I've released version 1.7.2 of Sweet16. This new version fixes a bug that prevented writing to 5.25" disk images, and lets you drag multiple disk images into the Disks window at once, to mount them all.

I'm going to be releasing Sweet16 1.7.2 very soon -- probably tomorrow (Monday, August 28th). This version only fixes a couple of bugs, but they're both thing I get a lot of email about.

After that, the big issues (both ones that are serious and ones I get a lot of email about) are pretty much all taken care of, and I'm going to dive into a much more substantial update that will incorporate some actual new features. I haven't decided which yet; I have a long to-do list so we'll see what makes the cut for the next version.

The point being that after this week's update, there hopefully won't be another one for at least a few weeks.

This is a pretty significant update, belying its minor version number bump. It includes some new features, including the ability to mount lots of 800K floppy images as "CleverPort" devices by holding down the Option key while mounting them. This lets you install System 6 without ever having to do a disk swap, for instance.

There are also nearly 20 bugs of varying significance fixed, including bugs preventing preferences from being saved, a jerky cursor when Default Folder X is installed, and problems with configuring the size of the emulated IIgs's memory.

For a complete list of changes, and to download Sweet16 1.7.1, visit the Sweet16 page.

Sweet16 version 1.7 is now available for download. This new version fixes several of the most commonly encountered bugs, including the speed control not working and problems with Unicode filenames. It also improves performance noticeably on PowerPC systems and plays appropriate sound effects when ejecting floppy disk images.

Compatibility with disk images is also improved -- most notably with DiskCopy 4.2 images.

Version 1.7 of Sweet16 is coming along nicely. It doesn't have a huge number of changes, but the ones it does have are good ones. Among other things, the Unicode support for file and folder names appears to be working very well now. In addition, the speed control checkbox now works correctly. There are a few other improvements as well -- both bug fixes and minor new features.

At this point, I'm hoping to release Sweet16 1.7 sometime in the next few days. I've just sent the second beta test version to my test team, so it's in their hands at this point.

At least, the program is running apparently correctly, now using Unicode strings for pathnames, filenames, and the like. I've only tested very slightly using file names with special characters, and so far it works, but I don't know how reliable it is yet. It needs a boatload of testing.

I may be putting out a call for folks that use Sweet16 on machines where English is not their primary language and are willing to make a backup of their stuff and try this thing out, under the understanding that it may very well toast their disk images, the Sweet16 preferences, and so forth.

I'm going to try to tackle a few more of the less intense things I'd like to fix before I do that, though.

I'm working on a new version of Sweet16 that's likely to be numbered 1.7. I don't have the slightest idea yet when it'll be done. The main thing it will include is what I hope will be decent support for Unicode filenames, which is a major undertaking. This problem came up quite simply: on BeOS, from which the code is adapted, the standard C string library routines (strcpy(), printf(), etc) all used UTF-8 strings, so they were ready to go for non-ASCII characters. Unfortunately, Mac OS X uses straight ASCII for those, so I have to recode everything.

I'm in the process of redoing it all to use CFURLRef and CFStringRef objects for the pathnames and filenames. This is taking some seriously tedious work, although it's not all that hard.

I'm doing all my testing in the PowerPC build because Xcode's debugging support for x86 doesn't seem to want to show me the source code -- it all comes up in assembly. Yuck.

I'd like to thank everyone that's emailed the kind messages about how much they like Sweet16 -- even when they have bugs to report as well. That's always nice when folks say, "Hey, even though I've got this problem to report, I'm sure happy you're doing this project." Beats getting chewed out, which I've had happen on other projects...

I've posted version 1.6.1 of Sweet16. While this doesn't yet address the Unicode problem that's causing trouble for a number of folks (particularly those outside the United States, unfortunately), but it does fix a couple of problems that were troublesome for some people, and has a couple of modest improvements as well. See the release notes on the Sweet16 page for details.