FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Ray Newman: Swooft Software is continuing its rapid development of new DiskFerret features with the goal of creating an exceptional user experience. Our free version, DiskFerret Lite, is being enhanced to provide additional features previously available only in DiskFerret such as duplicate file analysis and high quality skins. Compatibility with various browsers such as FireFox and Chrome is being improved as well. Other DiskFerret features currently under development include scan performance optimizations, a more interactive flexible file search, text within a file search, and a scheduling mechanism to allow one-time or regularly schedule scans.

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for DiskFerret? What inspired you the most? Do you plan to develop new software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
Ray Newman: Swooft Software, LLC was established in May of 2009 which is when DiskFerret development began. Our goal from the beginning at Swooft was to produce high quality, highly productive, affordable software. After many years of running large custom software development projects I wanted to start my own company and produce off the shelf products that a broad range of customers could easily cost justify. Swooft’s primary focus for 2010 is to continue improvements to DiskFerret, but more products are under development and should be available in 2011.

FW Editor: DiskFerret is a great tool and we love it. Can you tell us more about the concept behind it?
Ray Newman: Many years ago as a software developer I ran across a demo application that was part of an OS/2 Software Development Kit that would display a pie chart depicting disk space utilization. The application was designed to demonstrate several components of the operating system for developers such as 2d graphics, application and mouse events, etc. But what it really demonstrated to me in the long run was that a graphic display of my disk space allowed me to cut the time to find where space was being used to 1/100th of time it would take me to meticulous search through all of the folders manually to determine where my disk space was getting used.

FW Editor: Do you plan to improve DiskFerret? If yes, how are you going to do that?
Ray Newman: We are currently working on the next major release of DiskFerret to add new features and functionality as requested by our customers. DiskFerret development will continue beyond the next release based on the needs and request of our customers as well as new functionality driven by technology trends and changes.

FW Editor: What are the advantages of using DiskFerret over any other similar product?
Ray Newman: DiskFerret is extremely easy to use. The graphical views are nice to look at and easy to understand, and they make it easy to quickly drill down to folders and files that are using the most disk space. DiskFerret is packed with power and provides exceptional capabilities to analyze disk utilization. And it’s very efficient when you need to use different views and techniques to analyze various aspects of disk usage. With DiskFerret you scan the disk one time and then have extremely quick access to a variety of data views that depict the utilization information in different ways. There’s a size view, which displays the largest folders, a top files view which shows the largest or smallest or oldest or newest files in a folder and all of its subfolders, a file types view that shows which file types (audio, video, doc…) are using the most space, a distribution view that shows usage by size, date or attribute, a file owner view and a view for duplicate files. Each one of these view can be depicted as pie chart, bar chart, concentric ring chart, treemap, or in a table view. I don’t know of any other tool that provides the same combination of all of these data view. And, other tools force you to rescan the disk when you want to analyze space for a different view of the data. The bottom line is that DiskFerret provides better tools to analyze your disk space, and it more efficient.

FW Editor: What is the difference between DiskFerret Lite and DiskFerret?
Ray Newman: DiskFerret is a desktop application and is targeted to professionals and power users that need extensive capabilities to analyze disk space. DiskFerret Lite is Java applet that runs inside your web browser. DiskFerret Lite has a few limitation such as not allowing analysis of network shares and is targeted to more casual users or users that have an infrequent need to analyze their disk space, and it is free.

FW Editor: Is there any customer support service for DiskFerret users?
Ray Newman: We offer free technical support via email to all registered and trial users. Questions regarding DiskFerret installation or operation, or problem reports can be emailed to support@DiskFerret.com. We make every attempt to answer questions within a 24 hour period.

FW Editor: Do you have any message for DiskFerret users?
Ray Newman: Customer feedback is the lifeblood of our future product development, so please let us know your thoughts and suggestions on the product. And, please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or encounter any problems.