* NOTE: When running under System 7.5 and MacOS 8 the Standard Put File dialog used in the "Save As..." commands does not by default get set to the home folder of a document, but instead is set to the most recently opened folder. If you want to get the correct folder, you need to open the "General Controls" Control Panel and select (under the heading "Documents: When opening or saving a document, take me to...") "Folder which is set by the application"; this setting will allow dataComet to set the folder correctly before displaying the Standard File dialog.
* Printing on a LaserWriter may not space correctly if the 9 pt. font is included in the System Fonts Folder.
* dataComet 4.5.1 offers a simplified registration procedure. Registered users will now receive via plaintext email a registration code which sets the registration when it is selected and the menu command Shift-"About dataComet..." is executed. The previous method of registering using a dataComet document still works; the new method will make it easier for users to receive registrations when they receive email on a host rather than downloaded to their Macintosh.
* A session timer is now displayed next to the packet counters. The display of the timer is controlled in the "Control Controls..." dialog.
* A "National" submenu has been added to the "Control" menu to set National Replacement Character sets (this does not yet apply to IBM 3270 emulators).
* The "Find..." dialog now reverses the search or replace direction when the shift key is pressed.
* An 8-point font has been added to the "Comet ISO-Latin-1" font family to make it possible to display 132-column screens on smaller monitors. A native Macintosh version of this font has also been added ("Comet Mona").
Bug fixes:
* The error message "Application predates configuration version" has been removed, since it makes reversion to an earlier version a hassle.
* Control-Clicking on the menu bar to get help on a menu item no longer brings up
"Shortcuts" before user can get to the menu. (This worked, but the Control key had to be pressed after clicking on the menu bar.)
* Native MacTCP sessions can now be reopened after they have been closed from the host end of the connection (as opposed to a "Close session" command). (This bug was not present under OT/MacTCP.)
* Macros generated using the Record Macro feature now work correctly when used with an IBM 3270 host. This bug was introduced when 3270 translation tables were added.
* The "Control" submenu "Bold Font" option "Use Normal Font" is now saved correctly in the window's font configuration.
* The "Replace All" command in the "Find..." dialog now quits reliably after one time around the text in an edit window.
* Selections in the emulator window which start on the bottom line and include the last character are now inverted properly; previously the selection was copied properly, but the selection was not displayed if the screen was scrolled so only the first line appeared. Also, selections made downward from the far right column of a screen row now add a Carriage Return as the first character when a "Copy" command is executed.
* The emulator cursor is now updated promptly when the emulator screen is not the frontmost screen, so you don't have to bring the screen up to see the current location of the cursor. The cursor blink is now synchronized with emulator blink field blinking.
* Closing an unsaved "Untitled" window no longer changes the window position and font/size settings of the "Comet Default" document, so new windows no longer inherit these changes.
* The "Bold Font" submenu now allows you to select "None" as an option to avoid bolding, which may draw relatively slowly if a standard Macintosh font is selected.
* The VT100 emulators now map the MacOS 8 "VT100" font graphics character symbols automatically when this font is selected without using a Comet font.
* A "CharcoalMenus" resource file has been added so that menu items line up properly under MacOS 8.
Bug fixes:
* Prior to opening the Mac standard Select Color dialog the amount of memory available is tested to avoid crashes due to out-of-memory conditions.
* When using MacTCP new host data was sometimes written to the screen when a window was scrolled. The scroll alert should now always alert you to scroll to the end of the buffer prior to screen updates, which should only occur after you have scrolled to the end.
* Page sizes should now be correctly initialized when using VT100 print streams with QuickDraw printing, correcting a bug which printed pages with only one line of text. In addition, selecting an alternate print font should work correctly under all circumstances (formerly Courier was being substituted for the selected font in many cases). The serial print Top margin item in the "Control Printing..." dialog is now updated and saved correctly when it is modified.
* The cursor is now reset to an arrow when it's moved off the left hand side of the emulator screen, correcting a bug in which it was left as a text selection cursor if "Show cursor-buttons on the left side" was not selected in the "Control Controls..." dialog.
* A separate font translation configuration setting is now saved so that transitions from TN3270 to VT100 sessions will no longer produce junk screens caused by inapplicable translation table settings.
* Resources in the "Fonts" folder are now left in the beginning of the resource chain so that international menu and dialog resources can be dropped in the Fonts folder rather than embedded in the application for maximum flexibility.
* X/Y/Z-Modem file transfers are now supported, with BinHex and MacBinary file conversion and automatic launching of downloaded files using Internet Config File Mappings. Macros have been added to support Z-Modem file transfer: '!fFfoldername' to set the download folder, and '!fUfilename' to transmit a file.
* Internet Config is supported directly, so that it's no longer necessary to install ICeTEe to resolve URLs in dataComet windows.
* The Find dialog is now modeless and allows you to enter both the Find and Replace strings. It also includes buttons which allow you to perform "Replace/Find", "Replace All", and "Undo" operations (Undo does not undo "Replace All" changes).
* The VT100 and PC-ANSI emulators now support VT220 commands which allow the host to set the PFKeys (User Definable Keys, or UDK). The UDK commands can also be used to independently set the labels and macros associated with the buttons in the button bar and the left hand side of the screen.
* The VT100 emulator now supports displaying and setting an underline color using the "Extended" color mappings control in the Color Dialog... NOTE that if an older color VT100 session now displays underlined fields incorrectly (e.g., black on black!), updating the "Extended" color settings will fix the problem.
* The "Control Print..." dialog now allows you to set top and bottom margins for QuickDraw printing. (Note: the right margin field does not clip the drawing; it is used only to center the page number).
Bug fixes:
* dataComet's timers no longer rely on a Macintosh Vertical Blanking Retrace (VBL) routine, since this routine fails to keep time correctly under OS8 (and must be removed anyway to port dataComet to the PowerPC).
* Using "Control-Menu Select" to get help no longer causes crashes when items in the "Edit Selection" menu are selected (the memory allocated for the names is now longer to avoid overruns).
* TFTP has been fixed so that turning off the server no longer causes an infinitely repeating error message ("no buffer return") under OS8.
* The Telnet layer no longer reports errors in Telnet terminal type negotiation (since OCLC negotiations always fail...).
* The File menu "Open..." dialog now shows all documents by rather than only dataComet documents, so it's easier to open text documents created by other applications.
* The Clipboard is now updated correctly when dialog items are cut or copied. You can now use Command-A to "Select All" in dialogs.
* Text wrapping in edit windows using the Edit menu command "Add Returns" has been fixed so it no longer replaces the first Carriage Return with a Space if the first character is non-blank.
* Cursor motion in edit windows has been fixed so the text cursor moves up and down correctly from the last line when it contains only a Carriage Return and no text thereafter.
* Edit window printing no longer adds a leading blank line on the first page of printed output.
* "Record macros..." has been fixed so that a rare condition is avoided where the host returned output before the sent data was recorded for automatic match generation, resulting in the generation of a match-string which fails to work.
* Using Enter to send text from an edit window to an emulator window now sends the selection to the host when Key Macros are turned off in the emulator window, rather than pasting it at the end of the edit window itself. Enter now sends the whole paragraph, including preceding lines, rather than just the text on and below the line containing the selection.
* Bold characters are now drawn for Macintosh font families when color is on.
* An error affecting the drawing of screens when scrolling in the scrollback buffer has been fixed, so that incorrect characters no longer appear on the screen. The problem occurred due to a bad blank count accumulating when fonts needed to be switched from a type which has to be clipped for drawing (e.g., Monaco Bold) to one which does not (e.g., Monaco), which could result in the failure to erase or draw a character position at the end of a field.
* Likewise, a problem where garbage is left from previously drawn but not-fully-erased characters on the left hand side of characters which require clipping has been fixed.
* 3270 session character translation is reset to default ASCII when IBM 3270 -> ASCII linemode fallback occurs so ASCII characters will display correctly while in linemode.
* A bug afflicted 4.43B6 which allowed a junk "global key macro" to be "allocated" without being zeroed, which could cause a Type 1 Bus Error crash if 1) a key pressed matched the "key code" in the "key macro" and 2) the "key macro" also had a "pointer" to a "macro" to execute which contained an odd address. You might also have gotten "lucky" and execute the "macro" residing at, say, address 0.
* The CopyPaste utility now works with dataComet, which now copies the TextEdit Scrap to the Application Scrap with every cut or copy. "Copy" commands used in QuickKeys macros should also now work correctly. You can turn this off if you like using the "Control Global..." option "Zero Scrap" if you wish to conserve memory. In addition, the scrap is no longer "lost" if you "pass through" dataComet with a TEXT scrap in either mode (the scrap was being zeroed on entry but was not being updated on exit unless it had been modified).
* The startup code sequence was changed somewhat in an attempt to remedy mysterious crashing problems with 4.43B6 (evidently caused by the key macro bug noted above, fixed in 4.43B8).
* NEW HELP FEATURE! "Control-Command-Key", "Control-Mouse Click", or "Control-Menu Select" will automatically open the relevant dataComet documentation and search for the menu name, button name, or dialog text item selected.
* INTERNATIONALIZATION: dataComet 4.43B6 stores all string resources in Macintosh resources so they can be readily translated into languages other than English; see "A5. Internationalizing dC" for more information.
* SOCKS: The "Configure Session..." dialog now allows you to specify a SOCKS V4 proxy for Telnet/TN3270 connections.
* MODELESS DIALOGS: All dialogs except "Configure Session" have been made modeless, including the "Control Color..." and "Define Macro..." dialogs! Setting colors is now much easier than in previous versions of dataComet.
* You can now set global key macros and menu macros using the "Define Macro..." dialog; these macros are saved in the "Comet Default" document, and work in all windows. Macros defined for a particular window will supersede the global macros.
* You can now add user-defined macros to the "Macros" menu as named menu items.
* "Command-Mouse Click" in emulator windows will now select a word and resolve it as a URL through Internet Config; note you MUST install ICeTEe to support this feature.
* "Control-Mouse Click" in emulator windows will now perform an IBM light pen selection, or if that's not appropriate, perform a "copy word/paste/CR" operation (which works very well with host application command interfaces that expect words as commands and list them separately on-screen!).
* Translation of "foreign" characters using standard Mac keyboard layouts now works correctly when using either the Comet-Fonts or standard Macintosh fonts. Selecting a new font automatically selects the correct option for "Translation"; you can translate from the Macintosh character set to a session's selected character set by using "Shift-Paste". Using the Enter key to send text to a host from an edit window with a Macintosh-native font will cause it to be automatically translated to the target window's character set.
* Bold fonts are automatically selected when a font is selected using the "Font ->" submenu; if no font named "<Fontname> Bold" exists, QuickDraw bolding is used with the selected font, using dataComet's automatic character cell clipping, which will draw more slowly, but will allow the use of any font. You can still select alternate bold fonts manually using the "Bold Font ->" submenu.
* New macros:
"!AS" performs an IBM light pen operation on the field at the mouse position;
"!As" performs an IBM light pen operation on the field at the cursor position.
"!CV" and "!Cv" allow you to control the VT100 auto-print mode locally.
"!Eg" go to mouse location for replacing single click.
"!FD" now prints the selection using Serial Printing;
"!Fd" now does a form feed.
"!WA" opens items in the Apple menu by name.
The "Define Macro..." modeless dialog now allows you to enter menu items directly from the menus using the mouse while you are editing a macro.
* The "Control Global" dialog now include two new options, "Open "Comet Default" on launch" and "Clear scrollback buffers automatically".
* The "Control Printing..." dialog now allows you to select Serial Printing as a global default, and also set the page length, top offset in lines, and right margin in characters for serial printing. Serial printing now also adds page numbers.
* "Shift-Option-Page Up" now automatically deletes all spaces and tabs in the selected text of an edit window.
* "Shift-Option-Page Down" now inserts '>' characters in the selected text of an edit window.
* "Option-Add Returns" (Option-/) now allows you to set edit windows so that TextEdit's automatic line-wrapping is turned off; the text is shifted automatically so that the cursor will be visible as you move through the text (there is however still no horizontal scrollbar). This makes the edit windows much more useful for editing scripts.
* The text selection is now preserved after an edit window is closed, so that the selection appears in the same place when it is re-opened.
* The IBM 3278 emulator now indicates insert mode by changing the cursor to a vertical bar, and indicates the "X SYSTEM" wait state by swapping between a block and underline cursor (using the opposite of your preference), rather than displaying "HOST BUSY" in the control bar.
* Registered versions of dataComet can have a graphic displayed rather than the standard splash screen (this graphic is stored as the 'PICT' 128 resource in the application; it will be displayed in the window 'WIND' 128 if it is defined, in 'WIND' 0 if it is not).
Bug Fixes:
* VT100 background and foreground colors are now set correctly when a single character is drawn.
* The DEC-Multinational font now includes a 16 point font; the 16 point Bold fonts for DEC-Multinational Bold and ISO-Latin-1 Bold now have international characters properly bolded.
* Serial printing wraps edit window text correctly, and inserts three spaces for each Tab character.
* The print page count is no longer automatically reset whenever a new print is performed; "Shift-Print Page Now" allows you to reset the page number without causing page eject.
* TFTP uploads now work correctly; large uploads crashed due to the failure of some *very* old PC/IP code to allocate a large enough buffer.
* The stack size has been increased from 40K to 64K to help avoid situations where the stack overwrites the Macintosh heap (which contains the application's code and data, so this can be very bad!). This sometimes causes an ID=28 error when it occurs; note that the "Stack Sniffer" which generates an ID=28 error only checks for heap collisions every 1/60 second, so heap collisions can occur without being detected.
* NOTE: The "Control Global..." "Copy screen" option is now OFF by default to avoid problems associated with users inadvertently copying a whole screen and pasting, resulting in voluminous garbage. (NOTE that this will affect the execution of macros which do not explicitly set the screen selection prior to performing a copy! A "!Ea" Select screen" macro has been added to simplify selection of the current emulator screen.)
* A "Splash" item has been added to the "Control Global..." dialog to allow registered users of dataComet to display the splash screen only until launch processing has been completed in the background.
* The emulator display is now offset only 4 bits rather than 10 bits from the left margin when a font under 16 points is used. This addresses numerous comments that the margin was too wide. A "dataComet" icon indicator has been added to the status bar to show when dataComet is drawing using Fast Drawing mode.
* Emulator and TextEdit pages are now displayed immediately as the scrollbar thumb indicator is moved rather than waiting for the mouse to be released.
* The "!Cs" macro displays the cursor position in the emulator window status bar.
* The "!CI" macro forces the ASCII emulators to draw characters immediately rather than accumulating characters before drawing ("!Ci" restores the default mode).
* The "!B\000" macro saves lines in the scrollback buffer and logs; this is useful for forcing the screen to be appended to the buffer when the host application does not use Clear Screen or Clear Line commands but instead draws new screens over old screens.
* Holding down the Shift key when executing the "Go to line..." menu command takes you to the bottom of the document, skipping the dialog.
* You can now use Enter or Command-Return to send text to the topmost emulator window from any edit window rather than only the emulator's .edit window. (This saves the step of redirecting the output from the edit window into the emulator.)
* You can now select the NCSA-style Function key mapping (F1 -> F6) as an alternative mapping in the "Control Keypad..." dialog.
* You can now re-open host sessions across PPP sessions when using FreePPP: MacTCP session streams are released when a session is closed rather than when the window is closed for better compatibility with FreePPP, which fails to reopen connections if the PPP connection is closed and re-opened while a stream is left allocated by an application. (MacSLIP is highly recommended as a high-performance commercial alternative to FreePPP.)
Bug Fixes:
* The cursor no longer disappears when paging in the emulator window and Fast Drawing is on.
* The 3270 PF Shift state is no longer set incorrectly when the PF key is entered with NO Shift after ordinary characters are entered with the Shift key down.
* IBM 3270 sessions will no longer lock in "HOST BUSY" mode (requiring an IBM "Reset" menu command to continue) when a Telnet Timing Mark is received (some implementations of TCP/IP on IBM mainframes use this as a session keepalive, so this would occur after a session had been left idle about 10 minutes). (This problem was introduced with the addition of 3270 -> ASCII fallback mode in 4.43B4.)
* ASCII emulator sessions will now present VT graphics characters even when the selected font does not contain them (e.g., PC-ANSI or other Mac fonts). Support for VT300 mode character set selection control sequences has been added so that alternate character sets will be displayed correctly (LS1R, LS2, LS2R, LS3, SS2, SS3).
* You can now enter ^M (using Control-M) to enter CR in dialog text items without the dialog automatically taking the Control-M as an return meaning "OK".
* You can now paste into dialog items using the menu item as well as the menu item key equivalent.
* If "Use Command Font" is not checked in the Macro dialogs, buttons will produce the correct macro strings rather than "junk" characters (which map into symbols in the "Comet-Chicago" font. If "Use Command Font" is checked and the "Comet-Chicago" font has not been installed in the Fonts folder, the user is prompted to install the font when the Macro dialog appears.
* The IBM 3270 emulator will no longer report an error when an empty selection is pasted.
* The "Copy Screen" option in the "Control Global..." dialog is now OFF by default so that executing a macro which performs a click-word-copy-paste won't yield huge amounts of screen junk when you click on a blank and get a zero-length selection.
* Added a "Do Blink" item to the "Control ASCII Emulator..." dialog, which allows you to disable blinking.
* The default application size has been increased to 1.5MB from 1MB to make more space available for text documents and multiple sessions with scrollback buffers. This is for the sake of overall usability; dataComet can still run in 600K.
* The PC-ANSI font now includes the a 12-point font; in addition, the PC-ANSI special graphics characters have been added to the fonts (e.g., Carriage Returns appear as musical note symbols!).
* The ISO-Latin-1 font now includes a 16-point font.
Bug Fixes:
* The "Control Global" dialog option "Quit automatically when all windows closed" now works correctly with unregistered copies.
* The VT220 function keys at the top of the extended keyboard are now mapped by default so that F1 -> F1, F2 -> F2, ..., F15 -> F15, Shift-F1 -> F13, Shift-F2 -> F14, ..., Shift-F8 -> F20, rather than the old ("NCSA standard") mapping with F1 -> F6, etc., in order to avoid needless confusion and mystification.
* The Clipboard is now updated properly after copying from an emulator screen and switching to another application. (dataComet was failing to perform a SystemEdit() call when an emulator screen copies was performed, so sometimes MultiFinder failed to note that the System Clipboard needed to be updated.)
* The AppleScript dataComet "copy" command now waits for up to 45 seconds for dataComet macros executing in the frontmost session to be completed before copying the window selection to try to guarantee that select/copy macro scripts will work smoothly. NOTE that during this wait your whole system will have to wait for the loop to complete; if you're using a complicated macro to display and select text, it's best to check whether the "status" of a session contains "Executing" before performing a copy; this way you can be absolutely certain that complex selection macros will copy the selection you really want.
* The Telnet "Local Echo" command should now always provide local display; ASCII Telnet sessions now ignore a WILL ECHO when this is selected and perform Local Echo anyway (sessions with Lexis failed to display characters because the host was responding WILL ECHO when sent the DON'T ECHO, subverting the negotiation process).
* Default ASCII character translation tables are now reset to avoid junk characters appearing after dropping back into VT100 from 3270 mode.
* PC-ANSI and VT220 ANSI host color mapping has been fixed so that the background color is set correctly. Reversed fields are now reversed correctly when host color mapping is on. The default ANSI color maps have been improved so that they are more legible and display correctly in 16-color Monitor mode.
* Two macro commands were added to allow more flexible color mapping for those who use multiple monitors ("!Ck" guarantees the best color match available on the current display--see "A0. Problem Solving"; "!CK" uses the best match on the main monitor, the default).
* VT100 printing now passes Escape sequences (other than End Print Mode) along to the printer rather than discarding them. VT100 print mode is now reset when a session is reset (Shift-Clear Buffer) or closed so that the session will not remain stuck in Print mode if the host fails to turn it off.
* Scrolling in edit windows now scrolls smoothly rather than jumping by half pages to be more typically Macish. Using "Shift-Cursor Down" or "Shift-Cursor Right" to extend the text selection in an edit window now scrolls when it passes the bottom of the window rather than remaining fixed.
* Option-Copy now performs a "Copy Table" command, so it is no longer necessary to toggle the Table mode. (Shift-Option-Copy is now used to set the contents of the Clipboard to a string.)
* NOTE that the pressing the Enter key in a text window now automatically sends text to the next frontmost emulator window (holding down the Option key is no longer required; this makes text windows work just like a session's .edit window).
Bug Fixes:
* IBM 3270 screens now draw correctly when using fonts other than the Comet fonts. Attribute bytes which corresponded to zero width characters in other fonts (e.g., Character 0 in the Monaco font) were being interpreted as diacritics, so that an additional space was added after the attribute at the beginning of a 3270 field.
* Pressing Shift-F1 through Shift-F15 when using the 3270 emulator on an extended keyboard now sends a PF key shifted up by 12.
* VT100 stream printing now maintains the page count properly.
* If you copy a selection in a dialog it will now always be copied to the Clipboard when you switch applications (this was not occurring if only the dialog item had been copied).
* Serial connections no longer execute the connection macro twice if the Session option "Open session without terminal type negotiation" is turned on.
* If Domain Name resolution takes longer than three seconds, a window now informs you that you're "Waiting for MacTCP to resolve domain name...".
* Selecting the "Log session in..." menu item to turn off logging now causes the current screen to be appended to the log.
* The Font selected for printing (using Shift-Font) is now saved in the session document.
* Scrolling delays when paging have again been adjusted for optimal usability.
* The "!CB" shield window macro (used with kiosk applications) now works correctly when placed in the "Application Launch" macro. The "Macro" menu "Set Launch macro..." is now named "Set dataComet Launch macro..." to avoid ambiguity.
* TN3270 sessions now revert to ASCII line mode whenever the Telnet options governing TN3270 now longer apply. This allows sessions made through an SNS/TCP linemode connection to go into 3278 mode and then fall back correctly.
* The "Window" menu item "Close window" no longer waits for the session to completely close before returning control to the user. This could result in delays if the host failed to close a session promptly.
* Selections >32K in size are no longer truncated when you switch to another application. The selection is also now inverted correctly when a selection is made; sometimes "Select all" would fail to invert the screen in windows with more than 2000 lines.
* Scrolling by lines when extending a selection in an ASCII emulator window now scrolls as fast as possible rather than having a delay if paging had taken place.
