FileVersions

Programming is a process of trial and error, with various mistakes to be made, and testing one of the most important parts. Different versions of a product become available, some even being small updates to fix specific issues. To check the current iteration of a file, FileVersions can easily scan the content of a folder, and enlist this for everything inside.

A good thing is the application skips you the effort of pressing a few “next” buttons to set up the application, meaning it can be used from a thumb drive on other computers as well. What’s more, it doesn’t need to modify anything in system registries, thus not having any impact on the computer you use it on.

The visual design is simple, with all features wrapped around a clean, classic window frame, with no accommodation problems. Unfortunately, loading a folder to have its content analyzed needs to be done through the built-in browse dialog, because drag and drop is not a supported operation, and no context menu entry is created in this regard.

Search doesn’t start right away, giving you the chance to configure a few extra things in the meantime. One available option is to include subdirectories for a wider range of files to be scanned, while a dedicated field gives you the possibility to filter according to extension by simply writing them down.

Hitting the “search” button initiates the scan process. It usually takes little time to display results, but this only depends on the amount of files inside the selected directory. Items are shown in a table, with column headers for name, path, and version, and possibility to filter according to these values. Nothing can be changed though, and there’s no option to save the list to file.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that FileVersions is sure to come in handy when you really need to know the version of a program, but it’s not really easy to reach, or available on the download location. However, even with this application you need to be lucky enough for the developer to include the version number to be able to view it.