The Master and the Slave communicate by sending each other special AppleEvents. These are handled by the OS and can be transmitted over the network, but they also work fine without a network. In either case a connection must be established between the Master and the Slave before they can exchange data. If there’s already a Master running when you launch a Slave (and vice versa) they will connect automatically. For connections across the network you have to initiate the connection by selecting ‘Open Connection…’ from the appropriate menu in either application or by clicking the ‘Open…’ button in the Master’s ‘Slaves’ window. You will be presented with a standard program linking dialog box where you have to locate the target of the link.
Closing Connections
An open connection can be closed at any time. Just select ‘Close Connection’ from the appropriate menu or click the ‘Close’ butten. Note that in the Master you must select a Slave from the list before you close it’s connection. The Slave can only handle one link at a time so it’s unabigous which connection will be closed. The connection will also be closed when you quit one of the applications.
Launching Slaves
To make live easier for the ones of you which use MandelNet on a single Macintosh, the Master has the ability to launch Slaves himself. It can do it manually, by selecting ‘Launch Local’ from the ‘Slave’ menu, or automatically on startup, by enabling ‘Auto-Launch Slave’ in the Preferences. The Master remembers which Slaves it launched and quits them automatically when their connection is closed (usually the the Master quits). I recommend using Quiet Mode (see below) together with this feature because it’s less confusing.
Quiet Mode
The Slave can be set to ‘Quiet Mode’. This means that it will hide it’s status window and display no error messages when it’s in the background. It will also switch the Finder to the front immediately after it’s being launched. This feature is especially useful together with the ‘Auto-Launch Slave’ feature or when you install the Slave in the Startup Items folder so that it will be launched on system startup.
