Have any of you heard of, or used any programmes designed for integration with Apple II Desktop (originally MouseDesk)?
What I would like to see, at a minimum, in the future--which probably means writing it--are the following:
ANSI Text Editor: It'd be nice to support line numbers, and some other features such as find/replace. I suppose I could try porting something lie SciTE.
If done right, this could output a .BAS file, so you could write an AppleSoft BASIC programme in A2D, export as .BAS, then run it in A2D.
Filesystem Support:
At present, A2D does not have FSTs for DOS 3.3 or PASCAL volumes. I haven't probed too deeply into the A2D code, but I would think it would be trivial to support DOS 3.3 volumes, at least in read-only form, and to execute BASIC programmes from them. in theory, we could have DOS 3.3 r/w, with the ability to BRUN binary files, too.
I don't remember if A2D supports BRUN in general, but if not, that's a good goal for a v2.0.
I would also like to see, desite it being less important than DOS 3.3, PASCAL filesystem support. This would be an excellent expansion of the current shell.
Given that many of us have accelerated //e systems now, with large volume support, it'd be nice to have some applications in general, including some form of SDK/Dev environment for A2D. I need to do more research, but I wouldn't mind seeing docs on how to write for the A2D 'API'. (Although that is a somewhat inappropriate use of the term, I use it in its most abstract form.)
Once upon a time, I recall writing some software for Apple II GEOS, but the general UI of A2D is simply a thousand times nicer than GEOS, because of its multi-window system and general disk handling. I'd love to see something that allows developing software to run inside of A2D/MouseDesk. If this already exists, please slap me and point me at it.
If you know of any software that was made for A2D/MouseDesk, I would like to know about it.
I Just heard about this early this year. But the articles I ran into was they wasn't even sure if it was released. Well it was. But that is all I could find about it. That and everybody including me was like. Not, not bad. Oh I do think one other person said it ran slow.
TTFN,
Josh
Hi Josh,
You can get the current pre-alpha on github, here: https://github.com/a2stuff/a2d/releases
ou can find version 1.1 (and older 'MouseDesk' versions) on most resource sites, such as Asimov.
I've used A2D for years. My goal here to to try to make it more useful, and able to work with more disk formats. It doesn't run too badly on a stock system, and on a 3.5MHz or faster system, it runs quite nicely. THe slowest aspect of it is (naturally) screen draws, which a faster system easily fixes. I would be curious how fast it performs on a 16MHz accel card. At that speed, it'd absolutely fly.
As long as you are running files from ProDOS volumes, it is an excellent shell, but there is little to nothing made specifically to run inside it.