Folks:

Cello Beta Version .8 is hereby released.  You can obtain it 
from ftp.law.cornell.edu, directory /pub/LII/Cello.

A note on the version numbers; Distinct version discontinued
------------------------------------------------------------
Beta version r8 is the successor to Winsock version r6, and to 
the Distinct version beta 7.  There will be no continuation of 
the Distinct version;  Cello is now exclusively Winsock-based.
The files and messages on ftp.law.cornell.edu have been 
appropriately adjusted.

PLEASE NOTE that documentation in the online help system still 
incorporates the installation instructions for the Distinct 
version, a  problem which will be attacked next (this is 
getting us a lot of mail).

What it is:
-----------
Cello is a multipurpose Internet browser which permits you to 
access information from many sources in many formats.  
Technically, it's a WorldWideWeb client application.  This 
means that you can use Cello to access data from WorldWideWeb, 
Gopher, FTP, and CSO/ph/qi servers, as well as X.500 directory 
servers, WAIS servers, HYTELNET, TechInfo, and others through external 
gateways.  You can also use Cello and the WWW-HTML hypertext 
markup standard to build local hypertext systems on LANS, on 
single machines, and so on.  Cello also permits the 
postprocessing of any file for which you've set up an 
association in the Windows File Manager -- for example, if you 
download an uncompressed Microsoft Word file from an FTP site, 
and the appropriate association exists in File Manager, Cello 
will run MS-Word on it for you.  This same capability is used 
to view graphics and listen to sound files you get from the Net.

Repaired in this release:
------------------------

-- FTP timeouts adjusted to reflect reality for those on slow 
links.

-- Lagging-dot in DNS names is now removed by Cello, and won't 
interfere with those Winsocks which don't understand it.

-- Several very minor bugs involving display.

Not yet repaired/enhanced:
--------------------------

--Numerous user-requested enhancements to FTP handling, including 
non-anonymous login and the ability to get short ("ls" not 
"ls -l") listings for servers whose long listings don't make 
sense.

--Printing bugs.  In particular, inlined images don't print 
yet.  Some minor bugs with font sizes and whatnot were repaired 
in the current release, but the whole thing needs a good 
going-over.


Added/enhanced in this version:
------------------------------

-- Inline image support.

 Cello supports inlining of .GIF, .XBM (X bitmap), .BMP, and 
.PCX images.  The latter should be particularly useful to 
information providers who wish to serve local files only or who 
have a PC-based graphics library.  Autofetching of graphics can 
be turned off by menu choice, and dithering may be substituted 
for quantizing in the case of 24-bit images, which ought to 
speed up rendition quite a bit.

There are still a few glitches having to do with color.  Cello 
resolves palette differences between images by loading a 
scaled, representative 256-color palette and essentially 
insisting that everyone adhere to it.  Most of the time this 
provides fairly accurate color rendition, but experimentation 
shows that some shades don't do well.  The subtle oranges used 
in some of the O'Reilly GNN icons seem to suffer badly, for 
instance.  The future alternative to this scheme will be to 
mutually-resolve all images onscreen at any particular moment, 
but that won't be in place for a couple of weeks yet, and is 
likely to slow performance in any case.  Art-book publishers 
will probably want to wait.

-- DDE server support.

You can invoke Cello from other applications which support the 
DDE execute command.  Here's how you'd do it with an MS-Word 
macro:

Sub MAIN
ChanNum = DDEInitiate("Cello", "URL")
DDEExecute(ChanNum, "http://www.law.cornell.edu")
DDETerminate(ChanNum)
End Sub

As you can see, the DDE service name is "Cello", the topic is 
"URL", and the data sent in the execute command is a URL.

Needless (perhaps) to say, OLE support and DDE client support 
are planned in the near future.

-- TN3270 via external application.

Cello now supports TN3270 via an external application, a 
feature which was prompted by the appearance of a 
freely-distributed TN3270 for Windows (see 
comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc for announcements and location).  
Cello expects the same #h and #p parameters used in the 
"Use your own Telnet client" menu choice.


-- Locatable style and bookmark files

 By popular request of long-suffering network administrators, 
there are now options in the CELLO.INI file to set the location 
for style and bookmark files.  These are also menu-accessible.
Examples:

BookmarkFile=c:\somedir\cello.bmk
StyleFile=c:\another\dir\cello.sty


-- Bookmark-dump-to-file feature.

There is now a button in the Bookmark dialog which will dump 
your entire bookmark list to an HTML file for subsequent 
editing into whatever you like, possibly an alternate home page.


Coming attractions:
------------------

The sheer volume of user mail has convinced me that it's 
probably time to have an online help system which reflects some 
small corner of reality (grin).  Documentation will be fixed 
before anything else.

OLE, FTP enhancements, and DDE client features will follow.

Have fun with it.

Tb.