GrandPerspective is a small utility application for macOS that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. It can help you to manage your disk, as you can easily spot which files and folders take up the most space. It uses a so called tree map for visualisation. If you don’t want to shell out the $10 for DaisyDisk and you’re not using macOS Sierra, Disk Inventory X is free and does the job as well, it just doesn’t look nearly as pretty as other options.

1. Daisydisk Disk Inventory Xbox 360
2. Daisydisk Vs Disk Inventory X
3. Derlien Disk Inventory X

Disk Inventory X is a disk space analyzer utility for Mac OS X 10.3 and later. Inspired by WinDirStat, it shows the sizes of files and folders in a graphical treemap.

Version 1.3 of Disk Inventory X added support for macOS 10.15 Catalina, while the earlier version 1.2 added support for macOS 10.14 Mojave and its dark mode feature.

Reception[edit]

• Mark Frauenfelder, founder of Boingboing, wrote in his book, Rule the Web: how to do anything and everything on the Internet—better, Disk Inventory X was his favorite way of uncovering disk-hogging files.^[2]
• Download.com gave it 4 out of 5.^[3]

May 25, 2017  MAC iDirStat – monitor your disk space; Free MAC OS X alternatives of: DaisyDisk, Disk Inventory X, QDirStat and WinDirStat (Sierra 10.12.x) May 25, 2017 / 3 Comments MAC OS X Sierra 10.12.X compatible disk space monitor and statistic user interface and editor. Feb 20, 2020  The rectangular 'tree-map' presentation in Disk Inventory X has its benefits and downsides, but our own usability tests show that our DaisyDisk's sunburst is more easily readable and navigable, in most cases. Unlike Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk is not freeware, but the trial version is fully functional and not limited in time. Apr 24, 2018  Disk Inventory X will also give you the opportunity to observe your entire disk by order of folder size. CleanMyMac 3 CleanMyMac is definitely worth your consideration because this cleaning utility belongs to the best cleaners for Mac that can help.

References[edit]

1. ^ ^ab'Disk Inventory - Release Notes'. Retrieved January 22, 2020.
2. ^Rule the Web: how to do anything and everything on the Internet-- better, page 312
3. ^'Disk Inventory X for Mac'. Download.com. October 28, 2012. Retrieved January 22, 2020.

External links[edit]

Daisydisk Disk Inventory Xbox 360

Apr 5, 2010

The birth of DaisyDisk

DaisyDisk was started in late December 2008 as a result of half hour discussion between me (Taras) and Oleg, our coder. I proposed that it might make sense for us to create a relatively basic project in order to raise some money for something more serious.

The idea was simple: we create a disk visualization tool that can help one find out where the hell all the disk space has gone. By that time the only available applications of that kind for Mac users were GrandPerspective, Disk Inventory X and the like. All of those have mediocre interfaces and are built around the so called treemaps – the visualizations originally made for depicting disk usage.

Treemaps suck. They’re hard to read, they tend to shuffle all data on smallest changes, they’re messy and hard to navigate. Yes, one can handle these issues to some extent and certain modern implementations/researches can make them good enough, but still not good enough for us.

Another approach can be seen in applications that use the sunburst, basically a multilevel pie chart, slightly tuned for displaying folders tree. My favorite is Scanner while Linux users may recall Filelight – another similar implementation. Unfortunately for us all, the Mac version of Filelight has never been usable for any real-life tasks, remaining a mere shadow of its Linux ancestor…

It may sound naive now, but all we originally wanted was to create a Mac version of Scanner, just slightly more polished and usable. Display a list of sources, scan progress animation, resulting map. Profit!

Animations, second mockup

If only…

The very first problems arose when we tried to build the sunburst map in progress of scanning, from the data we get on the fly. While it looked sane on paper, experiments proved us wrong. Very wrong. Despite all tricks, all we got was just a convulsing set of rings that hardly represented the picture we wanted. Fail.

Daisydisk Vs Disk Inventory X

We gave up the idea of re-using the sunburst as a scan progress indicator and concentrated on more important things. Soon enough we found that the original sunburst and many existing implementations suffer from some serious problems. The map looked hairy due to numerous tiny segments, large files outside the fifth ring were often invisible, segment coloring changed on each move, and overall navigation was quite a mess.

We’ve build several prototypes which helped us solve those problems and test our implementation on real-world data. For example, tiny segments have been consolidated into groups. This makes more sense than just hiding them, as in real life there are lots of examples of large groups of small files: folders with images, music or other files. In such groups, each standalone file is relatively small, but the total size of the group can be hundreds of megabytes. We also decided to display extra rings which help reveal space hogs hidden deep in the disk folder hierarchy. These extra rings are thinner, but provide useful information without the need for extra navigation. Navigation is another thing we can be proud of. The very first idea was to retain segment color during navigation. In other words, if ~/Documents is green, then ~/Documents/MyWorkStuff should also be colored in shades of green. I have no idea why this has not been done years before…

The blossom animation was also a part of our plan on improving navigation. Earlier versions of DaisyDisk used different transitions, but with the same purpose: improve the navigation experience by smoothing map changes. Not even mentioning the wow effect it creates :)

Derlien Disk Inventory X

DaisyDisk has been gradually enhanced, tuned and tweaked throughout the year, but this is a different story :)