Disklosure is a floppy formatter. It supports initialization, erasure, verification and desktop file manipulation of any Macintosh 800K and 1.4Mb floppy disks. Disklosure speeds up lenghty tasks such as initializing more than a couple disks from the standard Finder™ interface, and provides an all-in-one window for customization. Advanced settings to increase the available free space after initialization are also available.
Power Macintosh compatibility
Disklosure runs native on Power Macintosh, since it has been compiled to work on both 68K and PowerPC machines. Although the floppy drive now used in Power Macintoshes happens to use DMA (a tecnology which frees the CPU for other tasks during I/O processes), Disklosure is unable to format disks in the background. Until Apple releases Copland there are no documented ways to do so.
Freeware notice
Having waited in vain for a single registration, I decided to make Disklosure a free software. Spontaneous donations will be gladly accepted. Registering your copy of Disklosure (with or without a donation) will provide you with free updates and other software I've written for the Macintosh. Remember I'm a young student and I'd like to know how far my software has arrived. Is asking for a postcard too much in your opinion?
I do accept e-mail registrations. You can find my mailbox address at the end of this documentation.
• The ‘…eject disk’ and ‘…mount disk’ radio buttons determine whether the disk will be mounted on the desktop or ejected when the operation completes.
• The ‘Use existing name (if any)’ or ‘Name it:’ radio buttons determine whether the disk will retain its older name (if it was already initialized for the Macintosh) or will be given a new one (typed in the text field just below the button).
• The ‘Add counter to disk name’ check box determines whether a disk number is going to be added to the disk name. This option is available only if the ‘Name it:’ radio button is selected.
• The ‘Confirm initialization (Slower)’ check box determines whether the user will be asked for a confirmation when starting any disk-related operation.
• The ‘Automatically operate on disk insertion’ check box determines whether the selected operation will begin automatically when the disk is inserted (as if the ‘Go’ button was pressed).
• Initialization options:
- Safe initialization: this operation includes initialization, verification, disk zeroing with bad block sparing of the disk.
- Normal initialization: this operation includes initialization and disk zeroing with bad block sparing of the disk.
- Erase disk space: this operation provides a fast disk-erasure with bad block sparing but it is only available on previously formatted disks.
- Make ‘Desktop’ file visible: this operation allows you to trash the Desktop file of any disk by making it visible in the Finder™. Once trashed, you must eject and later insert the disk to let the Finder rebuild a new one. This operation is useful when the Desktop file still occupies more than the usual 1K of disk space even if all files have been deleted and the standard Desktop Rebuild provided by the Finder™ doesn’t have any effect. This option is only available on previously formatted disks.
- Custom: if you are an experienced user, you can manually select the operation to perform by selecting or deselecting the check boxes just below the button.
• The ‘Eject’ button simply ejects any floppy disk currently inserted in the Macintosh disk drive.
• The ‘Go’ buttons starts the selected operation (only available if a disk has been inserted).
Preferences dialog:
• The ‘Show about dialog when launched’ check box determines whether the Information dialog will be automatically displayed when the application is being loaded.
• The ‘Play sounds for buttons in the main dialog’ check box determines whether Disklosure will play a click sound when any of the buttons in its main dialog are pressed.
• The ‘Beep when the operation completes’ check box determines whether Disklosure will play a system beep sound when the selected operation is complete.
• The ‘Force 800K disks to be formatted as 400K’ check box determines whether Disklosure will initialize standard double-sided low density disks using the old MFS file system. MFS disks have 400K of available space instead of the standard 800K. This option has been added to provide backward compatibility with older Macs.
• The ‘Increase free space on formatted disks’ check box determines whether Disklosure will reduce the normal catalog size used for newly formatted Macintosh disks, thus increasing the free space available to the user. This option is not recommended if you need to save many files on your disks, but is seriously recommended if you plan to use them with backup programs.
• The ‘Counter separator for disk names:’ text field contains the default character/s to be inserted between the disk name and the disk counter when the ‘Add disk counter to name’ check box in the main dialog is selected.
About dialog:
• The ‘OK’ button closes the information dialog. The same action is performed if the user presses the return, enter or escape keys.
• The ‘More’ button starts the scrolling of the about text. It will automatically change its name after the action it performs on the text. Pressing the tab key is an alternative to clicking on the button.
How to contact the author:
Suggestions, registration cards and bug-reports can be mailed to:
Gabriele de Simone
via Trento, 3
56100 Pisa
Italy
Internet mailbox:
desimon@cli.di.unipi.it
Check out my Homepage on the www:
http://www.cli.di.unipi.it/~desimon/intro.html
Many thanks to…
Metrowerks, for giving a PowerPC option to the numerous Pascal-written programs. My friends and occasional beta testers Mario Ghezzi and Francesco Fumelli, from the PAN Network.
