Get the latest issue of Howard Katz’s Apple II News & Notes, the free newsletter for Apple II users, at http://lamp.a2central.com/a2n/a2n0304.txt..

The first screenshot showing Contiki running on an Apple II suggests the port is making progress.

“The Contiki desktop environment is a highly portable, open source, Internet-enabled, multitasking, graphical operating system that runs on a variety of constrained systems, ranging from modern embedded 8-bit microcontrollers to old 8-bit homecomputers like the Commodore 64.” .

HyperCard Mac has finally officially been discontinued, several years after Apple quit giving it any attention. See this story for some thoughts about it. The “benign neglect” Apple showed HyperCard the last few years is very reminiscent of that shown to the Apple II in its later years..

Gerard Putter has released version 2.6 of Virtual ][, his excellent shareware Apple II, II+, and IIe emulator for Mac OS X. The new version improves performance and adds several additional features. Read on for specifics.The new version lets you include a floppy disk image within a configuration, making it possible to create a turnkey bootable Apple II configuration. You can also mount a Macintosh folder as a DOS 3.3 floppy disk. In addition:

• You can now quickly switch between Apple II, II+, and IIe machines.
• You can define a default configuration which is used when the program starts up.
• You can use the backspace as a left arrow key.
• Improved Open and Closed Apple key support on the IIe.
• Added an optional disk I/O indicator light when in full-screen mode.
• Added a “Media” pull down menu, which contains commands for inserting disks and tapes.
• Closing a virtual machine window now asks for confirmation before closing it.
• The standard window size can be set as an application preference.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the game Serpentine from running.
• Fixed a bug that corrupted the internal timing of the virtual machine after waking from sleep (on Panther).

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Kent Dickey’s latest version of KEGS provides sound and mouse fixes. You can grab it here!Changes in KEGS v0.86 since v0.85 (03/23/04)

• Add patch for Solaris sound by Jonathan Kalbfeld.
• Fix so that F4 enters config panel even while running Prosel-16.
• Major mouse pointer changes, based on some ideas from Geoff Weiss. The GSOS mouse now exactly tracks the host pointer automatically.
• Fixed an accidental debug halt when Prosel-16 disables the keyboard/mouse (this bug introduced in v0.85).
  

Kent also mentions:
“I’d like to get some feedback on the new mouse interface which Geoff has been nagging me to fix for months. I didn’t implement his code
exactly since I cleaned up a lot of gunk around mouse handling at the same time, and tried not to introduce a new mode. I think it works great on Mac OS X and Windows XP, but I didn’t think it felt quite right on X Windows, but I’m not sure if it’s something newly wrong or if mouse handling on X Windows has always been bad.”.

The new issue of The Lamp! was recently released by Lyle Syverson. This monthly publication summarizes the goings-on in the A2 forum bulletin board on Syndicomm Online. Some of the interesting topics include:

• localtalk on an Apple IIGS
• vga monitors on the Apple II
• how to build a joystick for your Apple II
• a status update on gwFTP
• a history of GEnieLamp A2 and The Lamp!.
  

Syndicomm’s online store now offers all 82 issues of Softdisk G-S for individual purchase on 3.5-inch diskette, at a price of US $5.00 apiece. To order, visit Syndicomm’s online store, or click here to go directly to the page for ordering the disks..

The latest issue of Juiced.GS magazine has mailed to international subscribers..

A new version of faddensoft’s CiderPress features several minor enhancements. It can now handle some archives created by an old version of ShrinkIt (thanks to a NufxLib update), and creates DiskCopy 4.2 images that match what Macintoshes create.Here is a more detailed explanation of the changes in this release:

Creation of DiskCopy 4.2 images is now closer to what DiskCopy does. It’s now possible to take DiskCopy images from Apple II FTP sites, convert them to 2img and back to DiskCopy, and have the result be an exact binary match of the original.

A bug in the RDOS disk detection was fixed that was causing some flavors of RDOS to be unrecognizable.

The latest version of NufxLib (v2.0.2) is included in the install package.

For the curious, the changes made to DiskCopy handling were:

• ProDOS volume names are now stored in the DC42 header. All disks used to just get the “-not a Macintosh disk” treatment.
• When the “-not a Macintosh disk” string is used in the label, the length byte for the string is incremented by one. There’s no good reason for this, it’s just the way DiskCopy seems to work.
• UNIDOS disk images (two 400K DOS volumes on a 3.5″ disk) were being stored with DOS sector ordering rather than ProDOS. CiderPress now matches this behavior.
• DiskCopy adds an optional “tag” section with an extra 12 bytes for every 512-byte block. CiderPress now does this, adding 19200 zero bytes to the end of each file.
• The above changes are supported by the disk conversion and “bulk” disk conversion tools.
  

For anyone not familiar with the product: CiderPress is like a “ShrinkIt for Windows” on steroids. It offers full access to ShrinkIt archives, and allows you to view and extract files directly out of disk images, as well as create ProDOS disk images. File converters translate programs, documents, and graphics files into formats easily accessible under Windows and other systems. Disk images can be converted between several different formats.

CiderPress is shareware, with an $8.95 registration cost. After 30 days it must be registered..

Read about Stéphane Guillard’s efforts to build an IDE interface for his Apple II. Although the project is several years old, he describes and illustrates the development process..