Re: DiskBrowser Software - Work In Progress

[Andy McFadden <fadden@fadden.com>]

John B. Matthews <nospam@nospam.invalid> wrote:
> I admire Andy's decision to go open source. He's set a high standard, 
> and CiderPress fans are loyal largely because of his continued efforts.

I haven't had a lot of continued efforts, sadly; making the world safe
for cell phones took priority. :-)

My ultimate desire is to have a good set of tools for the Apple II; whether
that's CiderPress or something else isn't important.  I specifically used
the BSD license for CiderPress so that any useful pieces could be pulled
out and used for freeware, shareware, or commercial purposes.

The value in open-sourcing CiderPress is less in the opportunity for others
to contribute -- you need a decent (read: expensive) set of Microsoft
tools to work on anything except the disk image code -- and more in
having working code that demonstrates how to deciper some obscure disk,
graphic, and document formats.  DDD 2.x disk archives, 13-sector 5&3
encoding, DreamGrafix SHR images, cassette audio, and three versions of
LISA assembly source required either working through the assembly source
code or disassembling bits and pieces.  These are things that shouldn't
have to be done twice. :-)

I have to admit I'm more excited about the Wizardry browser than I am about
the disk browser, but that's mostly because I spent an absurd amount of
time hand-drawing maps on graph paper back in the '80s.

-- 
Send mail to fadden@fadden.com (Andy McFadden) - http://www.fadden.com/
Fight Internet Spam - http://spam.abuse.net/spam/ & http://spamcop.net/