Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

John Boyce is, I think, a minimalist at heart. His utilities have long had the reputation of being high on functionality and low on aesthetics and JB5Utils keeps up the tradition. Whereas on the Series 3 range John tended to distribute his utilities as standalone programs, JB5Utils sees all the code brought together under the one 'shell', with one Extras bar icon. I've been looking at v1.00(beta(w)), grabbed from the beta-test area of his web site. I don't normally review beta software, but this is one utility which deserves a much wider airing than just to casual passers-by on the web.

The first utility in the suite is a much-improved version of my original SpaceHog application, scanning drives for the folders which consume the greatest amounts of precious disk space. The resulting list of folders is nicely sorted and can be saved to file for importing into another application (and thus printed). No less than 6 zoom levels are included, a welcome feature for those of us with already-strained eyesight.

Next up are Series 5 versions of John's Dupes and Find utilities. As the names suggest, the first locates all files of similar (or exact) names and the second looks for any given text string both in filenames and inside files. A nice touch is that a hexadecimal viewer can be launched at the tap of a button to view the contents of any found entry. Although slightly slow, the hex viewer is fully functional, with its own internal Find facility.

Completing the suite, and extremely useful in the quest to find extra disk space, are tools to locate temporary or large files on any disk. In the latter's case, you are free to specify lower and upper thresholds for the file sizes to be selected.

The freeware JB5Utils is still in a beta test stage, but shows a lot of promise. It's not the most glamorous program in the world but then many of the computer world's favourites over the years have also been ugly ducklings at birth. Why not offer yourself as a tester and play your part in turning it into a swan?

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