what, $80 or so. By that license, I am able to use XY on VMs I have to frequently use, multiple computers I use every day. I'm ALLOWED to do that. I can't even begin to tell you (and most of you probably know
) how restrictive and expensive licenses can be for that sort of use. It is absolutely AMAZING that I can do that and NOT violate terms. That's a big, big shoutout to admin, thank you so very much for keeping it that way. And to be clear, I see this as a huge bonus, I'm not expecting it, and neither should anyone else. If that model ever changes, there's gonna be good reason for it because it has been a free ride for a long time. Yes, not free, but again check licensing cost for other tools that have MUCH less functionality.And then one more last thing. You can tell this is a love letter to XY.. I know it's VB6, I know the codebase must be huge and can't port to newer technology easily. But I'll be damned, the sheer speed and flexibility of ALL the features is amazing. It feels and acts like a modern tech product.
Also someone talk to me about paper folders. I understand what they do, but not how to use them IRL.
What a great review, and which also points out many actual use cases. I'm tempted to publish it on the main website. And "It's a vision not a build", come one, that's PR gold! I'm tempted to print this all over my website. 