Better than treemap: concentric pie charts

[ppass]

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Space Monger is really a nice tool with noble objectives, one objective being to make things on the hard disk VISUAL. There are also a bunch of very useful tools embedded.

However, looking at the treemap, I often struggle to make the information really relevant. With many folder levels, and many folders of similar size, it is often hard to see which one is the biggest. Because some folder appear in a square shape, other in a rectangle. I tried to play with the settings (horizontal - vertical bias), but could never find something really satisfying.

Then, I came across a small program called "Scanner", you can see a screenshot:

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As you can see, the output is quite simple: a concentric pie chart, each arc represents a folder, and the further you move away from the center, the deeper you go into sub directories. The angle of the arc is proportional to the disk space of the folder/subfolder. Going over an arc with the mouse will give the folder name with size and number of files. Clicking on an arc will show the pie chart for the selected folder. On the screenshot, the dark red arc is "C:\Programme\" (seems 40% of total disk space), and the mouse is pointing to "C:\Programme\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires" which seems to be a tiny subfolder inside "C:\Programme".

"Scanner" is obviously not as sharp as Space Monger. Still, I find it much more intuitive to look at a concentric pie chart than looking at a Space Monger treemap. It is very easy to understand the relative size of subfolders in a concentric pie chart.

This morning, my hard disk ran out of free space, and I used Scanner and Space Monger to look for things to erase, programs to remove. First, "Scanner" was faster than Space Monger. OK, Space Monger does more things than "Scanner", but still speed is a keypoint playing in favor of "Scanner".
In Space Monger, I have first to hide things like "free space" and "unscanned space", then hide things like pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys, because these things stand out too much. Then, I expand "Program Files" to look for something to delete. Then I have to hit escape, because it is all dark and I cannot see a thing (because it is the current selection). Even then, I cannot tell by looking at the treemap which folder inside "Program files" takes the biggest space.
In "Scanner", nothing must be hidden, I can see at a glimpse of an eye which subfolder takes most space. By the way, "Scanner" also has the possibility to hide folders.

Of course, there are many things with Space Monger that you cannot achieve with "Scanner". But given that one of the aims of Space Monger is to make it easy to fetch useless things to erase on the hard disk, I think that some improvements could be done in the lines of a better graphical representation of the contents of the hard disk. Ideally, I would love to see concentric pie charts combined with all the nice features of Space Monger. Could this be part of the next development phase? For the time being, I will carry on using both Space Monger and "Scanner".

By the way, the best thing about "Scanner" is that it is free.
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[insignis]

It looks pretty rudimentary, feature-wise. On par, perhaps, with SpaceMonger 1.4. Which I would point out was also free.

[ppass]

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Yes, it is rudimentary and simple, yet much more convenient to read and extract relevant information from it than from a SpaceMonger treemap. In terms of looks, I agree it is close to SpaceMonger 1.4. So I see here a tremendous opportunity to make it more professional looking and integrate this inside SpaceMonger.
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[seanw]

You're not the first person to suggest donut charts might be a useful addition to SM, and the more I've analyzed them, the more I think they're a reasonable additional tab at the top of the window. Right now, I'm focussing more on SM's internals, because I want to finally get rid of the stability and performance problems it's had in the past, but once the new storage engine is done, I think I'm gonna try to code up donut charts on a lark just to see how quickly and easily they can be implemented (I suspect very, very quickly).

[gerryf]

While I think there's nothing wrong with the concentric circle approach, I disagree with the fundamental premise that they are easier to read than the treemap structure found in Spacemonger.

It was the treemap structure that first brought me to spacemonger in its earlier incarnations and it is what has kept me through the current version.

I don't think it is so much a matter of personal preference, but rather a fundamental way in which individual's process information.

I was always frustrated with the concentric circle approach, which never seemed intuitive to me. There are several other examples of this approach.

For a while, I gravitated toward the folder tree disk tools like TreeSize, but then stumbled on treemaps. For me, it was like hitting your palm on your forehead, a eureka moment. Treemaps just instantly conveyed to me where all the space was going in ways other programs did not, and Spacemonger -- even the older version--was leagues ahead of others.

Again, I'm not saying you are wrong in what you like--I just think that on some fundamental level people process information differently and different approaches appeal to them.

I can't imagine using anything else.
of which there are more examples then the one you pointed out, and gravitated toward folder

[insignis]

I agree with gerryf. While cocentric pie / donut visualizations are ... interesting, they seem, at best, very inefficient. Look at some screenshots of such software and see how much space is wasted--and neither Scanner nor OverDisk let you zoom and pan around like SpaceMonger. You can only hop from level to level.

I don't mind it being added as Yet Another Tab, and if Sean's taking suggestions for more visualization models, might I suggest Voronoi treemaps?

(see http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/0 ... ation.html and the sixth image from the bottom at http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/)

The one thing slightly offputting at first about your standard treemaps is all the right angles--it's hard to get a feel for what level you're at (and doing this by color took some getting used to). I doubt Voronoi treemaps would render nearly as fast, but I think they would be more intuitive for some people....

[ppass]

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Voronoi maps look cool, and are probably more intuitive than Space Monger treemaps (althoug some of you might disagree...). However, I wonder if they are easily implementable in Sace Monger.

The biggest issue I am dealing with in treemaps is this: I have to focus really hard on the treemap to understand which of my folders is the biggest, because of the different shapes of the rectangles, and the different colors due to different depths. It is not so easy to compare rectangle areas. To help me out, I start to take out of the treemap some folders by hiding them. When hiding stuff, the treemap gets re-shuffled, rectangles change shape, move around, and I have to start all over in my head to concentrate on the new treemap.

With concentric pie charts, the relative size of folders is displayed with an angle. It is very easy to compare angles. Also, it is very easy with subfolders to estimate the relative size of subfolders. A subfolder covering 50% of the size of the parent folder will have and half the angle. This is very intuitive. Maybe the screen shot of Scanner does not serve it best. I was kind of sceptical at the start, but when I ran Scanner on my machine, I got much simpler charts and could identify straight away stuff to erase on my PC.

I agree with you that concentric pie charts are not as cool as treemaps, but I am sure that Sean can make something fun with it, something Space Monger - like with them. Go for the new tab, great solution!
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[insignis]

The biggest issue I am dealing with in treemaps is this: I have to focus really hard on the treemap to understand which of my folders is the biggest, because of the different shapes of the rectangles, and the different colors due to different depths. It is not so easy to compare rectangle areas. To help me out, I start to take out of the treemap some folders by hiding them. When hiding stuff, the treemap gets re-shuffled, rectangles change shape, move around, and I have to start all over in my head to concentrate on the new treemap.

Have you tried Setup -> Treemap Layout -> Placement -> Alphabetical order? That way things would at least not "jump around" quite so much while scanning, moving, deleting, etc.....

[CobraA1]

I use the "squarified" placement option with the bias slider near the center. It works well, as all of the biggest stuff is placed in the upper left corner.

You can tell Spacemonger 2.x to scan only a single folder like Program Files instead of scanning the whole drive.