Directory Opus Magellan II 5.81 & Dopus Plus companion CD Reviewby Steve Folberg (from Amazing Computing, US, Vol 14 No 17, 1999)If you have ever used a file management utility on your Amiga before, then the very
term "file manager" probably conjures up the image of a rather dull looking
screen with two file listers -- one for the source directory and one for the destination
directory -- and a row of buttons that let you do things like rename, delete, comment and
play or view files quickly and easily, without resorting to arcane Shell commands or
sifting visually through icon-filled Workbench drawers. You could say that file managers
are like those "plumber's helper" plungers: not terribly exciting, but quite
often what you need to get the job done. Directory Opus Magellan II ships on a mere three floppy disks and requires only an Amiga with Workbench 2 or higher, 1 MB of memory and a hard drive, although this program clearly benefits from more RAM, accelerators, graphics cards and so on. (The software installs version 5.8, although a bug-fix update to 5.81 is available to registered users on the GP Soft web site.) Magellan can be installed to run as a stand-alone program, but it makes much more sense to install it in its intended form: as a total Workbench Replacement which loads transparently when you boot up your Amiga. Documentation comes in the form of an excellent, comprehensive, 262-page, spiral bound manual with a 117-page Magellan II addendum. Good, solid, printed Amiga software documentation is harder and harder to come by these these days, making Magellan's wonderful manual even more appreciated. Context sensitive Amiga-Guide help is always a button away, too. You can also buy a
companion CD called DOpus PLUS, containing comprehensive HTML tutorials and many
enhancement files (more on the CD below). Support is also available via an extremely
active D0pus mailing list, and there is also a great wealth of Opus support material
(scripts, images, file types and so on) on Aminet in the biz/dopus directory. Lister Window
Icon action and name mode provide a bank of customizable toolbar buttons which appear at the top of each lister, as well as a popup lister menu, plus the option of right-mouse-button pop-up menus which are specific to different types of files (more on File Types below). You can also choose what information about each file is displayed in a lister, and clicking on the title of each lister column will dynamically resort the files in the lister according to that piece of information (by name, or by date, or by comment, for example). The very existence of these customizable lister menus, lister toolbars and file-type
popup menus (all of which can access the same functions such as AmigaDOS or Opus commands,
AREXX scripts or other functions) highlights one of the major strengths of Opus Magellan:
the ability to do the same thing in many different ways. This makes customizing and
configuring Opus Magellan potentially intimidating for the new user, although the
"out of the box" configuration is very usable and the printed manual is
excellent. A general rule of thumb: if you can imagine it, there's some way of doing it in
Opus! (Judging by the traffic on the Opus Mailing List, for some users, tweaking and
configuring Opus is in itself a kind of "lifestyle!") Magellan also comes preconfigured with an amazing little script called ArcDir: when you double click on an lha archive, Opus displays the contents of the archive in a new lister allowing you, for example, to read the Readme file of an Aminet archive without actually unpacking it! (See Figure 3.) Custom Menus Custom menus are another key Opus concept. User menus (which may be "nested" and contain up to two sub-menu levels) can be added easily to the Opus title bar. For example, I've created a menu which gives me instant access to my most frequently used preferences programs (see Figure 4). Perhaps my favorite type of menu is the Start Menu. This little button pops up a menu
which can give you access to all sorts of functions. I've created one that sits on my
Workbench and gives me instant access to the download directories of all my web browsers
and ftp clients (see Figure 5). I love this feature! Pop-up menus
for various types of files can also be configured. I set up, for example, a
right-mouse-button menu item called "Unpack to RAM:" (guess what that does!)
which appears only when right-mouse-button clicking over lha archives. For example: my Pagestream button is configured so that a left click launches the
program, a right click opens up the Pagestream "Documents" directory, and
dragging and dropping a file onto the button will launch Pagestream and load the dragged
file into the program. You can also jazz up the appearance of your button banks with
background images. All of this configurability is accessed through a button editor which,
incorporating many drag-and-drop features, is surprisingly easy to use. Button banks (and
file listers, for that matter) may be iconified to save space on your desktop. One of Magellan's most powerful features is its system of file types. For each different type of file, the user can define how different actions (e.g., double-click, ctrl-double-click, drag-n-drop to a directory and so on) will affect that file. For example, I have an HTML file type configured to automatically display any HTML file in AWeb (and launch AWeb if necessary) when I double-click on it, and a Quicktime file type configured to play Quicktime movie files with CyberQT in a Workbench window when they are double clicked. File types may also be assigned to User Functions which may consist of a series of
AmigaDOS commands (that is how my "Uarchive To RAM:" popup menu works).
Furthermore, you may designate a default icon for file types with no .info icon file. The
file type editor is full featured and complex (see Figure 6), but
Magellan also offers a file type "sniffer" which attempts to automate the
process of creating file types when you double-click on a file for which no file type has
been defined. All of this user configurability is tied together in Opus Magellan's Environment
settings editor (see Figure 7). An "environment" is a
complete DOpus configuration, which may include the position of button banks and listers,
the background pictures used (Opus permits pictures as backgrounds in lister windows,
button banks and the entire desktop) and much more. You may load and save different
Environments under different names, too. Themes are an extension of the environment
concept which is new to Opus Magellan II. Borrowed from the Windows world (indeed,
utilities are included with Opus which enable Windows themes to be converted to Opus
themes) a theme may be a complete "suite" of matching images, fonts, sounds and
so on. For example, the DOpus Plus CD comes with an "Aliens" theme complete with
creepy images and sound from the movie which play when you insert and remove floppy disks
and so on. People have begun to post Magellan theme on Aminet, and while the limited
number of themes I've seen so far haven't been my cup of tea, you may find the concept fun
to play around with. No review of Opus Magellan II would be complete without mention of the Opus FTP module. If you have a TCP/IP stack like Genesis or Miami running, you can open up an FTP site's directory in a lister on your Workbench just as if the lister pointed to a directory on your own hard drive! You can drag files from that remote lister to a local lister and the file will be automatically downloaded to that local directory. Opus FTP also comes with an address book for storing the addresses of your favorite FTP sites. Another neat feature: you can drag an FTP site entry from your Opus FTP address book right onto the Workbench desktop; thus, you "leave out" an FTP site on your desktop. Double-click it when you're online and you will be immediately connected with that remote directory. Opus FTP is a very cool concept that works well for dealing with, say, downloads from commercial FTP sites or maintaining a web site. Where I find it less than elegant under Opus FTP is dealing with Aminet. Aminet file searches, for example, are easier to accomplish in a dedicated FTP client like Vaporware's excellent AmFTP than they are in Magellan, although Opus FTP's Aminet functionality has recently been improved (the unique Aminet "index" file containing brief descriptions of each file may now be downloaded and displayed as a file comment to each file, for example). There's also an AREXX script for Opus available on Aminet called HTTPlister which
purports to make it easier to handle Aminet "recent" files, but I didn't have a
chance to try it out before finishing this review. Suffice it to say that if Opus FTP came
better configured for Aminet "out of the box," it would be darn near perfect and
really would make dedicated Amiga FTP clients unnecessary. Before wrapping up this review, I should say a word about the DOpus Plus CD, which is
available at extra cost and contains nearly 400 MB of Themes, Images, Icons, Aminet files
and more. Most important, perhaps, the CD comes with a comprehensive, sequential tutorial
on all aspects of Directory Opus in HTML form. The tutorial is graphically rich and well
written (at the cost that some pages are slow to load) and will give you all sorts of
ideas of more neat things to do with Opus. One caveat: for some strange reason, I was
unable to get the DOpus PLUS CD's tutorial to work with either AWeb or IBrowse; only
Voyager worked properly. (This may be some quirk in my system, though.) I love Directory Opus Magellan II. It has added incredible power and ease of use to my
Amiga and given the old girl a new lease on life, not to mention a GUI which is miles
ahead of anything the Macintosh or Windows PC has to offer. I give it an A (held back from
an "A+" only by the occasional obscure bug, although the program is agressively
updated thanks to GPSoftware and its army of beta testers). I truly cannot imagine a more
worthy purchase for any Amiga owner. Buy this program now! :-)
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