News :: 15MR: Frigate3 File Manager v3.34.2.124
Greetings and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Frigare3 File Manager version 3.34.2.124 by CoolUtils.com—An advanced file management application.
Software Description
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“The best file manager 2005 by PC Magazine/RE. Enjoy highly configurable and convenient file management environment!”
Quick Pros
- Built-in features are countless
- Search functionality is very advanced
- Great level of customizable features and layout
- ‘Favorites’ for hitting your common file management locations
- Expandable plug-in functionality
Quick Cons
- Ends up being fairly cluttered; Bit of a learning curve
- FTP you have to set up ASCII file extensions
- No Explorer integration options
Expansion
I have been looking for a decent Explorer replacement for a while. I’ve tried a few before the days of the 15-Minute Review, and all-in-all they were lousy. Then came along today’s Giveaway of the Day—I downloaded, launched and my heart initially fell; It didn’t ‘look’ like anything great to start with. The initial font selection gave the application a ‘Win9x’ look to it and felt I just stepped into an old program that maybe someone liked over at PCMag. I dove in however, and started messing with the program, finding more and more features; Some of them are a bit of bloat to me, but all in all it expands the usability. I’m not going to even try to describe all that I found and liked because the list would be too long.
The biggest issue with so many features is that even though visually when you launch the application it doesn’t seem greatly cluttered, you have to go wading through menus or learning one of the dozens of keyboard shortcuts to use the application. While it is logically organized, it doesn’t lend well to someone new trying to find everything in this application. With this, it does provide a bit of a learning curve; First, finding all the features, then memorizing their locations, and finally remembering the keyboard shortcuts for all of those features.
Making up for the learning curve aspect, this application does make up for this by allowing a lot of ‘shortcuts’ to be developed; A QuickLaunch bar much like Windows has; ‘Bookmarks’ and ‘Quick Folders’ for organizing your commonly-used folder; And much, much more.
Two things in my 15 minutes of hardcore stomping through this application brought to bother me. One was the FTP client requiring you to explicitly denote file extensions to be handled as ASCII (Which, in my case, the list would be unbearably long.) However, I’m likely not to use the built-in FTP anyways as since WebDrive does a nice job for myself anyways. The other that I spent quite a few moments extra looking for was true Explorer replacement; I wanted to use this as my Explorer replacement; When you double-click on a desktop icon, I was wishing for the ability to go directly into Frigate3 but this feature I can not locate easily, if it does exist. There isn’t even a contextual menu for if you were to right-click on a folder or file. For being an Explorer replacement application, this I would have felt would have been a critical function and does not appear to be here. On top of this, this increases my total memory footprint for ‘file management’ another 18MB. No big deal for me, but it is hitting unreasonable levels for some older systems.
Final Verdict
If you’re in the market for a new Explorer replacement and haven’t found something to suit your needs yet, I recommend giving this application a try. While it doesn’t directly integrate into Windows, its feature set may have you using it more frequently than Explorer for its control and capability. I do recommend picking it up while free; With two versions available, there is an option for you to manage your price. Most would likely only need the functionality of Standard ($24.50)—Professional ($39.90) does come with all the plug-ins (which can still be added for free as a separate download) and a few extra features not in Standard, but may not be as useful to most as the Standard features.
Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, March 30, 2007
