This is an application extension (‘appe’) which does almost nothing but idle until it is quit, which usually only happens when you Restart or Shutdown your Macintosh. At this time, AppletalkOn will examine the current state of Appletalk and turn it on. It will also save the state of AppleTalk and optionally restore that state when you boot up next time.
The reason this extension is necessary is that, starting with System 7 TuneUp, AppleTalk does not load into memory if it is off at startup time. This requires you to turn AppleTalk on and then restart. This is annoying at best, and thus was born AppleTalkOn.
AppleTalkOn currently occupies 20K or RAM while it runs. I have done some testing and 20K is about as low as I can get it. It runs from start to restart and does not appear in the process menu or lists of running applications.
AppleTalkOn can optionally keep the state of AppleTalk across restarts by noting if AppleTalk is on when it quits and turning it back off when it starts. It is configured to do this initially. In this way, AppleTalkOn will simply keep AppleTalk in memory and leave the state alone. If you turn it off it stays off, but it also stays in memory so that you can always turn it back on when you need it. You can customize this behavior by setting a bit in ResEdit. There is a LAYO resource in AppleTalkOn that contains two bits. One tells AppleTalk to save the state and another tells what the state last was. Turn the save state button off if you wish AppleTalk to always be turned back on at restart.
There are a couple of problems I see with this program. First, if you leave File Sharing on, it will start up when AppleTalkOn quits, delaying the restart until File Sharing finishes starting up. This sucks, but I don’t see a clean way around it. You may think that you are hung or stuck, but you’re not. Just wait. Second, the only way to startup with AppleTalk unloaded is to restart and hold down the shift key until the menu bar appears. You can then turn AppleTalk off and restart with all your extensions. If you are cool then you can quit AppleTalkOn and then turn off AppleTalk before restarting. You can quit AppleTalkOn with the Hypercard command “close AppleTalkOn” or a variety of other utility programs that can see all active processes and send Quit AppleEvents to them.
AppleTalkOn is “WhatIt’sWorthWare”. If this saves you annoyance and pain, feel free to send me $5 or more (as if!).
Jon Pugh
20525 Mariani Ave. MS 37-AS
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 862-7094
jpugh@apple.com
Applelink: JONPUGH
Check out my ToggleAT FKEY which allows you to turn AppleTalk on and off with merely a keystroke. Available at fine archives near you and on ftp.apple.com in /pub/pugh/toggleat.cpt.hqx.
