Note: most of the information in this file can also be found in Chatter's on line help.
About Chatter
Chatter is a program that allows more or less real time text message communication with other computers that are running Chatter and are connected to an AppleTalk network. It can support up to 4 connections at once, and does not require program linking to be turned on.
At the user’s request, it can install an extension, Chatter Listener, in the System Folder so that the user can be notified of connection requests when Chatter isn’t running.
Network impact statement:
Chatter is very network friendly. It only sends broadcasts when searching for other Chatter users. Packets are sent when the user hits return, presses send, or selects a new icon during a conversation. The icon data it transmits is only about 2 kilobytes ( this translates to be about 5 or 6 AppleTalk packets, which is fairly trivial. )
Quality Assurance:
It has been tested on Macintoshes ranging from a Mac Classic to a Powermac 8100/80, and ran fine on AppleTalk, EtherTalk, and FDDITalk networks. It has been tested on both local and wide area networks ( wide here means from the East Coast of the United States to England ). Chatter does require System 7 or later.
Chatter is essentially free. It may be uploaded to BBSes, copied and passed around as much as you like, but with the following three restrictions:
1) Keep the ReadMe, Version History and Dangercon files with Chatter.
2) Any person or organization that plans to redistribute it commercially ( say, on disks of shareware ) must obtain my permission before doing so.
3) If you like it, send me a postcard or an email message telling me how you’re using it. Programmers love to get feedback about their code ( yes, even negative feedback ) because it tells them that someone out has looked at what they’ve written. If you really like it send me a disk with something on it (fonts, source code, other shareware, pictures, etc. ) I’d like to hear from you if you have suggestions or bug reports. If you do have a bug report, please include your system software version, extensions/control panels being used, hardware configuration, and how to create the bug.
Send bug reports, feature requests, comments and fan mail ;^) to:
Alex Doyle
Caffeine Productions
68 Sutton Road
Newbury, NH, USA, 03255
Internet: doyle@ctron.com (Note: this email address is not guaranteed to be up to date)
Using Chatter
Most of the following is ( if I designed Chatter correctly ) obvious, but the less-than-obvious features of Chatter are documented in here too so you’ll find out some neat stuff.
Connecting to other Chatter users.
1) Select the network zone by using the Zone popup menu. This menu will be disabled and say ‘None’ if you are on a network with no zones.
2) Select a Chatter user to connect to by selecting from the Users popup menu. If there are no Chatter users in the network zone you have selected, the Users menu will display found: 0 and will be disabled. Otherwise it will display the number of Chatter users that were found in that zone and the menu will be active. Once you select a user, the Connect button will become active and the found: menu selection will gray out.
3) To look for more users in the current zone, press the Search button. This makes Chatter update its list of zones and its list of users in the current zone. Use this if you can't find a user you believe should be on the network. If they do not appear after a few presses, that user is probably not on the network.
4) Once you have selected a user to talk to, press the Connect button. The mouse cursor will change, and the Connection Status (see below ) will be Opening. When you have an open connection the Zone and Users menus will gray out with the name and zone of the Chatter user you connected to, the mouse cursor will be an arrow again, the Connection Status will be Open, and a message will be displayed in the top text box that says: “Connection established with <username> in zone <zone name> at <time>”. The Search button will now say Disconnect, and the Send, Hold and Idle buttons will be active.
5) You can now send messages by typing text in the lower text box. When you press the Send button or the return key, everything you've typed since the last time you sent a message will be sent. When the Send button pops back up, then all data has been sent. Unless you are sending large amounts of text, you shouldn’t notice any delay while data is being sent.
The other user's messages will appear in the top box.
6) The Idle button will tell you the amount of time the other user’s Macintosh has been idle. This is particularly handy if the person you are connected to hasn’t sent anything in a while. By examining the idle time you can determine if they’ve been called away, or if they’re just typing a lengthy reply. If the idle time has been longer than 3 minutes, it replies with “Over 3 minutes”.
If you hold down the Option key, Idle becomes Query. In addition to the idle time, Option-clicking on the Query button will give you the remote computer’s owner and machine names, the name they are using for Chatter (see the Options Menu for how to set this ), and the time it took for the reply to your request. The latter is reported in seconds and 60ths of seconds, since replies will come back pretty quickly unless the network is slow or the remote Macintosh is really busy.
7) If someone interrupts you while you are typing, you can use the Hold button to send a preset message to the other user.
8) To terminate the connection, press the Disconnect button. The Query and Send buttons will become inactive, Disconnect will become Search, and the Zone and User pop up menus will become active after Chatter is done searching for any new users in the current zone. You will also receive the message “Connection closed at <time> --End of Line--” in the top text box.
Connection information:
This section details information about the state of your Chatter connection. In the lower left corner of the window, the following text is printed: Connection Status: Closed. The Closed will change to Opening and then Open when you connect to another user.
If the Show All Connection Info checkbox in the General Preferences dialog box is checked, you will see the following:
Connection Status. This is appended by one of the following:
Open. A two way connection has been established
and data can be sent.
Closed. Nobody has been connected to, and there
is no point in sending data.
Opening. Chatter is in the process of connecting
to another user.
Closing. Chatter is in the process of disconnecting
from another user.
Local Socket. The network socket number that this
Chatter connection is using on this
Macintosh.
Remote Socket: Net, node, socket.
Net. The numerical value of the Appletalk zone
your other party is in.
Node. The numerical value of the remote user's
Macintosh network identity.
Socket. The network socket that Chatter has
connected to on the remote Macintosh.
Features:
•New Window ( Command- N, or New Window under the options menu) produces another Chatter window with it's own independent connection. You can carry on conversations with up to 4 people by creating new Chatter windows and connecting to different users.
•Cut and paste are supported. Text can be cut or copied out of either text box, but can only be pasted into the lower text box, as there is no point in being able to paste text into the other user’s messages.
•The opening of a connection can be canceled by pressing command-period.
• If you want to search all zones for Chatter users, hold down the option key and press Search, which will now be Search All. Names of zones and Chatter users found in those zones will appear in the top text box. To cancel the search, press and hold the command and period keys until you see a dialog box that says “Action cancelled by user “.
•If you want to see all AppleTalk entities in the currently selected zone, command-click the Search button and a list will appear. It will list up to 400 entities. If anybody has more than that, let me know and I can increase it in the next release.
•If, for some reason, you want to see all AppleTalk entities everywhere on your network, hold down command and option and press the Search button. Note that this might exceed the amout of text that Chatter will hold in a window (16K) , so the beginning of it may not be around by the time you reach the end. This feature isn’t particularily useful, but was easy to sneak in, and I think is kinda cool.
•You can send icons to the person you are conversing with by selecting them from the icon popup menu in the lower right hand corner. To select an icon file that is different from the one currently being used, use Use Icon File... under the File menu. For more information on icon files, see the Icons help topic.
Warning ! Do not terminate Chatter except by using the Quit command. Most users won't have a reason to terminate it any other way. But if you, say, shoot it down with MacsBug, it won't be able to remove itself from the network interface gracefully, as it does when Quit is used . Thus the operating system will think Chatter is still active and will write any data for Chatter to a random location in memory with the usual detrimental results. If you do shoot down Chatter, save everything and restart.
The Options Menu
Preferences...:
This selection brings up the Preferences dialog box. The first time you run Chatter, a set of default settings are provided. See the Preferences selection in the Topics menu for more information.
Answer Messages:
Chatter can also function as an answering machine. If you select Answer Messages , answering mode will be turned on.
All of the buttons will be grayed out, and the popup menus will be Answering and Mode. The message “Answering mode ON” will appear in the top text box.. Any existing Chatter connections will be closed, though if this is the case, you will be asked if you want to continue.
Now any user that connects to you will automatically be sent your answering mode message ( see Set Message... below for how to set it ). Any messages they leave can be read out of the top text box. Note that if more than one user attempts to leave a message at the same time, there will be more than one Chatter window with messages in it.
To turn off Answering Mode, just select Answering Mode from the Options menu again and uncheck it. Note that this will also close any existing connections.
New Window:
This will create a new Chatter window that will support it’s own connection. You can have up to 4 windows at one time.
Icons
Chatter allows you to send icons during a conversation. I felt this adds a little more depth to conversing over a network. A popup menu of 30 icons is in the lower right hand corner of each window. These icons are read from the Chatter Icons file in the Chatter Preferences folder in your System Folder. The reason these icons are external is that I figured you might want to add your own icons, or might want to be able to access different sets of icons. ( I know I would !).
Creating an icon file:
Probably the easiest way to do this is just to rename the Chatter Icons file something else, and edit it with a resource editor like ResEdit. Chatter will create a new Chatter Icons file when it can’t find the old one.
When editing the resource file, keep the following in mind:
1) Chatter is hard coded to look for resource IDs between 600 and 629. This is something I’ll try to make more flexible in the future, if there is a demand for it.
2) The resource types have to be ‘icl8’, ‘icl4’, and ‘ICN#’, as Chatter uses them to draw the icon in 256 colors, 16 colors, and black & white, respectively. If the file just consists of ‘icl8’ resources, anybody using a 16 color or black and white monitor will see nothing.
3) I reccomend solid masks for the icons, as this makes them hilight better when they are selected from the popup menu.
Once you have created another icon file, you can use:
Use Icon File...
under the File menu to use it.
About Chatter Listener
Chatter Listener is a faceless background application that monitors incoming Chatter connection requests. From a user’s standpoint, its behavior is exactly the same as an Extension’s
To use it, select Preferences... under the Options menu. Then select Listener from the popup menu, and press the Install listener button. Chatter will then install Chatter Listener in your extensions folder. It will be run when your Macintosh starts up, and when Chatter quits , provided that Don’t launch Chatter Listener is unchecked in the Preferences dialog box . If Don’t launch Chatter Listener is checked, the Listener will never run.
The Chatter Listener tells the network that this Macintosh will respond to Chatter requests, and waits around for a request to come in. When this happens, it reads the Chatter Preferences file to find Chatter, launches Chatter and quits. If Chatter cannot be launched, it returns an error to the user that attempted to connect. When you quit Chatter, Chatter relaunches the Listener.
Thus you don’t have to keep Chatter running all the time for it to be useful.
A few caveats:
Rather than scan the whole hard drive for a copy of Chatter to launch, Chatter Listener gets the location out of the Chatter Preferences file. Every time Chatter is run, it records it’s whereabouts in the Chatter Preferences file so that it can be found immediately. Chatter Listener then looks for a program named Chatter at the specified location. If the Chatter program is named anything _but_ Chatter ( like: chatter, Chatter copy, Chatter with a space after it, etc. ) the Listener will become confused. Chatter Listener must also be named Chatter Listener for Chatter to find it. I’m working on making this more robust. If you have multiple copies of Chatter around, the copy that gets launched is the last one run, since it was the last to update it’s location.
Preferences
The following buttons have the same behavior regardless of the topic that is currently selected:
The Cancel button will discard all changes that you made since opening the Preferences window.
The Save button will save all changes that you have made.
The Use Defaults button will set the default preferences for the currently selected topic.
The Preferences popup menu allows you to select from several topics, described below:
General:
Your Chatter Network Name: This is the name Chatter will use when presenting itself to other Chatter users on the network. If the name is not unique, Chatter will inform you and use the name of your Macintosh. If you change your network name, you must quit and restart Chatter for the changes to take effect.
Show All Connection Info: If this box is checked, the source and destination AppleTalk sockets are displayed at the bottom of the window, in addition to the state of the connection. If it is not checked, only the connection state ( Open, Closed, Opening, etc. is displayed ).
When in background, beep: These radio buttons allow you to configure when Chatter will play the system beep to get your attention if something has happened while Chatter is in the background. The settings have the following effects:
Always. Chatter beeps when a new connection is created, or if it’s in the background and new data has been received.
Only On Connections. Chatter will beep only when a new connection has been established.
Never. Chatter will never beep unless an error of some sort has occurred.
In addition to beeping (or not ), Chatter will put a blinking icon in the system Applications menu if something you should be aware of has happened while Chatter is in the background.
Search:
Search for other Chatter users:
This is the number of seconds Chatter will spend searching for other Chatter users. On fast networks, this value can be 1 second. It can be set higher for slower networks.
Hold:
The message that gets sent when the Hold button is pressed can be stored here. It cannot be longer than 255 characters.
Shrink Windows During Hold:
This will collapse the window so that only a Resume button is showing. This is handy if you don’t want people reading over your shoulder.
Listener:
Don’t launch Chatter Listener
If checkmarked, the Chatter Listener will not be launched when Chatter quits. See Chatter Listener in the Topics: popup menu below for more information.
Install Listener
This will install the Chatter Listener in your extensions folder. See Chatter Listener in the Topics: popup menu below for more information.
Answering Mode:
The message that is sent to connecting users when Chatter is in Answering Mode is stored here.
Creating your own icon files.
One of the programs that prompted me to write Chatter had the feature of sending icons along with a message. This added a lot to a conversation, but had several disadvantages:
1) The icons were only in black and white
2) You could only choose from 12 icons.
3) You couldn’t add your own icons. (well, you could, if you cracked it open with a resource editor and modified what was there, but that is a bad thing to do while the program is running. )
To extend this ability, I’ve introduced support for icon files. You can choose a resource file to read ICN# resources out of. I supply one with Chatter, but feel free to make up your own. For Chatter to use an icon file, the following restrictions apply:
1) No more than 30 icons in a file ( well, you can have more, but they won’t be displayed. )
2) The icons must be of the ICN# , icl4 and icl8 type. Chatter uses these for drawing in black and white and color, respectively. A background mask should be supplied as well.
3) The resource numbers should run from 600 to 629.
4) You can put the file anywhere and specify it by using the Use Icon File... menu option, but Chatter will first look for a file called Chatter Icons in the Chatter Preferences folder in the Preferences folder.
