OK, I admit it. My floppies and other removable disks are in a disorganized mess. Atticus Vista was designed for folks like me. It consists of a control panel and application that automatically catalog the disks you mount on the Mac’s desktop.
Each time it scans a drive, Vista puts up a small dialog box asking if you want to create a snapshot of the disk’s directory. You can also have the program skip the request and simply display a warning hand when saving the directory, or display nothing.
Vista loads the disk information and stores it in a directory called a Vista. Each Vista directory has a full catalog of all the disks the program has scanned, and it displays an icon for each disk. When you click on an icon, you see that disk’s directory, including program and document icons. If the contents of the disk have changed, because you’ve added or removed files, Vista automatically updates the entry when the disk is mounted.
Vista has additional capabilities. One feature allows you to easily capture the directories of multiple disks. Each disk ejects automatically to quickly make room for the next. A File Walkers option searches the contents of compressed archives created in Compact Pro or Stufflt. You can also collect directory snapshots in a single window, search their contents, and print them using the Label Monitor feature. The directories are automatically formatted for use with several types of Avery labels, and you can print either a single directory or the entire list.
When you double-click on a file name inside the Vista, the listing acts like an alias, and you get a message telling you to mount the disk. At least that’s the theory; in practice, I found that it doesn’t always work. Sometimes Vista would tell me that I wasn’t using a proper alias, or it would launch the application that created the document without requesting the disk that the document was stored on. (Atticus’s technical support is aware of these problems.)
Vista has a few other problems. For example, you can’t view a disk directory from the application. Instead, you must go to the Vista and double-click on the disk icon. The only way to open a directory from inside the application is to add the directory to the Label Monitor directory. But if a directory contains more names than a label can hold, Vista lops off the end of the list, and the search feature can’t find those names. Disks are displayed in the Label Monitor directory only in the order the directories were read; they can’t be sorted.
With a few more bells and whistles, and a fix for the alias problem, Atticus Vista could be the last word in managing disk collections. As it is, the program is reasonably well behaved in normal use and can help bring order to even the most disorganized disk collection.
Steinberg, Gene. (May 1994). Atticus Vista 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 79).
Atticus Vista
Robert Gibson
Applications
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Atticus_Vista.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
