3. [When] will application X (eg Eudora/Fetch/????) support Internet Config?
4. You have spellt "Organization" incorrectly?
5. Can Internet Config be used in laboratory/shared situations?
6. My wife/coworker/dad/axolotl and I share my Mac? How do I configure IC?
7. Why doesn╒t IC support lab situations better?
8. How do I find out about programming Internet Config?
9. Why does Internet Config install an extension?
10. I often change which hard disk I boot off. How can I keep only one set of IC prefs?
11. Why can╒t I specify a preferences file when I specify my helper applications?
12. Why can╒t I enter the type and creator directly?
666. Why is this FAQ entry so short?
Quinn 6 Dec 1994
1. Which applications are "IC Aware"?
Currently the list is:
o NewsWatcher 2.0b21 and higher
o Register 1.1 and higher
o NotifyMail 2.5 and higher
o BlitzMail 2.0.2 and higher
o MacGzip 0.2.2 and higher
o FTPd 2.4.0 and higher
o ICeTEe
o Internet Config Access
o Mpack 1.5 and higher
o BBEdit 3.1.1 and higher
o NewsHopper 1.1 and higher
o Anarchie 1.5.0 and higher
o NCSA Telnet 2.6.1d7 and higher
o Black Night 0.1.4 and higher (also currently in late beta)
Quinn 28 Apr 1995
2. Which developers have committed to support IC?
The following developers have committed to supporting IC in some future release of their products:
o Intercon Systems (TCP/Connect II)
o Peter N Lewis (any future programs where it is relevant)
o Aladdin Systems Inc (StuffIt family)
o Eric M Kidd (Type Fixer)
o Mark Smith (University of Michigan X.500 Directory Project)
o Aaron Giles (uuUndo)
o Jim Matthews (Blitzmail)
o Peter DiCamillo (Brown University╒s tn3270)
See also FAQ 1 for a list of applications that currently support IC.
Quinn 6 Dec 1994
3. [When] will application X (eg Eudora/Fetch/????) support Internet Config?
We have no control over any other application vendors. If you would like your favourite application to support IC then I suggest you lobby your application vendor directly. Please don╒t mail us. If the application vendor happens to be Peter Lewis then don't bother, he is well aware of the usefulness of IC and will support it as soon as reasonably possible.
Quinn 5 Dec 1994
4. You have spellt ╥Organization╙ incorrectly?
Internet Config was written by Australians and is localised for Australia. [If you don╒t believe us then check out the 'vers' 1 resource.] Thus it uses the Australian spelling for ╥organisation╙.
Chris Newman <chrisn+@CMU.EDU> has graciously volunteered to localise IC for the US. His versions are available from:
ftp.andrew.cmu.edu:/pub/Mac/Internet-config/
And while on the subject of localisation, Jean-Pierre Kuypers <Kuypers@sri.ucl.ac.be> has localised IC for French. His versions are available from:
ftp://ftp.sri.ucl.ac.be//pub/InternetConfig/
Thanks to all our localisers.
Quinn 30 Jan 1995
5. Can Internet Config be used in laboratory/shared situations?
The Internet Config system is suitable for use in situations where Macs are shared by multiple users. It offers two mechanisms to support this. The first is centred around the mechanism used to locate a preference file. When an application is launched using a preference file then it should provide the folder that contains that preference file to Internet Config (using the ICFindConfigFile call) so that IC can look for a shared preference file in that folder. IC will follow aliases to the preference file so that this solution scales for multiple applications. The initial IC Aware release of NewsWatcher demonstrated this ability to good effect.
In addition applications call the Internet Config extension through a patchable Application Program Interface (API). So an enterprising third party can write a replacement for the current Internet Config extension that gets preference data from a shared database. The Internet Config RandomSignature extension is a demonstration of the technology used to do this.
See FAQ 6 for an example of how to set up IC on a shared Mac.
Quinn 4 Dec 1994
6. My wife/coworker/dad/axolotl and I share my Mac? How do I configure IC?
Internet Config╒s support for Macs in shared or laboratory environments is discussed in FAQ 5. This purpose of this text is to give specific advice.
At the moment when you use a shared Mac you use NewsWatcher by having two separate preference files and each user launches the appropriate preference file to read news. NewsWatcher reads its preferences from the file you launched, not from the file in the preferences folder.
Internet Config builds on top of this scheme. You simply place an alias to your Internet Preferences file in the same folder as your NewsWatcher preferences file. When other applications support IC they should use the same technique.
So let╒s take a look at a hypothetical Macintosh with two users, Fred and Sheila, running Eudoraá and NewsWatcher. In Fred╒s folder there is a Eudora Folder which contains a Eudora Settings file and a News folder which contains their NewsWatcher Preferences file. Fred launches these when they want to read mail and news respectively. Sheila╒s folder contains a similar setup.
Fred and Sheila get together and install Internet Config. They do this by creating two different Internet Preferences files (the Interent Config application lets you open, edit and close preference files just like normal documents) and putting them in their respective user folders. Sheila then puts an alias to her Internet Preferences file into her Eudora Folder and another alias into her News folder. Fred does likewise.
Now when Sheila launches NewsWatcher, by double clicking her NewsWatcher Preferences file, NewsWatcher will tell IC to get shared preferences from the Internet Preferences file whose alias is in Sheila╒s News folder. And Eudora will work similarly.
á Please note that Eudora is used as an example in this discussion. Eudora does not yet support IC and it╒s author has made no commitment to do so.
Quinn 6 Dec 1994
7. Why doesn╒t IC support lab situations better?
Let me explain some of the rationale behind the design of IC. The most important thing, about IC is that although it took a lot of time and energy to write, it╒s not a success until even more people put in even more time and energy into adopting it. So one of the primary marketting targets for IC was application developers. We just assumed that the users would like it.
So what do application developers like? In a word, simplicity. Things that are easy to understand are more likely to get adopted. So we tried to keep IC as simple as possible while still not losing any critical funcionality.
There were two major features that were candidates for inclusion but which eventually got left out. The first was the concept of application specific preferences. Some users will obviously want a different signature in news and mail. We left this feature out because it would have complicated the implementation of the IC application too much. But we did leave ourselves an escape hatch. All applications identify themselves to IC by their creator type (eg 'Arch' for Anarchie) and thus it is possible to write an alternate IC extension that does this.
The second major feature which we left out was the ability to mark preferences are either ╘user╒ and ╘system╒ preferences. We left this out for much the same reasons as given above. And again, we left ourselves an escape hatch. Preferences can be marked read-only, in which case applications should not allow the user to edit them or attempt to write them back. So a lab oriented IC extension could mark system preferences as read-only (which would prevent the vast bulk of applications modifying them) and user preferences as read-write. It would then have to provide an alternative mechanism to allow modification of system preferences.
There was some debate on the mailing list about extending the IC API to provide a flag on the ICSetPref call that marks whether the setting should be stored ╘locally╒ or ╘globally╒. The primary problem with this was that by choosing a meaning for ╘local╒ and ╘global╒ we would have restricted ourselves to one of the two major features discussed above. We decided that the best solution was to leave this problem for the future but do our best to make it easy to implement.
So, in conclusion, let me reiterate that the primary goal of this version of IC was simplicity for the programmer. Judging by the responses we╒ve got from the first developers to adopt the system, we have been successful. And in the final analysis if lab managers are to gain any benefit from IC, it must first be adopted by a wide variety of developers.
Quinn 6 Dec 1994
8. How do I find out about programming Internet Config?
The Internet Config Programmer's Kit is available from...
ftp://ftp.share.com/internet-configuration/
ftp://redback.cs.uwa.edu.au//Others/Quinn/Config/
This holds all the information you need to develop for Internet Config in Pascal or C using any of the common development environments (Metrowerks, Think and MPW). The kit also contains the source code to the Internet Config Extension.
The same sites also contain the Internet Config Application Source Kit, which contains the source code to the Internet Config application (in Think Pascal).
Quinn 7 Dec 1994
9. Why does Internet Config install an extension?
Internet Config installs an extension which acts as a shared library. This extension provides an Application Program Interface (API) to the Internet preferences database. It is vitally important that applications access this database through the API and this text will explain why.
Firstly the API provides reliability and robustness. If IC was implemented merely through a shared preference file then each application developer would have to write their own code to access this data. Not only is this more work for the individual developers, it also increases the likelihood of an error that causes preference corruption.
To get around this we could have shipped IC as a statically linked library that each developer links into their application. The disadvantage of this is that if that library has bugs then it╒s statically linked into lots of old versions of applications that are never updated. [A classic example of this sort of problem is the original MacTCP DNR library, which looks for DNR data in the System Folder. Unfortunately with the advent of System 7 the DNR data moved into the Controls Panel folder. To get MacTCP working with System 7 Apple were forced to create a MacTCP DNR file in the System Folder anyway, just to support those old applications.]
So the IC API had to be in the form of a shared library. Unfortunately the Mac does not provide any suitable mechanism for providing shared library so we chose to implement it using a component. [The Component Manager originated with QuickTime and was rolled into the system with System 7.1. Virtually all Macs have the Component Manager or can get it easily.] So the API╒s statically linked glue calls the component if it╒s install but otherwise accesses the IC Preferences file directly. This provides the best of both worlds: the code works on old machines and without the extension but it can be patched by simply dropping a new version into the Extensions folder.
Finally the IC API gives a huge amount of flexibility for future extension. Imagine you want your preferences to be stored on a per-application basis, or you want your preferences fetched from a central network database on a per-user basis, or you want your signature to change every Friday the 13th. Well you can patch the existing Internet Config extension (or write a complete drop-in replacement) that provides this functionality and, as long as it provides a backwardly compatible API, none of the IC Aware applications have to be changed.
An example of the cool technology that API provides is the Internet Config RandomSignature extension provided in the Programmer╒s Kit. While this is only a technology demonstration it shows how the API can be patched to provide all sorts of cool things that the original designers did not anticipate.
The IC component patches no traps and does no strange things. It should not suffer from extension conflicts.
Quinn 7 Dec 1994
10. I often change which hard disk I boot off. How can I keep only one set of IC prefs?
Internet Config resolves aliases to preference file. Put the real Internet Preferences file in one of your Preferences folders and an alias to it in the other.
Quinn 6 Dec 1994
11. Why can╒t I specify a preferences file when I specify my helper applications?
The short answer to this is ╥Because double clickable preferences documents are a kludge and this restriction is an artifact of their kludginess.╙
The long answer is that IC targets applications (when doing things like sending GURL events to process URLs) based on their creator code. This is a three step process. First we find it in the desktop database, then we launch it, then we send it a GURL event. The two steps are skipped if the application is already running.
If we╒d allowed you to specify a preferences file then we would have had to send the application two events, first the open document event (to open the preferences), then the GURL event. This is OK when the application is not running but what if it is running? Do we send the open document event, which may or may not cause the application to switch to that user╒s settings [Eudora does but NewsWatcher doesn╒t], and then the GURL event, or do we just send the GURL event and hope. The answer to this problem was to avoid the issue altogether by only allowing you to target applications.
The workaround is to launch the application using its preference file before you use it via command clicking.
Quinn 4 Apr 1995
12. Why can╒t I enter the type and creator directly?
Lots of people complain about not being able to enter type and creator directly into the Add Map Entry dialog. Well you can, it╒s just a little tricky. If you hold down the option key, the ╥Choose Example╙ button changes into an ╥Edit Type and Creator╙ button. Click on that and you will be able to edit the type and creator directly.
Quinn 28 Apr 1995
666. Why is this FAQ entry so short?
Because every time I create a new entry I copy and paste this entry.
