Jaques Law Bits 9609 (© Kevin Jaques 1996) ©(c)1996 Kevin Jaques. All rights reserved excepting that this file may be copied for non-commercial purposes, unchanged. No warranties apply. I am just a user volunteering my observations and collecting those of others. €Disk Images [Heavily borrowed from Chad Magendanz , author of ShrinkWrap, as published in TidBits] This is yet another example of faking your computer out. In this case, the computer thinks that information on a faster medium (ram or hard drive) is a floppy. What are the advantages? To the user, the advantage is mainly for installations. Most programs come as an installation package on floppies. It is slow and user­intensive to take the necessary floppies from machine to machine and feed them in, one at a time. Plainly, it would be better if the install programs simply used regular folders and file formats, even if compressed. But the publishers sometimes want the security of floppies or the extra compression that is available by putting everything in one big archive. Publishers may also wish to preserve window and icon placement In this struggle between the desires of publishers and users, image mounting is a compromise. To install the latest, you can 'mount' all 17 floppies at once, fooling the installer into proceeding at a decent pace, and permitting network distribution. Of course, they waste great gobs of memory unless compressed, because they must include unused space as well as all the hidden desktop database files which come with any disk volume. But, compressed, they aren't too bad. Microsoft installers don't check if the next disk is available before ejecting the current disk and prompting the user to insert a floppy. Of course, "reinserting" a mounted disk image from a modal dialog is practically impossible. Connectix's installers, deliberately refuse to work with images. Of course, you can work around these installers by copying disk images to floppy disks and running the installer the old fashioned way, but that's not as convenient. Ram based images take longer to mount, run faster, but are limited by your available RAM in how many can be mounted. Disk based drivers typically use only about 1K of RAM per mounted image, but they're slower and can be confused by background compression utilities like AutoDoubler or StuffIt SpaceSaver. All utilities below use file­based images excepting MungeImage. ShrinkWrap makes both available. Tag data is an extra 12 bytes of "scavenger" information for each block on 400K and 800K floppies. It was mainly used to embed copy protection information and data recovery hints back in the old days of half-tracking and other such whimsical annoyances. Since the 660AV and 840AV Macs can't even read tag data, many disk image utilities and disk image formats safely ignore it. The Apple Disk Image format predominates, but the Apple has now come out with New Disk Image Format (NDIF). It optimizes, according to whether it is to be read­only, write­only, or both. Sadly, it only uses Apple's proprietary compression codec, KenCode. So, third party mounter's must license it, but Apple hasn't met their promises to actually offer it for licensing. Some of the utilities are listed here. I like ShrinkWrap best. DiskCopy - Apple's original utility written by Steve Christensen at least seven years ago. There were no updates for a long time, till v.4.2. 24K. v.6.0.1 is in use at Apple but not yet released. It is a complete rewrite, supporting copying, creating, converting, and mounting DiskCopy 4.2 and NDIF disk images. It will also add support for AppleScript, log files, CRC-32 checksums, DiskScripts, and digital signatures. DART 1.5.3 by Ken McLeod from Apple but not supported by Apple. Better interface, supports RLE & LZH compression, but slower. DiskCopy 5.0d1-6.0 - beware, this is a hack of a beta version of DiskCopy. Lose it! MountImage 1.2b2 - beware, this control panel has serious bugs. MungeImage 1.2 - Ram based. Source code in the public domain. Norton Floppier 3.2. - Proprietary format. MacTools FastCopy 4.0. - offers both Apple's and its own compressed image files (which use Stacker's proprietary compression algorithm). DiskDup+ 2.7 - options to ignore unused or bad blocks and even copy 800K images onto 1.4 MB media with increased free space. Supports Apple DiskCopy images as well as its own DiskDup+ image file format. Must pay shareware fee before it will mount them. Disk Charmer - $10 shareware. Uses asynchronous I/O and the Thread Manager to permit background operation. ShrinkWrap 2.0.1 - freeware, but with a $20 shareware fee for commercial use. Oops. I paid the $20! My favourite. Handles lots of formats. Does dragNDrop but also has an interface. Supports batching. CryptDisk 1.2.1 - $20 shareware. Doesn't read or write image files to disk. Creates and mounts soft partitions of any size that are encrypted using IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm) encryption. IDEA uses 128-bit keys and is generally recognized as secure. The full version of CryptDisk is available for U.S. and Canadian citizens; a demo without encryption is available to anyone. DropDisk 1.0b5 - Originally released as Mount 'em. Has only a drag & drop interface and can't mount DiskCopy images unlocked. Disk Image Mounter 1.0.1 - by Apple but not supported. Direct descendent of DropDisk. Supports New Disk Image Format images and DiskScripts (batch files for mounting disk image sets). Won't mount as a locked disk. €Mac OS Runtime for Java Apple has posted a pre-release of Mac OS Runtime for Java, which is essentially designed to put a Java virtual machine into the Mac OS. Allows users to run Java applets in a stand-alone viewer and within an OpenDoc document. Works on Cyberdog 1.1, but not prior versions even 1.1 beta. Not particularly recommended. €Next Year's Power PCs With roughly twice the speed of a 604e, the "G3" processor should appear this time next year followed by the G4 and Project 2K line of processors. http://www.macweek.com/mw_1030/news_g3.html €Any truth to this? >NEW YORK, Aug 12 (Reuter) - Microsoft Corp has launched a >quiet but ambitious effort to help small software companies >write Internet programs for its struggling rival, Apple Computer >Inc, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. > The unusual effort is designed to boost Apple's efforts in >the Internet arena, an area Apple has said is crucial to its >campaign to save itself. > Microsoft has also made the Internet a top priority. But >Microsoft officials said it was helping Apple in part because of >concerns that anti-trust challenges to Microsoft's dominant >position in the computer industry might increase if Apple went >out of business. > Microsoft set up a unit in San Jose, Calif., last year to >direct the program, although it only came to light recently. The >effort will cost Microsoft millions of dollars, the newspaper >said. >MICROSOFT BOOSTS APPLE SOFTWARE EFFORTS >In an effort to boost Apple Computer's appeal to potential buyers, long-time >rival Microsoft is setting up a separate unit that will focus on assisting >small software companies to write Internet programs for Apple computers. >The unusual move is motivated, in part, by Microsoft's worry that it would >face serious antitrust problems if Apple were to go out of business. >Microsoft's new strategy means that software writers are free to create >programs just for Macs, a reversal of its previous policy that required >independent developers to write software for Windows as well as Mac systems. >The new unit may also make no-strings-attached cash grants of up to $100,000 >to small software developers to aid their efforts. The goal is to "help >make sure that Apple's market share stays between 8 and 11%," says the >unit's director. (Wall Street Journal 12 Aug 96 A3) €Sorry, that¹s all the time I have. This Jaques Law Bits was delivered by: Kevin Jaques, B.A. LL.B. of the Jaques Law Office #101 - 2515 Victoria Avenue Fax: 525­4173 Regina, Saskatchewan Home: 586­2234 email: jaques.law@dlcwest.com Tel: 359­3041 visit our web page at http://www.dlcwest.com/~jaques.law/