Monday's Mac Gadget by John F. Braun Disk Charmer: Multi-Threaded Floppy Formatting Monday March 29th, 1999 Disk Charmer 3.1.4 ($10 Shareware) Fabrizio Oddone Although the Death of the Floppy has taken place on the Power Macintosh G3 and the iMac, there are still millions who need to use this limited but common storage medium. Under Mac OS 8.x, many Finder operations are multithreaded, meaning you can do other things while you copy, trash or move files. Unfortunately, the format command still requires you to sit there and wait, when you could be getting other things done. Disk Charmer will let you do what other platforms have been able to do for years, namely format a floppy (and possibly other removable media) in the background. You can choose from several format options, including full erase, erase catalog, verify, and read to memory. The read options serves two purposes. The first is that Disk Charmer can be turned into a small copy factory, being able to produce a single or multiple copies. The second is that the read operation supports the Undo concept, so that even if you format a disk, you can restore the contents from memory. The ability to select the format (standard, extended, DOS or ProDOS), the low-density size, and HFS+ block size are icing on the cake. For those that still need to deal with these 3.5" relics, Disk Charmer makes them as easy to deal with as possible. Useful Link Disk Charmer Home Page Formatting on Steroids Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you with those cool things that we all just have to have on our Macs. Shareware, Freeware, Postcardware, Emailware, and even commercial apps, Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you find and use the best of these programs. John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on all aspects of communications technology. He has several degrees that claim he knows what he's doing when it comes to computers. After watching co-workers reinstall Windows, search for device drivers, and experience other horrors during the day, he's glad that he comes home to a Mac (compatible) computer. Have any comments, suggestions, or favorite Gadgets? Drop John a line at You can also Post Your Comments below. Current Monday's Mac Gadget Want to Supercharge Your Dock? Check Out Todos! - August 21st Worried About Your Mac Getting Jacked? Get JackSMS - June 12th Want iChat with Tabs? Try Chax! - April 3rd Visit Monday's Mac Gadget Archives for more great Mac Gadgets!