DropDMG is $24 for new users, $12 for previous DropDMG owners, and free for
people who bought DropDMG 2.x on or after June 20, 2008. There’s a 30-day
fully-featured trial for new users and upgraders.
- Highlights
- The user interface and disk imaging engine have been almost
completely redesigned and rewritten to make DropDMG easier
to use and more robust.
- The Layouts feature gives developers a WYSIWYG editor to
set the background picture, view options, and icon
positions, making it easy to deploy Mac software to their
users.
- The New Blank Disk Image… command lets you protect select
folders using the same encryption technology as FileVault
but without its drawbacks.
- Added support for the .sparsebundle, .sparseimage,
and hybrid (.iso) disk image formats.
- The DropDMG window now has a customizable toolbar for
quick access to commonly used commands.
- The Activity window consolidates progress information
into a single window, rather than having separate windows
for each operation. Additionally, DropDMG now has progress
bars for bulk operations, so that you can see the overall
progress (e.g. folder 6 of 10) in addition to the progress
for the current operations.
- DropDMG can now create device images of hard drives.
- The Verify Image… command now works in the background and
can verify a whole folder of disk images at once. You can
also bulk-verify multiple encrypted disk images without
having to keep re-entering the passphrase.
- The Mount Image… command now works in the background and
can mount multiple disk images at once. You can also
bulk-mount encrypted disk images that share the same
passphrase.
- Added the Change Image Passphrase… command, which makes
it much faster to change the passphrase of an encrypted disk
image.
- The Join Files… command lets you recombine files that
have been split into .001, .002, etc. files.
- Configurations
- Configurations are now editable, and the Configurations
window has been merged into the Preferences window.
- The Formats pop-up menu has been reorganized and provides
more information about the different formats and which
versions of the OS they work with.
- Added support for 256-bit AES encryption, which the NSA
rates as secure enough for TOP SECRET level documents.
- Added the Optimize for restores option.
- Added the Sizes pop-down menu, which makes it easy to
select common sizes for disk image segments.
- The Show Passphrase button lets you check the passphrase
for a configuration without having to re-type it.
- The dialogs for the New from Folder/File… and Convert
Image/Archive… commands now have pop-up menus to select
which configuration to use.
- The destination and names prompts have been combined into a
single dialog.
- If the chosen destination folder is not available (e.g.
because its volume is offline) DropDMG now displays a
caution icon in the pop-up menu and will report an error
during the operation, rather than silently changing to
Next to Source.
- When choosing a configuration in the DropDMG window or
from the Dock menu, you can hold down the Option key to open
the configuration for editing.
- Configurations are now stored as individual .plist
files, rather than in DropDMG’s preferences file, so it’s
easier to exchange them with other users and they work
better with Time Machine.
- Optimizations
- Creating encrypted disk images is faster and requires less
temporary disk space.
- Other types of operations can now run while DropDMG is
waiting for a blank optical disc to be inserted.
- Improved the queuing of bulk operations to reduce disk
contention and increase performance.
- DropDMG now runs as a 64-bit application under Mac OS X
10.6.
- Log
- The DropDMG window now has a drawer that shows detailed
information about the selected log entry.
- You can Control-click on log entries to perform operations
on their files.
- Log entries are now posted as Growl
notifications. If an operation has succeeded, clicking on
the Growl notification will reveal the destination file in
the Finder (or Path Finder). If the operation has
failed, clicking on the notification reveals the log entry
in DropDMG.
- The Remove log entries preference lets you set DropDMG to
auto-delete old log entries after a specified amount of time.
- It is now possible to delete individual log entries manually.
- The log is now displayed as a table rather than a block of text.
- The log can now be set to only show errors.
- The log is now stored as a Core Data database rather than in
DropDMG’s preferences file. This makes reading and updating
it faster and reduces DropDMG’s memory usage.
- License Agreements
- The separate windows for the license agreements list and the
language editors have been combined into the new Licenses
tab of the Preferences window. The steps for making a new
localized license are much clearer now.
- Licenses can now customize the prompt text and button names
that are presented to the end-user.
- Added additional languages for localized licenses: Czech,
Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish.
- License agreements are now stored as individual files,
rather than in DropDMG’s preferences file. This allows for
sharing, storing them under version control, editing using
external applications, and better Time Machine backups.
- Added Spelling and Grammar, Substitutions, and
Transformations to the Edit menu, and also added
menu commands for finding and replacing.
- You can hold down the Option key when choosing a license in
the Configurations tab to open it for editing.
- The license agreement editor now localizes the display of
the language names.
- Miscellaneous
- You can now choose whether DropDMG shows temporary
options by default or only when you hold down the Option
key.
- Added the Compact Image… command, which reclaims free
space from .sparseimage and .sparsebundle files.
- The Get Image Info… command now displays the information
in an outline rather than a block of text.
- Custom badged icons for the mounted disk image volume
are of much higher quality. The icon is now rendered at up
to 512x512 pixels, and there’s a separate optimized version
for each size (rather than scaling down the full-size
rendering).
- The dropdmg command-line tool now has a man page.
- File and segment sizes are now displayed using base 10
megabytes, for consistency with the Mac OS X 10.6 Finder.
- Remembers between launches which windows were open.
- DropDMG now auto-updates its command-line tool when you
first launch a new version of the application.
- The Create Disk Image/Archive Automator action is now
compatible with Mac OS X 10.6.
- Added Esoteric Preferences.
- Worked around an OS limitation that could prevent DropDMG
from converting a very large disk image into segments.
- Properly handles composed characters when truncating
filenames.
- Made various improvements to the Software Update… user
interface and engine.
- Improved the Purchase… window to make it easier to
understand how the trial period and serial numbers work.
- DropDMG now uses Mac OS X code signing,
which should reduce the number of annoying keychain dialogs.
- Fixed a bug where DropDMG would continue trying to burn an
encrypted disk image after the user had failed to enter the
proper passphrase.
- Fixed a bug with non-ASCII names and the command-line tool.
- Removed
- DropDMG 3.0 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later. Older versions for
Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.3 are still available.
- The Encoding option has been removed, since it’s no
longer particularly useful to create BinHex- or
MacBinary-encoded disk images.
- Removed support for creating self-mounting .smi NDIF
disk images, since all recent versions of the OS have
built-in support for disk images.
- Removed the keyboard shortcut for DropDMG’s command in the
Services menu, since Command-Shift-D was appropriated by
the OS. You can use the Keyboard pane of System
Preferences to assign your own shortcut, if desired.
- Removed the option for making disk images auto-open. This is
no longer necessary since Mac OS X can now auto-open disk
images that do not have this option set, and this makes disk
image creation much faster.
- Removed the Copy to Others button in the temporary
options sheet, as this functionality is superseded by
configurations.
- Removed the contextual menu and Dock menu items for changing
image formats. This functionality is superseded by
configurations.
- Removed support for creating and converting StuffIt
archives.
- Removed support for creating ADC-compressed disk images.
Zlib-compressed images are more efficient, and, due to other
changes in Mac OS X’s disk imaging engine, ADC images no
longer provided any compatibility benefits.
- Removed the Fix Image… command, since Mac OS X will now
mount disk images regardless of whether they have the
correct type and creator codes. The Control-drag shortcut
has been reassigned to the Verify Image… command.