A long time ago — all the way back when people still said “write once, run anywhere” with a straight face — I wrote a simple Java app called Iceberg. It reported on the directory sizes of your disk, and presented a simple UI for poking around to find the big ones.

Although it had a lot of shortcomings, it continued to be a really useful little tool every now and then. Whenever I ran low on disk space, it more often than not helped identify some big, dumb files that were unnecessarily hogging space: old downloads, video files, log files, unused apps, etc. Sometimes I even managed to run it on the remote Unix machines at work, which was often similarly enlightening.

But Java has slowly and steadily lost whatever sheen it once had. From having the Oracle logo on it nowadays to Apple recently removing the plugin from OS X web browsers, its day in the sun has passed (see what I did there?).

Out of the ashes of that goofy little side project app now arises: another goofy little side project app! Meet Iceberg 2 (v.1.9.7). That page gives all the details and usage info necessary, as well as a link to the GitHub repo. The “1.9.7” is a nod to this not quite being finished enough to fully call 2.0 yet. I’m hoping additional use will shake out some issues, and am also hoping to speed it up more.

As you’ll immediately see, I’m accepting from the start that this isn’t going to be a utility for everyone, that it’s a tool for me and my kind: Iceberg screenshot geeks who use a *nix command line (and who know what “*nix” means). The generator script currently has no Windows support (unless it miraculously works under Cygwin), but if someone wants to contribute a version that works there (Perl? Ruby? Python? .NET.ASP.C# RT Professional.bat?), that would be great.

The generator script works fine on Mac OS X, and also on the handful of Linuxes I’ve tried it on (Ubuntu, RedHat, & CentOS). The HTML files it creates should work fine in any modern browser, on any OS.

If this sounds like something up your alley, check it out and let me know what you think: Iceberg 2.