By Hugh Hood (CSA2) AppleIIWorks Envoy is a ‘faceless’ application for Mac OS X (10.4.x Tiger through 10.8.x Mountain Lion) with a two-fold purpose. First, it provides for Mac OS X Finder recognition of Apple II AppleWorks Files, presenting both a custom Mac Finder icon as well as a custom ‘Kind’ description for AppleWorks Word Processor (AWP), Database (ADB) and Spreadsheet (ASP) files. Second, the application implements a Spotlight metadata importer for AppleWorks Word Processor (ProDOS type ‘AWP/$1A’) files that…
Paris, September 1st, 2013 – Brutal Deluxe Software is proud to introduce BenchmarkeD to the Apple II community. BenchmarkeD is a benchmark utility for the Apple IIgs. It allows you to calculate the average throughput in reading and writing files and sequential disk blocks of your ProDOS volumes. BenchmarkeD uses standard GS/OS routines to perform its tests. Until now, there were no such utilities for the Apple IIgs. Nowadays, disk devices are USB sticks or Compact Flash cards, physical devices…
September 2013 A very long time ago even by non-Internet standards, the Spy advised people owning stock in typewriter companies to sell. In that same era he opined “collect postage stamps young woman, for soon they won’t make them any more”. To the former, anyone under thirty-five might today say “what’s a typewriter?” The Spy was right. But to the latter, he was only half so. True, anyone under ten today is likely to say the same thing about stamps…
The Usenet newsgroup comp.binaries.apple2 contains about 2-3 thousand Apple II programs, but they’re tricky to download to an emulator or a real Apple II, owing to the fact that they’re all encoded with ASCII armor. Well thanks to Format Converter, technology that will decode all the Apple II and Macintosh file formats, these files from comp.binaries.apple2 can be easily downloaded to your computer as a ShrinkIt file. BinSCII files will be decoded (usually to ShrinkIt archives) and so will Executioner…
The curator of the Aztec C Museum, Bill Buckels, has announce the immediate availability of two new directory builders for Dos 3.3. The new Directory Builders Dir33 and LS33 are available from the Aztec C Museum as a free download. Complete source code and documentation is included as part of the download. According to the note on CSA2 posted by Bill, “ The Aztec C65 DIR33 Project for Apple II DOS 3.3 – RWTS revealed with structures and everything… Download…
A2Command, the Norton Commander style file manager for the Apple ][ series computer has been updated. Version 1.1 was releaved by author Peyton Byrd with the following updates and changes: This new release features several bugfixes and some improvements including: Added support for the new cc65 functions for listing devices. Fixed viewer to avoid crashing when many spaces are present in one line. Corrected the single file selection when copying. Lowercase and uppercase commands are now active. Date and time…
Dagen Brock has updated his recently released 65xx Programmers Reference for iOS. This App is a great reference for programmers of the 65xx series CPU’s such as those found in the Apple II series computers. The latest version of the program has complete CPU separation allowing those who are programming a specific CPU to only see the commands for that particular CPU. According to his posting on CSA2, there are more updates to the application coming soon. The reference is…
Let’s take a look at what’s going on with the Apple II: – Bill Buckels is still hard at work with Aztec C, and he has made a number of shell utilities for this system. – Eric Shepherd updated his Sweet16 emulator for Mac OS X to version 3.0.1. – The Daily Apple blog is working on a mapping program and ZBASIC for an IFComp entry. – Steven Hirsch has saved the ZVX4 8″ disk controller software from extinction. –…
Eric Shephard, owner and operator of the Apple IIgs Software producing SheppyWare, has announce a new push for an Apple IIgs based SMB2 client. According to his posting on CSA2, ” We’re now accepting pledges to increase the value of the S-Prize! The Prize has been established to encourage Apple II developers to create an open-source SMB2 file system for the Apple IIgs which meets certain functional requirements. We’ve started with the $400 seeded by myself and the Apple II…
What is this file? That’s a good question when it comes to these Apple II files which often have pretty cryptic names, such as “Mmgrdosinst.” Earlier this month, file catalogs were added to show the contents of ShrinkIt archives and disk images, but that only helps a little. Having a screenshot of what the program looks like is a much more valuable asset. To that end, exactly 10,657 screenshots are now available for 4,668 8-bit Apple II programs in Mac…
As the end of the 2013 version of KansasFest winds down, the particip@ants begin to look to the next year. The dates for the 2014 rendition of the KansasFest Apple ][ convention have been announced and ccording to a posting on twitter from Ken Gagne of Juiced.GS, the event will be held 22-27 July, 2014. This year’s event featured Randy Wigginton as the keynote speaker and Steve Wozniak showed up to relive some of the good old days with the…
Rumors have been flying around for some time about the downtime experienced with the Apple Developer website. Today, Apple sent an email to all registered Apple Developers, stating: Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the…
We learned today that one of our directors, Mike Pfaiffer, has passed away. Michael was a programmer, editor of Call-A.P.P.L.E. and The Digital Civilization, as well as A.P.P.L.E. President. He passed away at his home in Manitoba Canada. Mike was a driving force behind the rejuvenation of A.P.P.L.E. in the early 2000’s and will be sorely missed by all of us.
Ewen Wannop has released an upgrade to his original ByteBagger hex editor program. It is now called ChewBagger and it is a stand-alone file viewer, editor and disassembler. ChewBagger lets you view the raw data of either the data or resource fork of a file, search for target strings within that fork, using either Hex or ASCII data, and optionally allows you to edit the data, and write the changed data back to the file. You can also load an OMF…
Today’s Mac GUI Vault update brings enhanced file catalogs to over 70% of the 27,000 files currently in the Vault archive; that’s almost 19,000 files. These file catalogs are in the search database too, so you can use them to find the programs that you’re looking for. Some files, such as BinHex and BinSCII, will often have a description of the program in them; this description has also been copied out and is searchable. The following file formats are cataloged:…
Changes Meter, the URL checker by Massimiliano Origgi and Intuiware, has been updated. The latest version for Mac OS X, 1.8.1, address a host of issues that users were having including: Performance and Stability Added option to toggle the ‘Check Complete’ Growl notification Updated Growl to the latest version Fixed a bug which would cause excessive resources usage, in certain specific situations. Fixed a bug which could cause Changes Meter to stop checking sites, requiring an app restart to restore…
Let’s take a quick look at some of the latest developments in the Apple II world. Juiced.GS, June 2013 edition is available. This issue features a behind-the-scenes look at the discovery and publication of 8-bit shooting game Zéphyr; an interview with the conference services staff at Rockhurst University, host of KansasFest; reviews of Option8′s RetroConnector keyboard interface device, and of Karateka Classic and Lode Runner Classic for iOS; a history of Apple II software publisher Electronic Arts; and much, much more!…
In the aftermath of WWDC, the Spy notes his reader saw it here first–a modular multi-core MacPro, that is, a closed box with all expandability through external ports. He thought an all-in-one design possible, and didn’t foresee the cylinder, but rightly saw the demise of the tower more than a year ago. Doubled Thunderbolt speed will be nice, and it will be great to get the desktop machine back on the desk from the floor. With that kind of connection,…
Brutal Deluxe Software, the Apple II game software manufacturer, has announced that the recently released Apple II series game Zephyr will now be available in electronic disk image format. The software which was released earlier this year on Floppy Disk is now being sold for a single Euro per copy. According to the Brutal Deluxe Software website, “Now, get one disk image copy made available to you. Purchase it and you will get a double-sided floppy disk image (French and…
The website for the Apple II series based fantasy RPG, Silvern Castle, has moved. Jeff Fink, the owner and author of the game announced the relocation was due to changes with the Google Groups. He also mentioned server speed being a factor in the change. The new website for the Silvern Castle is now at: http://finkjsc.a2hq.com/silverncastle/
