December Mac Shareware

Mount unusual drives, slim down oversized files, and tweak document info.

By Ari Weisz-Koves

Mt Everything isn’t the newest utility, but it does its job well. It allows any partition on any disk to be mounted or unmounted with a click. For drives unsupported by anything else, it includes its own generic driver to get functionality quickly out of those ex-PC salvaged components, and specialist support for cartridge disk systems with proprietary driver systems.

Using Mt Everything, systems need not be rebooted to find that lost, but essential, partition. It can also act as a security aid of the best kind — keep all sensitive data on one partition, then unmount the partition. No passwords are necessary, and anyone cruising past won’t know where to start looking for your files.

Unfortunately, Mt Everything only supports one SCSI bus, so on systems such as Power Computing clones, the additional bus (usually the faster one with all the drives) isn’t visible. But if you use systems with one niggly bus, Mt Everything is the answer to all your prayers.

I’ve got a bunch of FAT applications, some of them commercial behemoths, and to gain some of the satisfaction of compiling your own code -- like in the Linux world -- I decided to plunge in without worrying about disk space. Stripper works. In fact, I stripped a well-known newsreader from 2.6M down to 1.7M in about three seconds. This is about where I went crazy (but remembered never to do this to an original) and started stripping all over the place.

Be prepared for some big surprises as Stripper informs you that some of your PowerPC native applications don’t have any 68k code to strip. And remember, don’t do it to applications you may want to use on a legacy system. Stripper is a fun toy for power users, and while it can save a lot of space if many FAT applications are installed, it can also wreak havoc on the unprepared.

The thing that is overlooked by almost every Web-creation tool for Mac OS is that the resource fork is redundant for anyone accessing via a browser. Would you prefer your 40K GIF to be 5K instead? How about shrinking the HTML files produced by a WYSIWYG editor? Webmasters will love this little application for stripping their files down to the minimum size — just drag and drop files onto the icon for instant results. My own 1.4M web became 1M after being stripped! Not only does this save space, but it also increases the speed of your site to all users as the redundant information is no longer transferred as part of a file! Be careful, though, as stripping resource forks can render some files completely useless.

It is obvious that the author set out to streamline his own work and found it agreeable to share his application. Those working with graphics and who have PC-based collaborators will be most grateful. Adding the DOS suffixes is a snap, as is using the function to change names to upper-case, lower-case, DOS and other standard forms.

File types and creator codes can be changed easily, but unlike other utilities, Frank’s White Cells allows the work you do in it to be saved, so you can undo and redo what you've done should there be a problem later.