The Omni Group

I didn't know about that particular app, but it's all about choice–you can use Finder to delete files too.

Why, here is a link! Doesn't it look wonderfully fantastic in every way? If only I could catch a double feature of SoaP and Slither. My cup, it would would runneth over.

At this point I think I'm pushing the “commenting in my own entry's comment section” approach a little far.

Marc: hey, it's just a blog. There's going to be all kinds of different entries in this thing, by different people, on different subjects. I suggested skipping the ones tagged with my name. : )

Linda: I rather meant the newsletters. It's kind of hard to figure out the real news. :-)

Cameron, allowing the user to authenticate as an administrator to view all of the files on the disk is definitely something we want to add to the product.  But if you're comfortable (or at least willing) to drop down to a Terminal window to sudo anyway, you can always sudo OmniDiskSweeper itself (rather than “du”) to give it read access to your entire system:

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

Again, this isn't the ideal solution (we want to add authentication to the application itself), but it's at least nicer than “sudo du”!

By the way, one of OmniDiskSweeper's unique features is that it lists the packages which reference a file so that you can see which packages will be affected if you remove it.

And other than the new on-screen help:

OmniDiskSweeper 1.5 is now a Universal Binary.

We've added the ability to resize individual columns (by dragging them, just like in Columns mode in the Finder).

The licensing system now supports fast user switching.

You can now contact our tech support team by selecting “Send Feedback…” from the Help menu (just like you can in all our other apps).

We've fixed all known crashes.  (Thanks to everyone who sent in the rare crash report!)

Yes, doing:

sudo /Applications/OmniDiskSweeper.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniDiskSweeper

is a good idea as it is much nicer than using 'du'.

However that of course would have the whole of OmniDiskSweeper running as 'root' and this is a bad idea for any GUI app since such apps are big and complicated and thus it is much harder to avoid security holes. I'm sure you know all of this and plan to use a small command-line helper utility (that would run as 'root' after authentication) to get the file size info instead of having the whole app running with 'root' privileges.

I also note that if I wanted to run OmniDiskSweeper as 'root', I could use the 3rd-party utility “Pseudo” to run it instead of having to use the command-line.

I'm glad to see that ODS has been updated (after so many years), but the interface wasn't updated much, so it still has an older feel to it still.  I think some of the buttons and such need to be updated and changed so it feels a little more “Mac-like”, in accordance to Year 2006 standards.

And what about allowing secure removal for file deletion?  Or perhaps even the option to erase an optical (& rewritable) disc?

Good thing that there is a nifty app (like Permanent Eraser) which already does some of those things, but wouldn't it be great if some of those wonderful features were integrated into OmniDiskSweeper?  I think they would, but hey, I'm biased!

Will there ever come a universal binary of ONI?