The Internet Configuration System was designed to make your life easier by reducing the number of times which you need to enter your Internet preferences into the various preferences dialogs of all your Internet applications.
For example, currently you need to enter your email address into many common Macintosh Internet applications, for example Claris Emailer, NewsWatcher and Anarchie. The goal of the system was to get each of these applications to get this information from one common place and to give you a tool to edit these common preferences.
It is important to realise that applications will have to be modified to take advantage of the Internet Configuration System. It will take some time for all applications to be revised and until then you will have to enter your preferences in those applications in the traditional manner. You can find a list of the applications that currently support Internet Config in the Internet Config FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).
The Internet Configuration system requires at least System 6 and works best under System 7 or later. It does not require MacTCP and it makes sense to install it even if you're not directly connected to the Internet.
Run the Internet Config application. If it asks you whether you want to install the Internet Config Extension, say yes. Click on each button in the Main dialog in turn, enter appropriate preferences. [If you don't understand an item turn on Balloon Help or look it up in the reference section at the end of this document.] Save and quit.
It is important to realise that you don't have to set every preference. For example, if you don't use WAIS, there's no need to set your WAIS Gateway preference.
At the user level, the system contains 3 important parts:
For the programmer there is a separate distribution that contains all the files needed to make an Internet Config aware program.
The Internet Configuration application works much like any other Macintosh application. The basic document for the application is a Internet Preferences preference file.
Unlike most Macintosh application, when you launch the Internet Configuration application it does not create a new untitled document. Instead it opens the Internet Preferences file in your Preferences folder (creating it if it isn't there). This is useful because, unless you're doing something strange, you need never use the standard document features (New, Open, Save, etc). Instead all you need to do is launch the application, modify your preferences and then quit with saving.
The following commands are available on the Apple menu:
About Internet Config
This opens the about box. Do not bother looking for magical Easter Eggs; we were much too busy to mess with that sort of thing.
The following commands are available on the File menu:
New
These commands work as you would expect in a normal Macintosh application, with one exception. The application can only have one preferences file open at any point in time so when you open a new preferences file, by Open or New , the previous one is automatically closed. The Open Internet Preferences command opens the default set of Internet Preferences (in your Preferences folder), which is useful if you accidentally close the window.
The Edit menu is used for editing text.
The Window menu allows you to open or bring to front any of the configuration dialogs.
The help menu (on the right hand side of the menu bar) lets you turn on Balloon Help. The application has full Balloon Help support.
The Main dialog is opened whenever you open a preferences file. It has 8 buttons (with cutesy colour icons) that let you open other dialogs
The Personal dialog lets you edit all sorts of preferences related to your person. These include:
Info-Mac and UMich are two big archives of Macintosh software. They are often very busy and won't let you on. To get around this you can get files from other machines that mirror these archives. Some software will use the preferences here to automatically route requests to your preferred mirror.
The Other Services dialog is a collection of preferences that didn't fit in anywhere else. These include:
The File Types dialog lets you view and edit the table that is used to set the Macintosh file type and creator of incoming files based on their extension. If you don't understand this dialog then please don't worry. We've done our best to set up appropriate defaults. If you have any problems with file transfers, then reseting to factory defaults will probably help.
The Helpers dialog lets you view and edit the table that is used to determine which application to run when a specific URL is accessed. For example, ICeTEe uses this table to determine what application to run when you command click a URL.
All of the Internet Configuration documentation assumes that you are running under System 7. Under System 6 some things are slightly different from what is stated in the documentation. The most important thing is the placement of the files. Under System 6 the Internet Config Extension and the Internet Preferences file are always placed in the System Folder. Also some non-critical parts of the system may not work under System 6.
The entire Internet Configuration system has been tested under System 6 and should work happily. Having said that, you are warned that the system has had a lot more testing under System 7 than System 6 and there may be System 6 specific problems still lurking. If you find any, please report them to us.
If you find a bug in Internet Config then please forward details to the official support address for Internet Config. Please read the Internet Config FAQ before sending mesages to this address. If you want to discuss Internet Config in general then we suggest you host that discussion on the comp.sys.mac.comm newsgroup.
The Internet Configuration System was written by Quinn "The Eskimo" and Peter N Lewis over a period of way too many late nights and weekends. Certain important chunks of code were contributed by Marcus Jager and Stuart Cheshire. Craig Richmond provided a lot of help sorting out the default MIME mappings. Much of the extension to type mapping information was gleaned from Robin D H Walker's Extension-to-Type mappings file. Eric Kidd maintains the Internet Config web site and also gave invaluable insight into the problems of override components.
We would like to thank all of those on the Internet Config mailing list and all of the developers who have adopted the system.
The entire Internet Config system is public domain and can be redistributed without restriction.
The latest version of all the component of Internet Config can be FTPed from the home sites in Australia and the USA.
Comments: internet-config@share.com