I did see a shareware program that replaced these dialogs on Win 9x/2K/XP. Don't remember what it was called. On my system I modified COMDLG32.DLL using Resource Hacker and a hex editor. 16-bit Windows has the corresponding COMMDLG.DLL but the binary format of resource data is different for 16-bit Windows so I don't know how you'd edit it exactly. Maybe an old MS compiler could compile/decompile resource scripts for 16-bit Windows.

Borland compilers or rather, their DLLs, had their own dialogs that applications could use, I think.
I remember the dialogs with the big green check sign and the red cross..

bakemono wrote on 2023-01-29, 12:07:

I did see a shareware program that replaced these dialogs on Win 9x/2K/XP. Don't remember what it was called. On my system I modified COMDLG32.DLL using Resource Hacker and a hex editor. 16-bit Windows has the corresponding COMMDLG.DLL but the binary format of resource data is different for 16-bit Windows so I don't know how you'd edit it exactly. Maybe an old MS compiler could compile/decompile resource scripts for 16-bit Windows.

Sounds a bit too advanced for me 😀 But out of curiosity, what did you change or add to COMDLG32.DLL ?

Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-29, 14:41:

Borland compilers or rather, their DLLs, had their own dialogs that applications could use, I think.
I remember the dialogs with the big green check sign and the red cross..

Yes, I can image that's what Borland would do 😉 Do you remember if they added any new functionality to the dialogs as well or was it more cosmetic?

pbagain wrote on 2023-01-30, 13:13:

Sounds a bit too advanced for me 😀 But out of curiosity, what did you change or add to COMDLG32.DLL ?

Made the window a little bigger and made it default to Details view instead of List. Much easier to find files when you can not only see the size/date but sort by them.

pbagain wrote on 2023-01-30, 13:30:

Jo22 wrote on 2023-01-29, 14:41:

Borland compilers or rather, their DLLs, had their own dialogs that applications could use, I think.
I remember the dialogs with the big green check sign and the red cross..

Yes, I can image that's what Borland would do 😉 Do you remember if they added any new functionality to the dialogs as well or was it more cosmetic?

I have to check.. But So far I've found an old advertisement which nicely shows the differences between Standard Windows GUI and Borland interface.
It's attached below. Hope that's okay. It's just an old ad. Did my best squeezing it down to small size without losing too many colours. 😅

In Windows 3.x (in fact it's probably only 3.1x), Central Point Desktop in PC Tools For Windows Version 2.0 modified the common dialogs - see the last screenshot in http://toastytech.com/guis/cpdesk.html I'm not sure that it provided bookmarks though.

XTreeGold for Windows 4.0 did the same, https://www.xtreefanpage.org/lowres/x52revs.htm says:

Finally, it includes File Companions. These first appeared in PC Tools 2.0, but would only appear if you were using the PC Tools shell. This function places a small icon by the control menu of File|Open and File|Save dialog boxes, allowing you to perform various functions without leaving the dialog box.

Unfortunately they don't look as nice under Win95 as they did under Windows 3.x; and they don't work on native Win95 dialogs at all.

I wonder if Norton Desktop for Windows did this too.

bakemono wrote on 2023-01-29, 12:07:

On my system I modified COMDLG32.DLL using Resource Hacker and a hex editor. 16-bit Windows has the corresponding COMMDLG.DLL but the binary format of resource data is different for 16-bit Windows so I don't know how you'd edit it exactly.

Borland's Resource Workshop was a Windows 3.x equivalent. I'm not sure if it worked with earlier versions. Perhaps Whitewater Resource Toolkit did.

Here is the File -> Open dialog in Borland C++ 4.52 running under Windows XP:

I think this came out in 1995 but it's a 16-bit application with short file names 🙁 I don't think there's any added functionality here - I think a "Network" button was standard in Windows for Workgroups? - so probably not what pbagain is looking for.

Wow, thanks Jo22, doshea and bakemono for your responses! I'm genuinely impressed there's other people out there who care about this 😀

It seems Borland made an effort to refresh the dialog boxes with large colorful buttons (nice!), but the Xtree functionality is really what I was looking for. I'm unable to remember if Xtree was the exact program I was using at the time, but these basic file operations were definitely part of it. I'm pretty sure I got mine from a shareware CD that came with a magazine. I still have many (maybe all) of them, so if I happen to run into it, I'll post here if it was indeed Xtree or an alternative.

In the meantime I remembered that WordPerfect 6 also had a nice extended file dialog. It also had "bookmarks" in the form of a modifiable "quicklist". Of course this dialog was only available within WordPerfect, but still. Posting some screenshots below for anyone interested.

WordPerfect 6.0 file dialog:

Compare to standard windows file dialog:

Quicklist "bookmarks":

File options:

Nice! It seems so old-fashioned that that WordPerfect obediently lined all the buttons up on the right edge of the dialog box so that to add an item to the Quick List you don't click anywhere very close to the list itself! I probably would have quite liked it at the time though. Microsoft Word 6 has nothing that nice for its open dialog box, it's just a slightly nicer version of the standard/common one, laid out slightly differently and (like WP) using CTL3D.DLL.

As to your previous comment: I was completely unaware of Norton Desktop at the time, but apparently yes, it does add file dialog enhancements. See this timestamp in Cathode Ray Dude's awesome review on youtube.

doshea wrote on 2023-04-05, 23:33:

Nice! It seems so old-fashioned that that WordPerfect obediently lined all the buttons up on the right edge of the dialog box so that to add an item to the Quick List you don't click anywhere very close to the list itself!

I guess they were still figuring out all these UI things that we now take for granted. As CRD remarks, these kind of UI improvements were 5-8 years ahead of mainstream adoption (he addresses the design "failures" later in the video). This kind of early foray into UI improvements is super interesting to me 😀

Thanks for the information regarding Norton Desktop for Windows!

Central Point Software had a similar desktop alternative at the time (PC Tools Desktop).

Source: http://toastytech.com/guis/cpdesk.html

It's probably not much different to Norton Desktop, though, since Norton/Symantec had bought CPS around the time.

Edit: Here are a bunch of alternate shells for Windows 3.x.
Alternate Shells for Windows 3.1x
The Workplace Shell from OS/2 was interesting, too.
Windows 3.x had so many different faces. ^^
Not sure about their file open dialogs, though.