This document describes the development of a Beta version, ( still in development yet functional ), Macintosh Gopher client written by Rhett "Jonzy" Jones, jonzy@cc.utah.edu, at the University of Utah Computer Center. MacGopher is copyright 1992, by the University of Utah Computer Center. All rights are reserved. The program may be distributed freely so long as there is no monetary gain for any organization, person, or persons. This includes no charge for any Internet downloading of this program. Please send any bug reports to: jonzy@cc.utah.edu
The University of Utah has been given permission from Apple Computer Corporation to use the name MacGopher as the name for this gopher client.
This MacGopher Client requires System 6.0.5 or greater and MacTCP 1.1.
For information about the operation of MacGopher please refer to "Digging Into Gopher". A file called "Digging Into Gopher.txt" is also available but contains no pictures which are relevant to the description of the various windows and dialogs.
For a smooth transition into Telnet when selecting a telnet item, it is recommended you use System 7 and have MacGopher point to gTelnet2.5 which is a modified version of NSCA/BYU Telnet that supports MacGopher. If you are not using System 7, there is no need for this modified version of Telnet. gTelnet2.5 can be acquired via gopher from augusta.cc.utah.edu port 70 as gTelnet2.5.sit.hqx, or via anonymous ftp from ftp.cc.utah.edu in /pub/gopher/Macintosh by the same name.
For a smooth transition into tn3270 when selecting a tn3270 item, it is recommended you use System 7. tn3270 can acquired via gopher from augusta.cc.utah.edu port 70 as tn3270.sit.hqx, or via anonymous ftp from ftp.cc.utah.edu in /pub/gopher/Macintosh by the same name. Please note that when selecting a tn3270 item under System 7 a tn3270 document will be created in the same directory as MacGopher.
KNOWN BUGS AS OF MacGopher version version 0.5b14 released: November 3, 1992.
1) A MacTCP out of memory error will occur if a connection to more than 16 different hosts is made. If this happens you can save any bookmarks but will need to quit MacGopher to establish any new connections. I have spent mucho time on this problem and suspect the problem is a memory leak with the MacTCP driver.
2) "Text Prefs ...", may not correctly translate text into the French character set. The reason I say may not is because I don't know what will happen with the new bug fixes as of version 0.5b12 released October 19, 1992. So please let me know if this is still broken.
3) A connection to a server on the same machine as the client can be lost if the data being retrieved is greater than 150k. If this happens an error message will be posted, and you may be able to acquire the document in question with a subsequent retrievel. I don't know if I would really call this a bug, but I cannot determine the problem at this time.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b12 released: October 19, 1992.
1) Fixed that gosh darn "Text Prefs ..." bug..
2) Removed the debugging code that wrote to address 0x0000.
3) Fixed a bug that would cause the program to crash during initialization. Thank you Steve Dorner for not only bringing this to my attention, but also for turning me on to a nice debugging tool.
3) Fixed another bug that had potential of some dangerous side effects.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b11 released: October 16, 1992.
1) If a ftp item is being retrieved has a ".hqx" extention, (it looks like it may be a Macintosh BinHex file), the user is asked if they want the data retrieved as such. An oversight on my part.
2) Added support for Finger. This option is found under the new Services menu. This also includes the identification and support of a finger item 'f'.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b10 released: October 14, 1992.
1) Fixed a bug that would trash memory when retrieving a directory which required more than 32k of data to be placed within a gopher windows pane. If this case arises, when building the pane, a dialog informing the user the directory is too big will be displayed..
2) Fixed a printing bug that would not wrap long lines appropriatly.
3) MacGopher now supports the selection of ftp items (9). This was a quick hack and the interface may be somewhat misleading. If you know that data you are retrieving is ASCII text select the "Text" option, if on the other hand you want to receive the data as a binary transfer you will need to select "Unknown". I am open to any suggestions on this particular interface.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b9 released: October 8, 1992.
1) MacGopher now supports TN3270 items. However, to get full support for a TN3270 item it is recommended you run System 7 and acquire a copy of the tn3270 application as noted above.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b8 released: October 2, 1992.
1) The dialog informing you the data be retrieved is too big now has an Abort button instead of a Cancel Button. For clarity reasons only.
2) Some minor changes to some of the dialogs to make the messages more meaningful.
3) Added the ability to distinguish the new gopher+ Image item and the experimental GIF image types represented by the characters ':' and 'g' respectively. I apologize for the small icon used to display a GIF item, a box around the letters GIF, but I couldn't come up with anything else.
4) Fixed a potential problem of not properly identifing the retrievel of newer item types.
5) Implemented the ability to inform the users of a non-successful data transfer with a gopher+ server.
6). MacGopher is now gopher+ savey.
7). MacGopher can now retrieve but not display GIF images under the old protocol, and GIF, PICT, and TIFF files under the new gopher+ protocol. MacGopher will not display these items yets, so you will need to go to the Preferences menu "File Creator Prefs ..." options and make sure MacGopher knows what application to use so you can open the file retrieved.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b7 released: September 22, 1992.
1) When talking to a Gopher Plus server and selecting a view via the "Get Views ..." option under the "Gopher+" menu, a dialog is displayed informing you this is not implemented yet. (Forgot to do this yesterday)
2) Changed the layout of the "This is not implemented yet" dialog.
3) Fixed a problem when retrieving a Macintosh BinHex file and storing the debinhexed file on a volume other than the default volume.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b6 released: September 21, 1992.
1) Started giving support for the new gopher + protocol.
2) A dialog will be brought up when retrieving data and the connection to the host either gets closed prematurely or lost.
3) Added the ability to print any selected text in a text window.
4) Changed the font used in the Gopher Window panes from Chicago 12 to Geneva 9 point.
5) If the Prefernces file is opened via the Finder a dialog stating this is meaningless is displayed.
6) Added an interface that allows the selection of what application is the creator of a given document. This now allows the ability to change the creator of a text document without going into ResEdit. This option can now be found under the Preferences menu as "File Creator Prefs ...".
7) Approximatly 10 percent of the routines were rewritten to support both the Gopher Plus protocol and dynamic growth of the Gopher protocol.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b5 released: August 31, 1992.
1) Fixed a bug when selecting an option found under the Preferences Menu.
2) Started adding support for Balloon Help under System 7. Currently the only help available is when placing the cursor over the MacGopher icon from the Finder.
3) Both a bookmark name and the search string for an Index-Search item can no longer be a null string. When acquiring this data, and the data is the null, the ok button is now disabled until something is entered.
4) The text window now gets redrawn if the file being retrieved is too big, and Cancel is selected in the dialog informing you the file is too big.
5) Fix a bug when opening a session file, via the Finder, which is stored in a location other than the program. The problem was a dialog informing you the file could not be opened because it was from an older version, even though it was not.
6) A dialog informing you of a MacTCP out of memory error is now brought up when the situation comes up. This is just a temporary fix telling you to quit MacGopher.
5) Some minor bug fixes and optimized a couple of routines.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b4 released August 10, 1992:
1) Modified the code to handle selector strings which are greater than 255 bytes. MacGopher can now handle up to 512 bytes for this string. Thank you Jari Perkiomaki for bringing this to my attention.
2) If a file being retrieved is too big, the dialog informing you of such now has a Cancel option. Selecting this option aborts any further reading of the incoming data.
3) When saving a Server Session, the location of the gopher and ph windows gets saved. Thus when you Load the saved server session, the respective windows will come up in the location in which they were saved.
4) The reply from a ph query will no longer corrupt memory should the reply be greater than 32K. If the reply is greater then 32K all data in excess of 32K will be discarded.
5) Did some more code compaction. This compaction will make the application smaller, but the Load and Save Session options will run a tad slower. This was done solely to keep the application as small as possible.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b3 released August 7, 1992:
1) Added the ability to write the information about gTelnet2.5 to the Preferences File instead of the resource fork of MacGopher. This should have been done in the previous release, but I forgot all about it. Sorry about that.
2) Fixed a bug that would sometimes disable a Window menu item, as well as lose some of the characters when creating a window from a bookmark.
3) Added the ability to determine what the search string was for a given Index-Search item. When retrieving data from an Index-Search item, the title of the pane contains the string in which the saerch was done on. You can also determine the string by reselecting the Index-Search item and looking at the string in the dialog asking you for the string. At this point just select Cancel, edit the string etc. Lets say you select an Index-Search item with the name "Search", and you then enter "string" as the string to have the search done on, the pane containing the data retrieved will have the title "Search <<string>>". Thank you Torsten Heyche for this idea.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b2 released August 3, 1992:
1) The "Make Bookmark ..." menu option now gets disabled if there is no Gopher window with an item that has been selected.
2) If an unknown item type has been selected and attempted to be retrieved, a meaningful message will now be displayed in the dialog instead of garbage.
3) Fixed a bug that would sometimes disable a bookmark menu item as well as lose some of the characters.
4) Fixed the bug that caused the program to crash when retrieving a directory with more the 255 items. Phew, am I glad to get that one fixed!
5) Changed the word "Server" to "Session" under the File menu for clarity reasons.
6) The Text Prefs can now be altered when no MacGopher window exists.
7) Fixed a bug in the handling of bookmarks.
8) Modified the Remove Bookmark dialog to adhere to the Macintosh interface guidlines. Ie. multiple selections, extended selections etc.
9) The default host and port, as well as all the bookmark information now gets written to a preferences file instead of the resource fork of MacGopher.
The preference file, which by default will have the name "MacGopher Preferences" will be placed in the "Preferences" folder if running System 7; otherwise, it will be placed in the "System Folder". If no "Preferences" folder exists, one will be created if you're running on System 7. If you rename the preferences file, no ill side effects will occurr; however, if there exits more than one preferences file for MacGopher, the first one encountered will be the file that gets used.
If you would like any of the default values, host, port, creator, or the name of the preferences file, to have different values you will need to go into ResEdit and change these values which exist in the MacGopher resource fork of type 'STR ' id of 256, 257, 258, respectivly. The preference file name has type 'STR#', has the id of 257 with the index of 11. You need not change any of these values for MacGopher to work correctly. These are the default values that are put into the preferences file. You can still change the default host and port from the Preferences menu while running MacGopher.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.5b1 released July 26, 1992:
1) Fixed the problem of having garbage displayed if there were no entries for a directory retrieved.
2) Fixed a bug that caused the computer to get in a hanged state.
3) Added the ability for command-period to abort the process of either creating a new pane in a Gopher window or retrieving a text item. The abortion will occurr at the most opportune time.
4) Changed the small icon for representing an error to the symbol of a bomb.
5) Added the ability to distinguish MIME, html, Image, and TN3270 items.
6) Removed the Transfer menu.
7) Added the use of bookmarks. Currently bookmarks only support directory, ph , telnet, and text items; furthermore, you are limited to a total of 16 bookmarks, and there can be no bookmarks with the same name.
8) Many routines were rewritten for code optimization, the ease of future implementations, as well as for supporting bookmarks.
9) Fixed a bug that caused the program to crash if the user hit the right arrow key, and there was no data in the right pane of a gopher window.
Currently information about the default host and port, as well as information about bookmarks, is being written to the resource fork of MacGopher. It is anticipated to write this information to a preferences file in the near future.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.4b15 released July 17, 1992:
1) Corrected a problem with Inspector window update when moving between various gopher windows.
2) Fixed a bug that crashed the machine when changing the default host and port via the Preferences menu "Gopher Prefs ..." option. Thank you Peter Kaufman for bringing this to my attention.
3) Enhanced Find so that all searches are now non-case-sensitive by default. The reason for this is to support the selection and highlighting of text when retrieving a document via an Index-Search item.
4) Fixed a problem with receiving a directory where unknown characters were displayed, usually in the first three lines. As far as I can tell this has now been corrected.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.4b14 released July 16, 1992:
1) Fixed a problem with the saving of server session information. In the past, if you saved the session file to somewhere other than the location of MacGopher, the version information would not be valid. If you attempted to open the session file, an error was displayed to indicate that the file could not be opened because it was from an older version of MacGopher.
2) Enhanced the saving of server sessions so that if you save a session when you have only one in progress, the name of the session window is the suggested name in the Save Session As... dialogue box. If you have more than one server session in progress, the suggested file name is "server.info".
3) Fixed "New Gopher ..." in the File menu so that it attempts to bring up a gopher window via the default host and port.
4) Fixed "Gopher Prefs ..." in the Preferences menu to allow changing information about the default host and port. ResEdit is no longer needed to make these changes.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.4b13 released July 15, 1992:
1) Corrected a condition where Temporary files created by MacGopher did not get deleted if MacGopher terminated before it could clean up. Temporary files are now deleted during program initialization and during termination.
2) Updated the Index-Search ability to adhere to the newer gopher protocol for index-search items.
3) Enhanced retrieval of documents via Index-Search. The window containing the text now has the selected word, entered for the Index-Search, highlighted and visible within the text window. You can now use command-g to find the next occurrence of the word as if you had entered it in the Find dialog.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES MacGopher version 0.4b12 released July 12, 1992:
1) Fixed the problem of losing the connection when attempting to acquire information from the server.
2) Fixed the occurrences of sound items being represented as ftp items when viewed via the item inspector.
3) Added an ╥Insufficient Memory╙ message which appears if the display string or selector string exceeds 127 characters.
4) Fixed a minor bug that if memory could not be acquired when building a new directory, the dialog informing you of such would be displayed twice.
5) Added the feature that if the option key is pressed when selecting OK in the Index-Search dialog, the information will be received as text and not a directory. This was implemented for debugging purposes.
6) Added updating of the gopher window after acquiring a Index-Search string from the user and prior to receiving the directory - done for cosmetic reasons only.
7) Added the ellipses to the "Open Gopher" menu item so the user will know this selection will bring up a dialog -- as per Inside Macintosh guidelines - an oversight on my part.
8) Did some code compaction to reduce the size of the application which in turn makes some processes faster.
9) Received permission from Apple Computer Corporation to use the name MacGopher.
10) Started making MacGopher system 7 compatible.
11) Added the ability to handle Telnet items. This is done in one of two ways depending on the version of the Macintosh operating system in use.
If you are using System 6.0.8 or older, you will be prompted for the name of a file to write to, told you must open this document via Telnet, and given the information on how to login.
If you are using System 7, you will need to acquire "gTelnet2.5" which is a version of NSCA/BYU Telnet that I have modified to support MacGopher. You will be told what to login as and have "gTelnet2.5╙ launched for you with an appropriately named window to the correct host. The modified version of Telnet can be acquired via anonymous ftp from ftp.cc.utah.edu in /pub/gopher/Macintosh as "gTelnet2.5.sit.hqx"; or via gopher from augusta.cc.utah.edu port 70 as "gTelnet2.5.sit.hqx".
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES Gopher version 0.4b9 released June 29, 1992:
1) Enhanced saved server session files so that the connection to the saved host and port is now made automatically instead of connecting to the default host and port.
2) Corrected a problem with ph queries that returned multiple entries with the entry separator sometimes in the wrong position.
3) Implemented the ability to handle search items.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES Gopher version 0.4b8 released June 5, 1992:
1) Fixed a bug in the debinhexing of a file whose data fork or resource fork was greater than 32K.
2) Corrected a message stating "Receiving Sound file ..." when actually retrieving an ftp file type.
3) Enhanced the cursor so that when saving a file that is too big to be displayed in the window, the beach ball cursor is now used.
4) Fixed the case where if the caps lock key was pressed when attempting a retrieval, this was interpreted as an option key press which retrieved the data as a text file.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES Gopher version 0.4b5 released May 19, 1992:
1) Added a rotating beach ball cursor to indicate a possible time-consuming processes.
2) Added support for retrieval of Macintosh BixHex files. Note: if a text file ends in ".hqx" a dialog appears asking you if the item should be retrieved as a binhex file.
3) Enhanced retrieval so that if the option key is held down during an attempt to open/retrieve an item, the data will be retrieved as a text item.
4) Fixed the error where Item type 9 was displayed as a sound file; it is now correctly displayed as an ftp item type.
5) Fixed a problem with starting up the MacTCP driver. If gopher was the first application to use the driver, a message was displayed informing the user that MacTCP was not installed correctly.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES Gopher version 0.4b4 released May 17, 1992:
1) Enhanced the cursor display so that if a file is too big to be displayed, the cursor now changes to the watch after the appropriate dialog is displayed.
2) Fixed the bug where, when saving a file too big to be displayed, the text that was displayed in the window was lost.
PROGRAM ENHANCEMENTS AND BUG FIXES Gopher version 0.4b3 released May 15, 1992:
1) Modified the code to keep the List Manager information and the Text under 32k.
2) Corrected a problem of losing a character near the end of the buffer while acquiring the reply from the PH server.
3) Changed the code so that a valid server.info file is now a file whose version is less than or equal to the program╒s version instead of requiring both versions be the same.
4) Corrected a problem that would not correctly re-size a pane that was being shifted into the gopher window. The problem arose when the pane was shifted out, the window re-sized, and then the pane shifted back into the gopher window.
5) Fixed a bug that would not erase text in the left pane that was originally from the right pane when a gopher window was re-sized to a larger size.
6) Fixed a bug that attempted to shift in a nonexistent pane on the left when a connection could not be made to a host whose information was contained in the left-most pane.
7) Fixed a bug that would not erase the right pane during a window re-size if there was no list for the pane.
8) Added hooks for future support of the Transfer menu option.
9) Corrected a problem of losing a character near the end of the buffer while acquiring the reply from the PH server.
10) Fixed a scrolling bug in the Ph window. If you scrolled the reply text and then made another query, the new reply text would not start out at the top of the window.
11) Made the window visible before acquiring text so you see the text coming in and get some feedback. Also closed the connection after receiving the text and prevented a screen redraw.
