･ Cron Setup rewritten from scratch. More features including: SIVC support, preferences dialogs for all Cron options, automatic installation of Cron, option to remove Cron, convenient (but not WYSIWYG) editing of crontab file, convenient viewing of Cronﾕs log file.
･ Cron built as a fat binary (read: ﾒAccelerated for Power Macintoshﾓ) using CodeWarrior 8.
･ Cron is now allocated a larger application heap and stack. Cronﾕs previous efforts to be super-efficient with such memory usage have repeatedly been torpedoed by extensions which gobbled large amounts of stack space at the funniest times, and new system software releases with their ever increasing demands on application heap space. So super-efficiency is history; it just isnﾕt worth the price either for me as a developer, or for you as the end-user and immediate victim of all this nonsense.
･ Cronﾕs ﾒopenﾓ command has been eliminated because it was a major support headache. Infinitely better documention might have corrected this problem, but Iﾕd rather write software than documentation any day, so Iﾕve taken a software approach to solving this problem: Cron now accepts as command names the names of applications, Cron commands (which are applications, after all), AppleScript applets (same story), desk accessories (kinda the same story), and document files (not at all the same story; theyﾕll be loaded into whatever application created them) which are located in the same folder as Cron. It can also accept aliases to all those items regardless of where they are actually stored, provided that the aliases are located in the same folder as Cron, and you supply the full name of the alias as the command name, e.g. ﾒBBEdit aliasﾓ rather than just ﾒBBEditﾓ. Cron does continue to accept pathnames just in case you donﾕt want to be placing all these things in Cronﾕs folder, but I donﾕt recommend bothering with them, personally. Cron also accepts as a command name the creator code of any application. The application will be found by searching the Desktop Database and then launched. Note that Cron automatically figures-out (or makes a best guess regarding) the ultimate referent of a command name, so no special flags need to be supplied to use all these different options.
If you currently use the ﾒopenﾓ command, either switch to one of the alternatives mentioned above (and documented in the ﾒREAD MEﾓ file), or save the ﾒopenﾓ command from your existing version of Cron and use it with this new version. If you opt to continue using the ﾒopenﾓ command, please remember itﾕs no longer supported, so donﾕt send me any problem reports concerning it.
If you were using the printing features of the ﾒopenﾓ command, please let me know. Iﾕll provide an alternative method of printing in a future version if anyone actually needs it.
･ Cron now includes support for the Simple Internet Version Control protocol (SIVC). Working in concert with ﾒSIVC Query Engineﾓ and ﾒCron Setup,ﾓ Cron will now automatically tell you when it is out of date, and will help you download the latest version if you so desire. People who are not connected to the Internet, or are stuck behind firewalls (which amounts to much the same thing) will not be able to take advantage of the SIVC features.
･ The Cron Log now includes some additional information, including the total percentage of CPU cycles Cron consumed during its operation. In the past, a few net.maniacs have claimed Cron was slowing-down their computers. Frankly, Cron has never done enough that it could slow down anyoneﾕs computer, and these log file entries will prove it. (You can independently verify these figures with a copy of a utility like Process Watcher and a calculator, if you so desire.) Note that when the log file states that Cron used something like 0.3220% of all CPU cycles while it was operating this means that it used three hundred twenty two one thousandths of 1% of all CPU cycles; not 32.2%. These CPU utilization figures become more meaningful the longer Cron has been running.
･ Cron is now shareware and accordingly ships Kagi Sharewareﾕs Register application to make shareware registration as convenient as possible. Unfortunately, it was no longer possible sustain this development effort as freeware.
Changes in Cron 1.0d17-18, and 1.0a0-6:
These versions werenﾕt generally released, and no change histories were compiled for them.
Changes in Cron 1.0d16 (14-May-94):
･ Commands can now be scheduled for execution at shutdown (actually, they're executed when cron exits, but it's essentially the same thing when cron is running in its default faceless-background mode).
･ Preferences file now supported. Current preferences give control over the log file. Options include the booleans: LogFile, LogSuccesses, LogErrors, and LogCronStart. See the example "Cron Prefs" file for details. (It's just a text file, so you can view/edit it easily with your favorite text editor.)
･ Log file is only open while log entries are written to it; the rest of the time it's closed, so it's easy to throw away when it starts to get too large. Also, this frees up an FCB most of the time (which probably isn't a problem for most folks, but it's nice to know, I suppose).
･ An optional '-l' argument may be specified at the beginning of the seventh field in a normal crontab entry. This switch tells cron to log the launch/exit of the command regardless of the LogSuccesses and LogErrors settings in the preferences file. Note that this option has no effect if the LogFile option is set to FALSE.
･ Command exits are now logged. The exit entries in the log file include the total time the command ran, and the date/time at which it was launched. If the command terminated as the result of a system error, the system error code is also logged.
･ The format of the "cron log" file has been altered.
Changes in Cron 1.0d13:
･ Cron now runs as a background-only application, so you won't see it in the application menu anymore. (If you liked it the way it was before, use ResEdit to alter the "Background Only" bit in cron's SIZE resource.)
･ Cron uses less memory, especially when used in its default background-only configuration.
･ Cron includes some on-board diagnostics which may help people track down problems in a few obscure situations. Basically, it's simple stuff; alerts will appear to let you know that some part of program initialization failed, or that it ran out memory while trying to do something, etc.
･ The "argc Receiver.c" file has been altered such that it works correctly for commands built to execute as background-only tasks.
･ The "argc Receiver.c" file has been altered such that it now accepts multiple sets of parameters at one time. In the past, commands accepted only the first set of parameters they were passed at any given time. This is more of a limitation in the Mac OS than in the cron code. Note that the option to receive multiple sets of parameters in a command must be enabled by defining the "ReinvokeMain" symbol in the command project, and your code must be prepared to cleanup behind itself completely, etc. If we could just fork processes, none of this would be necessary, of course.
･ The 1.0d10 version of the "argc Receiver.c" file has been ported to THINK Pascal by Peter N. Lewis, so Pascal programmers should be able to join in the fun now. :-)
Changes in Cron 1.0d10:
･ Cron no longer crashes when the system clock is set back.
･ The open command now resolves aliases to the files it is instructed to open.
･ The old echo command was rewritten from scratch by Mike Pearce such that it now echos its arguments to Notification Manager alerts for which timeout values can be supplied. This creates a very useful way for cron to provide users a reminder service. Thank you, Mike.
･ The "tcp time client" command has been added. This command will query TCP-based Time Protocol (RFC 868) servers and set the Mac's clock accordingly. It will optionally allow for the U.S. Daylight Savings Time (DST) convention.
･ The "activity-report" command has been added. This command brings up a window on the user's screen into which they can type up to 255 characters of text. The text is recorded in a log file with a time stamp attached to each entry. This is useful for keeping track of one's daily activities in order to satisfy demanding management.
Changes in Cron 1.0d9:
･ Cron now resolves aliases to commands and to the crontab file. The aliases must have exactly the same names as the files they represent, i.e. an alias to the crontab file named "crontab alias" will not work.
･ Most of the text files supplied with, and created by, this version of cron are setup to work with Rich Siegel's marvelous BBEdit text editor, instead of TeachText as with previous versions.
If you don't have a copy of BBEdit, I recommend getting one. Even so, if you'd rather not get BBEdit, they're still just plain old text files, so you can edit and view them with almost anything.
･ Cron supports several extensions to the standard crontab format. These include the options of scheduling events relative to the time at which the Mac: starts-up, goes idle, or becomes busy.
Points of interest:
･ Cron looks for its crontab file in the same directory as the Cron application.
