The Master and the Slave communicate by sending each other special AppleEvents. These are handled by the OS and can be transmitted over the network, but they also work fine without a network. In either case a connection must be established between the Master and the Slave before they can exchange data. If there’s already a Master running on the same computer when you launch a Slave (and vice versa) they will connect automatically. For connections across the network you have to initiate the connection by selecting ‘Open Connection’/‘Remote…’ from the Master’s ‘Slave’ menu or by clicking the ‘Open…’ button in the Master’s ‘Slaves’ window. You will be presented with a standard program linking dialog box where you have to locate the target of the link.
Closing Connections
An open connection can be closed at any time. Select the connection from the list and click the ‘Close’ button (Master only) or select ‘Close Connection’ from the appropriate menu (both Master and Slave). The connection will also be closed when you quit one of the applications.
Launching Slaves
To make live easier for the ones of you which use MandelNet on a single Macintosh, the Master has the ability to launch Slaves himself. It can do it manually, by selecting ‘Open Connection’/‘Local’ from the ‘Slave’ menu, or automatically on startup, by enabling ‘Auto-Launch Slave’ in the Preferences. The Master remembers which Slaves it launched and quits them automatically when their connection is closed (usually when the Master quits). I recommend using Quiet Mode (see below) together with this feature because it’s less confusing.
Quiet Mode
The Slave can be set to ‘Quiet Mode’. This means that it will hide it’s status window and display no error messages while it’s in the background. It will also switch the Finder or the Master to the front immediately after it’s being launched, whichever is appropriate. This feature is especially useful in conjunction with the ‘Auto-Launch Slave’ feature or when you install the Slave in the Startup Items folder so that it will be launched on system startup.
