Timm Martin - SID 2

Author's product rating:   

Instructions / Help
Ease of use
Ease of Installation
Value For Money

Advantages:	Gives you control of your computer
Disadvantages:	None

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

SID was written for the Amiga computer between 1988 - 1992 by
an American chap called Timm Martin, and was released as
shareware for a handful of dollars. It was an instant hit with
the Amiga community worldwide. I hope the guy made himself a
mint of money with it because if ever a shareware programme
deserved to be handsomely rewarded, SID certainly did.

Back in 1990 when I got my first Amiga, the A500, I also came
across SID1.6 which changed my computing life and when Timm
brought out SID2 I was in total command of my computer.

Put simply SID is a file/directory manager which enables the
user to get at every single directory (PC's & Macs call them
folders) and all files on a disk or hard drive or CD or ZIP
etc. I know that you could do just that via the workbench but
you ended up with a messy screen cluttered up with windows
full of icons. You could convert the icons into a line of text
but you still had all those open windows.

Timm Martin produced a programme which displayed a GUI which
covered the whole screen. It is split into two halves across
the screen and underneath each section is a row of ten buttons
pertaining to the section above it. SID was fully configurable
to the user's own requirements so the number of buttons could
be changed to any reasonable number. Obviously the more
buttons that you had the smaller they would get but I never
found the need to change from the default total of ten.

Underneath these buttons were three rows of ten larger buttons
right across the screen which were also configurable. Behind
this bank of buttons you could have another bank and behind
that yet another bank ad infinitum, limited only by the memory
available.

The small buttons under each half were device buttons and were
named DF0, DF1, RAM, CD0 or whatever else you wanted. By
clicking on a button it would access the named device, which
included partitions on the hard drive. One of these buttons
was named Vol(ume) which when activated listed all the volumes
connected to the computer. In the space above there appeared a
list of all drawers and files in that device. Drawers were in
one colour and files in another. Thus by clicking on say DF0
in the left hand portion and DF1 in the right hand portion you
could see what was on each device.

The bank of 30 buttons underneath are action buttons which
would act on any highlighted drawers or files in the list on
either side. So for instance if you clicked once on a file it
would become highlighted and if you then clicked on the "Copy"
action button that file would be copied to the other side. The
action buttons could be configured to do just about anything,
like showing a picture, playing a sound sample, viewing an
animation, renaming a file/drawer, reading a text file,
deleting a file/drawer, even launching a programme to act on
the highlighted file. I can set protection flags on files and
drawers to prevent them from being deleted by accident or even
copied. I can set file notes. SID will unarchive a bunch of
files or unZIP them in the PC world. In fact the possibilities
are just about endless.

SID2 gives me such absolute and total control over my computer
that I know where everything should be and find out if it
isn't and why it isn't and put it back where it should be.

You would think that a programme to do all those wonderful
things would be huge but it is only 255356 bytes. A real
masterpiece of programming which works equally well on the
earliest operating system right through to the latest and a
real boon to a computer user.