It was a very warm summer day in the year 1990, I was 5 years old. We went shopping with my mum and sister and after the  shopping spree we had a lot of heavy shopping bags to carry back home. The problem was we had a very long way to walk back home and my mum and sis started complaining that the bags were hurting their hands. So I started thinking. I found a strong stick on the road and told my mum to hang all the bags on it so she and my sister could equally share the weight of the bags without hurting their hands by holding both ends of the stick… I remember how my mum was amazed by the idea of a 5 year old and I remember how much I enjoyed creating solutions to everyday problems. Well to be honest, I still do.

We all have removable devices such as USB Hard disks on our desks, USB Flash Disks in our pockets, SD Memory Cards from our cameras… etc that we frequently format “through the command line or some complicated partition managers”.

Thus I’ve created Quickformat, which is a solution to one of your daily problems; Formatting a removable disk “easily”. It is incredibly intuitive, easy to use and integrated to KDE’s file manager Dolphin. Quickformat can be tested with Pardus 2011.1 Beta.

Ok, now it’s time to explain how to use it.

1. Insert a removable disk to your computer.
2. Open Dolphin.
3. Right click on your disk icon. (Left click for left handed)
   

   Access Quickformat from Dolphin

4. Select format.
   

   Quickformat

5. Quickformat recognizes your current partition format and automatically selects it as default. You can change the partition format to Ext2/3/4, FAT32 or NTFS if you like.
   

   Choose a file system

6. If you want you can change it’s label.
7. Then simply click format.
8. A fancy notification will appear informing you the status of the operation.
9. If the formatting is completed without any problems you will see the success message.

And thats how easy it is.

Access Quickformat Anywhere

You can also run Quickformat outside Dolphin.

1. All you have to do is run Quickformat from your KDE menu.
   

   Access Quickformat from KDE Menu

2. If you have already inserted your disk select it from the drop down list.
   

   Select your disk from the list

3. If you haven’t inserted your disk, you can insert it now and quickformat will automatically recognize it instantly.
   

   Quickformat recognizes your disk instantly when you insert it

4. Then you can simply click format to start formatting.
   

   Quickformat is formatting the selected partition

5. When the format is completed successfully quickformat will notify you.
   

   Formatting is completed

A better user experience: Pardus

Lots of us suffer from the unbelievably “inhuman” user interface of KDE. There are thousands of rubbish floating everywhere on the desktop just because an ordinary programmer /engineer only asks the question “can we do it?” rather than “should we do it?” when starting a project or adding a feature. Of course in a perfect world UI / graphic designers and artists should be involved in such activities not everyone who knows programming.

At Pardus, we do our best to give users an extraordinary experience of beauty, simplicity and usability like they have never experienced in any Linux distribution before. This is why we need artists, not only programmers. Feel free to contribute if you think you are an artist.

Talk to me nerdy

Quickformat is written with Python 2.7. The user interface is Qt. Disk information is brought to you by KDE solid. Some disk operations such as removing the partition flags and setting the filesystem is done with PyParted. The overlay is a derivation of the gorgeous work of Gokmen Goksel‘s PDS. The source of PDS is here.

You can find the source code here and you can report the bugs here. I’ll be very pleased to see you contribute to quickformat.