There are some little pieces of software I couldn't be without. I'd like to share them with you in a series of articles. This is part one; read on.
 
Disk Copy has been with us for many, many years now. It used to be a simple little thing which allowed us to make exact copies of floppy disks; and that was all it did. This incarnation of Disk Copy, was last known as Disk Copy 4.2. Features insignificant and now obsolete.
A new day dawned with the release of Disk Copy 6.1. We'd heard about it through rumours for several years, but when it didn't seem to come to light...we thought it was but a myth.
Disk Copy 6.2 came out with Mac OS 8.1 and it instantly became my favourite new toy. Providing the same facility as Disk Copy 4.2, NDIF is now Apple's distribution format of choice.
New Disk Image Format (NDIF) supersedes Disk Copy 4.2's flat format, bringing simple; yet excellent enhancements. This new format not only allows you to make a floppy-copy, but it also automatically 'mounts' a disk image as though it were a locally or network connected volume. Disk images can now be of any size, and provided they are over 32MB in size; HFS+ also becomes a possibility. The exciting things about a disk image are the fact that they don't seem to use any RAM and reading from and writing to them is incredibly fast...rivaling the speed of a RAM Disk. As yet, how Disk Copy does this remains a mystery to me. Oh and did I forget to mention that NDIF can have built-in compression. comparable to StuffIt. All these makes NDIF my archiving format of choice. Unlike StuffIt Deluxe, double-clicking on an image gives you instant, high speed access to your files.
New with version 6.2 is the ability to segment images; and this was the StuffIt Deluxe killer as far as I am concerned. This meant I could help my friend in Canada use Netscape Communicator 4 on his crammed PowerBook 140 Hard Disk with only 5MB to spare. For you it can mean backing up large disk images onto floppy disks; transporting a large image file over the Internet a piece at a time without needing a 'rejoin' operation. The image file can work in its individual parts provided they are on the same volume.
Unfortunately the segmenting feature has not been implemented in the user interface as yet...BUT it is available via AppleScript. Having never used AppleScript before I was disappointed; yet determined to access this feature. After a few days of attempts I did it...I created my first ever AppleScript applications...I had made use of AppleScript, a Mac OS tool I had ignored for too long. These little applications can be used either by themselves or by creating a folder called "Scripts" beside your copy of Disk Copy and putting the applications inside it, you can use their features from within Disk Copy itself. To save you time, you should be able to access my AppleScript apps from the magazines software page. They are Segmenter, which tells you allows you to choose the number of segments and Floppier, which allows you to segment an image into nice 1.4 MB floppy disk size parts.
If you have System Software 7.0.1 or later (8.1 for HFS+), you can get Disk Copy 6.2 on-line from Apple's Euro FTP site, by clicking the Disk Copy icon above.
 
One of my favourite applications is of course Home Page. I've used it from the day it came out in its first beta release to create my web pages. I've never been trained to write HTML and yet my web site could make you think otherwise.
It's at http://www.patsy.demon.co.uk/, requires Netscape 3 or later with the LiveAudio plug-in set to play Aiff files. LiveAudio requires QuickTime 2.1 or later to be installed.
Home Page provides the most and easiest to use features of any WYSIWYG HTML editor. Support for JPEGs, GIFs, plug-ins, Java and frames make it simplistic for a novice to create a media-rich web site. Web site managment is of course built-in as is the web file uploading process (although I prefer to use Fetch 3.0.3 for uploading due to habit).
It displays the web pages almost exactly as they will in Netscape or Internet Explorer, even with frames, allowing realtime editing.
I love it, you'll love it if you don't already...what more can I say. Unfortunately it isn't free, nor is it cheap. At a cost of around £80, it's for those who must have the quality of product we've become used to from Claris. Although a 30 day trial version should be available on-line from Claris' web site, http://www.claris.com/
 
Find out about a Mac OS tool for developers which can help prevent losing data etc. after a crash. As well as help you tell the makers of a particular piece of software which keeps causing you hassle, exactly what it is up to.
Adobe Acrobat Reader, you probably have it somewhere already and ignored it, but did you know how common and useful its format really is. They're all using it you know.
A utility for trimming those FAT files to suit only your Computer's processor; saving loads of disk space.
If your lucky, even more...
:¬)
Send comments about 'Think Andrew' to andrew@patsy.demon.co.uk
