Disco 1.0

It is just under two months since I first reviewed the application Disco ($14.95), from the developers of AppZapper header.jpg

At the time I loved it. My only (very small complaint) was that the innovative ‘smoke’ feature didn’t work on the Mac mini. Well the great news is that it does now! But, and it turns out it is a pretty big but, that isn’t all that they have changed* In fact although it is undoubtedly cool, smoke is really just a bit of fun, a very innovative piece of interface work that sets the scene perfectly for the rest of Disco.

I have been doing a lot more burning to CD these day, primarily because of the new workflow I am setting up for my digital pictures. As such the two features that I am finding most useful are Discogrpahy which keeps track of every file n every disc, and Spanning which works out and informs you of how to spread your files across multiple discs.

This is a great application, which I am sure you will enjoy!

* Changes in this version:

1. Disc Naming has been greatly improved
– Redesigned the disc name field editor to be easier to see
– Ability to have Disco warn you when burning an untitled disc
– Ability to auto-append the date in international format to untitled (or all) discs
– There is no longer a character limit on names
– The disc name field now resizes with the window width

2. Discography has gone trough some major improvements (again)
– Discography has been moved to a Core Data back-end
– Indexes of previous versions of Disco are automatically imported
– Drastic speed improvements where made for both indexing and loading of indexes
– Spanned burns are now correctly indexed by Discography
– Audio CDs are now also indexed by Discography
– Listing of indexed discs now includes burn date
– Conflicts with discs having the same name in Discography are resolved
– Discography now properly updates the index list to reflect the latest burns
– The index list is now sorted by date, and the result lists are sorted by name.
– Double clicking on a disc now only shows result for that specific disc

3. Smoke now works on almost any Quartz Extreme capable Mac
– Based on your machine configuration, Smoke will enable or disable advanced options
– General stability and performance of Smoke has been improved
– Fixed compatibility issue with some nVidia cards
– Fixed occasional crashing with fallback smoke when burning

4. Interface changes
– You can now minimize the Disco window while burning
– The file list view is now resizable
– Preferences have been redone, now contains a burning pane
– The default interface transparency has been decreased
– Some terminology has been revised to be more human-readable
– Transition animations have been optimized to be smoother
– Many other smaller UI changes have been made

5. General changes
– Reliability of Spandex has been improved greatly
– Issue where imaging or storing a large disc would hang at 99% has been resolved
– File size calculation speed and accuracy have been improved
+ This fixed an issue where Spandex discs would have to much data burned to it, creating a coaster
+ This greatly improved the speed of Discography indexing
+ This solved numerous smaller issues
– Burning progress is now accurate for dual layer DVDs
– Sensitivity of motion sensor issues have been resolved
+ Motion sensor preference has been turned off by default
– Fixed and issue where the name of a disc sometimes could be determined
– We now have support for .toast disc image files
– Full Unicode support added for displaying/copying/imaging/indexing discs with unicode characters
– Numerous occasional coastering issues have been fixed
– Fixed an issue where hitting Reburn before the previous disc was mounted would not eject disc
– We added a tooltip to the disc name label in the Disc Info view to ensure long disc names can be read.
– We have made many small memory and cpu usage optimizations
– Custom professionally created sounds effects, for when a disc was burned successfully and for a coaster

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