Get time and date from server

[smaragdus]

What prevents me to use DownZemAll! on a regular basis is that it lacks a common feature available in most advanced download managers:

• Get date and time of file from server

Several examples of this feature:

• Ant Download Manager (commercial):

Sets the web server datetime for the downloaded file

screen:

• DownloadStudio (commercial):

Use web server's date and time for downloaded files

screen:

• Free Download Manager (free, closed source):

Set the date of a file identical to the date specified by the server

screen:

• HTTP Downloader (free, open source):

Set date and time of file from server response

screen:

• Internet Download Accelerator (commercial):

Get date and time of file creation from the server

screen:

The command-line download manager aria2 also supports this feature via the following parameter:

--remote-time

So download managers which use aria2 as download engine also support this feature.

A couple of examples:

• AWGG (free, open source):

--remote-time

screen:

• uGet (free, open source):

--remote-time

screen:

I really hope that this feature- Get time and date from server, will be implemented in DownZemAll! since for me it is indispensable to be aware when a file has been uploaded to a server.

[setvisible]

Wow, what a detailed comparison! That's what I call a ticket !

Thanks for your feedback, will see how to implement it. ++

[smaragdus]

@setvisible

Actually I discovered DownZemAll! about a year and a half ago (version 1.7.1) and even back then it looked very promising but I didn't have time for more thorough testing. Several days ago I came back to it and I had a look at version 2.4.2 and I could see that the program had evolved a lot! I was a bit hesitant to open a new issue because I noticed that there were no commits for several months and I was afraid that the project might be abandoned or at least the development put on hold. My sincere opinion- DownZemAll! is a well-designed download manager and in its current form it has the potential of becoming one of the best download managers with several future enhancements and a bit of fine tuning. I like the GUI- clean, well-organized and intuitive, no ugly modern interface like Free Download Manager (after version 3) or EagleGet, a good set of features including torrent and video support and a good language used- C++, no .NET, no Java, no Electron. So I will do more tests and I might suggest more possible enhancements for future releases.

About getting time and date from server- I do not know whether this might be helpful but you may have a look at HTTP Downloader and see how this feature has been implemented.

I browsed the currently open Issues and I see that what I asked for has already been requested- issue #1 so this issue is a kind of duplicate.

Keep the excellent work!

Regards

[setvisible]

Thanks for your compliments

I use it very often to replace several download software that I like but I don't trust (closed source) or nice to use but too limited.

It's not abandoned! The thing is that it's stable enough, so that's why releases are more and distant... And it reached the classic plateau (and curse): once stable enough, free of critical bugs, no more develpment is made, developers fly, and issues become mainly improvement of niche users...

Moreover another reason the releases are more and more distant is that it's more and more complicated to upgrade the extension in Chrome (There's something in the policy that Goolge changed recently, which make difficult -near impossible- to create or update extensions related to a Youtube downloader). I guess Google (owner of youtube and chrome) is under scrutinity of the american Music Vendors or something like that.

For the GUI, there is the Fusion style with Flat icons, which is subtile and looks modern. It's not the default style but my prefered one.

Perhaps I made a mistake with the name (which sounds very close to DownThemAll, with TH), and now it's late to change it... I have a lack of imagination for naming things. On the other hand it's tempting to find an original name, but how to communicate it to the current users to not confuse them and keep the community...?

Next releases will be probably focus on translations, which depends on the contributors availabilities (+ some feature requests like this one). It's a question of luck and opportunities!

Regards

[setvisible]

Feature added!

Moreover extra options are added (...access time, creation time...)

Should be ready for release in v2.4.3 (likely tomorrow):

[smaragdus]

@setvisible

Thanks for the detailed comment about the current status of DownZemAll!

There is not an abundance of good open source download managers and very few of them are to my liking. DownZemAll! is one of the best.

About the name- when I first discovered the project it occurred to me that the name was not the best choice. I suppose that renaming an already popular project which has its own website and extensions for both Chrome and Firefox may be a pain. But this happened to FireDM which was once known as pyIDM. If you decide to change the name I may suggest few alternative names (I think the shorter the name, the better).

About the extensions- when I fisrt tried the one for the Chromium browsers it was not what I expected it to be (automatically catching the downloads and thus replacing the browser download manager) so I removed it. Once there was a popular classic extension for Firefox- FlashGot, which allowed browser integration of download managers. Actually it should work with Pale Moon browser and as I still have this browser I will try to integrate DownZemAll! with Pale Moon. Have you tried this? Unfortunately FlashGot cannot be used with modern versions of Firefox. If you experence problems with Chrome Store (it seems that extensions are removed without any apparent reason) people interested in the extensions can get them from Releases but this may be awkward for some users.

About date/time from server- thanks for implementing this feature so quickly! When there is new release I will test it. By the way- aren't 'last modified time' and 'creation time' supposed to be equal when time and date are obtained from the server?

Thanks for your excellent work and I hope that you won't get bored by this project soon.

Regards

[setvisible]

Thanks for the references, will investigate them;

Yes please share any name ideas; I agree the shorter is the better is.

For the times (creation/last modified/access/etc.), Qt allows 4 differents file fields (it probably depends on the OS capabilities, as Qt tends to cover as many OS as possible), so I simply reproduced the options in the application UI. That is, Linux people can check some fields, Windows users some other... total freedom of decision to the users.

I'm not bored. But it's a bit challenging to follow all the trends, as the DM software is an very competitive "market".

Please feel free to try the new feature, and tell me if it works, then we could close this ticket;

Regards

[smaragdus]

@setvisible

Great work!

I downloaded version 2.4.3 and did parallel testing using DownZemAll!, Free Download Manager and HTTP Downloader and got exactly the same time stamps from the server:

screen:

So what I wanted is implemented perfectly! Thank you!

So I will close this issue.

[smaragdus]

@setvisible

I'm not bored. But it's a bit challenging to follow all the trends, as the DM software is an very competitive "market".

I need a day or two to do more tests, I will suggest several tiny enhancements, mainly related to the interface which I suppose would be easy to be implemented. Perhaps tomorrow I will come back to testing DownZemAll! more thoroughly. I may open some more issues but I do not expect all of my ideas to be implemented, just consider them and if you find that they are worth implementing work on them when you have time and desire to code.

I will also think about possible new names if you decide to change the name of the program in the future,

Once again- many thanks for adding options to get time and date from server for the downloaded files.

Best regards

[smaragdus]

By the way, I see that the MSVC builds are a much bigger than the MinGW ones. Why is that? I use the MinGW ones as they are considerably smaller..

[engelhro]

For MSVC vs. MingW: see the footnotes section of Advanced Setup:

Prefer the MSVC version if you are on Windows. It uses the Chromium engine that parses HTML and Javascript. The MinGW version is more basic, it uses Google Gumbo, that parses HTML only, not Javascript.