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Hi, I've got a little time this morning to test the latest build on a machine at the workplace. The latest interface modifications work a charm, many thanks for those. However I've noticed a few quirks.
On Windows (XP):

• Every time you change directory, the column width is reset so that the entire heading fits. I've noticed this when browsing folders with photos, so I've only seen this behavior for the columns in the "Image" category, but probably it happens with other categories too.

• A fast double click executes the file currently selected, not the one on which the click occurred. Seems Siren hasn't got enough time to move the selection...

• At startup, Siren stalls for ~6 seconds. After tracing Siren's activity (with Sysinternals Process Monitor), it turns out it does a fair bit of prefetching, and the stall occurs when it's checking for a link in Network Neighborhood whose remote machine is offline.
  I haven't yet had time to check if it does the same for a network drive when the server is inaccessible, but it's worth investigating IMO because the same six seconds penalty is possibly multiplied by each offline resource. Sadly for the next few days I'll be offsite, I'll only be able to conduct further tests on Monday.

On Linux (Mint 9):

• The behavior when selecting with the cursor keys isn't the one expected. If you overshoot the end of your target range, reversing (while still keeping shift depressed) doesn't deselect the extra items.

Thanks again, and sorry if I'm being a bother.

The screens on which I use Siren are usually quite small (netbook size, 1024x600). On version 2.x I could rearrange the toolbars in a more compact layout to save space, but no longer in the 3.x tree, probably due to its cross-platform nature and the use of wxWidgets.

However, since the current toolbar layout leaves a lot of empty space in the first row, and the expressions are seldom very long*, I think it might be worthwhile moving the expression box in the first row on the right of the buttons.
Perhaps this could be decided by the user with a "Use compact toolbar layout" checkbox in the Display preferences (or maybe in General, since it would probably entail an application restart just like changing language).

*and in the remote case they are, one can always scroll horizontally in the expression box...

First, thanks for this wonderful program. A couple of things could make it even better, though (well, at least for me )

     Instead of the nearest neighbor resizing algorithm that you seem to be using now, a biquadratic/bicubic/Lanczos resize would yield a much better preview, especially at smaller sizes. Those algorithms are well documented and already implemented in many open source projects like comic book readers, of which there's at least one coded in every programing language (personally I use CDisplayEx), so code examples abound.
Probably it would be a little too computing-intensive to do the resizing in realtime as it is now, so maybe you could keep the fast existing code for the while-resizing-the-preview part, wait X milliseconds for the pane to settle down to the desired size and only then apply the better quality algorithm. The same approach could be used when scrolling through the images of a directory if you want to keep resource usage low, even though any PC made in the last 4-5 years should be more than fast enough to handle it.

     Support for PNG images preview would be very welcome, too. Probably the less costly solution would be to link to a existing DLL (libpng for example, but don't know about license either; maybe to use it you'll have to make the source code available on your site...). Since the Image & Fax viewer renders PNG images fine, probably from Windows XP onwards there's already some system library that decodes them.