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.
