CYBERQWK Offline MAIL READER Copyright (c) 1995-1997. Stryder Software Development ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY Dale Clarke This text file discribes some of the changes between versions of the CyberQWK off-line mail reader. The listing is layed out from most current to first release 1.0 - First release to public. 0.9c - Fixed exception when double clicking right paine window in 32 byte explorer. - Added Mime Base64 insert to message editor. - Spacebar now will scroll pages to the end of messages then move to next message. - More work on the help file for both versions. - Tool and Window menus have been combined under the menu of View. The View menu contains all commands related to display options and configuration. - Can now turn the display of Toolbar and Statusbar on and off in the View menu. This allows more area to view messages in the viewer if they are not needed. - If repetedly changing between cascaded and tiled child windows the reader would go into a unbreakable loop. - When cascading or tiling child windows all minamized child windows are now also cascaded or tiled. 0.9b - The quote header is now not centered but left aligned and will wordwrap if it exceeds the maximum line length set for the editor. - Added two more parameters to the header quote macro. %3 - abrevated date and time of original message. %4 - Full date no time. The %3 overrides %4 so they can not be used together. - When forwarding messages a forward information header simmilar to other readers is added to the body of the message. This header contains the original from, to, date, and subject of the original message. - Removed OriginalSender cludge. The reader now looks for forwarded information within the first few lines of the text body and after leagal 3 dash tair lines. - The viewer and editor now display consistent date and time formats in the Post field of their headers. - Redisigned options dialog to allow easier expansion for more options, less of a crampt look and more of a Win95 style. - Added reply options to the open page of the options dialog. - Added start terminal option to the close reader page in the options dialog. The program will attempt to execute the given command line and only prompt if widows returns a error. - Extracting encoded mime base64 inserts now works correctly. It only works reliably with single messages. Still working on supporting multi message encoded files. - Added more to the help file. The Win95 version now has a 32 bit windows help file. Better compression for the internal bitmaps has been implemented. Reducing its size by over half in both versions. It still needs more work and a help file for the 32 bit Attached Files Explorer. All bitmaps now contain help jump hotspots. It is still incomplete but contains a lot of information. - Added detection of wether CyberQWK is running to the setup programs. A prompt will request to close the mail reader before running the program. 0.9a - Added OriginalSender QWKE tag for forwarding messages. - A problem when determining who the message was from and subject when passed to the Attached Explorer was causing it not to be displayed if it was not the first message in that conference. Have downloaded several attached files in messages to make sure it works now. All were displayed correctly. - When passing a message from the viewer to the editor not all the message was being inserted if a illegal tear line (--) was encountered. Tear lines are now not removed in this transfer and it will be up to the user to remove them if they wish. - Determination of wether the message can be posted to the conference is now completely handle by the Post Dialog. - when messages are forwarded they correctly display who the correct sender is. The invert/undo button in the Post diaolg will also switch between this name to. - Toggling between insert and overwite mode now works in the message editor. - Added more to the help file but its still needs a lot of work. 0.8g - Sometimes the wrong reply number was beeing displayed in the Editor. - When adding a new message in the reply folder the number of total replies was not being displayed correctly when returning to the viewer. - When opening a reply packet and entering the new messages the new messages were not being updated in the packet when it was closed. - When double clicking a valid internet address in the viewer it is interpeted as wishing to post a message to that address. - Added a invert button to the post dialog (Only available when REPLYING). This button will switch the To: Field between the previous sender and reciever. If the To: field has been changed and is not one of these to it will revert back to the previous sender acting like a undo. - Added Attached File Explorer. - Removed email checkbox. 0.8f - Was not replaceing existing files after prompted that another file with the same name existed. - Changed dialog appearences to reflect more of the Win 95 look. - When forwarding messages to a different party than the original sender the wrong initials were being set in the quotes. - Quotes no longer chainsaw unless the message quoting already is chainsawed. The message is not reread for speed but taken from the viewer. If word wrap is on and the viewer window is small enough to garble the message the quotes will also be garbled. - The conference in the Post Information dialog was disapearing when changing the name in the To field. - Added Cancel/Delete Message speed button. It's only enabled when the reader is in edit message mode or viewing the replies folder. Deleting a message for the second time undeletes it. - Added Attached File button to bottom right hand corner of status bar that displays a paperclip. Its only enabled if a message has a attached file. - The attached file manager has been changed so that each attached file is now handle indavidualy. - Changed speed button pictures to be hopefully less confusing. - Added Edit and Delete to the Message menu. These two commands are only available while viewing the replies folder. The Reply and Cancel speed buttons will also perform these functions respectively while viewing the replies folder. - A Tag check box has been added to the Post dialog. When checked it enables the taglines and randomly selects one. - Open Reply Packet has been added to the File menu. A temporary mail packet will be created so all functions will work as if a regular mail packet had been opened. If the reply packet was created by another program CyberQWK must be able to recognize the BBS it is for. In other words CyberQWK has to have opened previous mail packets from that BBS. - New Reply Packet has been added to the File menu. A dialog box listing the recognized BBS's CyberQWK has information on will be displayed. Like opening a reply packet a temporary mail packet is created so all functions will work as if a regular mail packet had been opened. - When windows were maximized and switching between the conference and message lists a enoying flicker was being produced while updating the lists. - When changing to different windows menu items were sometimes flickering. - When quoting, quote enitials are only added to previously unquoted lines. This makes multiple quoted messages easier to read, saves on band width, and the lines do not unecessarily grow longer. - The Edit menu is now available when viewing messages. As the viewer is read only not all commands are available. - The wordwrap command in the edit menus is only temporary for the current session. When CyberQWK starts it will set the viewer and editor to the wordwrap settings in the defualt options. - The message quotes can now be set to a different color than the regular text in the default options for the viewer. If the viewer is clicked with the mouse the text will become normal color to allow selecting. - Quote Header has been added to the editor page of the options dialog. If this field is blank no quote header will be inserted. The string inserted uses % variables as follows %1 = original sender %2 = original reciever I might add more % variables in the future. - Updated the help file to reflect these additions. - Several other little things have been fixed as I have worked on this version but I unfortunetly did not write them down. 0.8e This release has only one new addition. Everything else is related to performace optimization. - The select directory diaolog boxes in the 32 byte version were not using a tree view outline that adhered to the 95 style but the 3.1 style. It now uses a 95 style tree and all context menu associations from the explorer are available for directory management. - When moving mail packets in the Windows 95 version the system now handles the move this is less code with optimum speed. In the Windows 3.1 version a file stream is used for optimum speed. - When deleting mail in the Windows 95 version they are placed in the recycle bin. - The auto attached method was fixed in the previous version correctly but by changing the status dialogs to child windows and not removing references of hiding these windows still caused a exception. This also was caused when trying to print a message because they use the same status dialog box. A child window can not be hidden so all references to hide this dialog have been changed to close it. - The message read buffer has been increased. Messages are now loaded at the same speed notepad would load a text file of the same size. - The viewers read status guage has been removed. It was only required to display that the reader was busy reading the message. Now that messages are loaded as fas as posible it is no longer needed. - The statusline no longer displays that the message is being read. This happens so quickly that a user does not have time to read it anyway. The longest read times are aproximatly 2 seconds for a message greater than 32k. This is a windows limitation for loading into any memo control. - Messages were being marked as read when scrolling through conference and message lists. A message is now only marked as read when loaded into viewer. 0.8d - Replies no show the conference the message is posted to now. the message number is irrelevant to a reply so its not shown. - The quoting now works better but still chansaws once in a while with previous senders quotes. It does not fix other reader bad quoting. - Option to remove or retain previous senders quotes has been added to the Editors options page. - If a legal URL is double clicked in the viewer. The mail reader will now try to start the associated program. This feature will only work in the 16 byte version if the web browser or ftp client you use sets associations for URL's. - A new message can now be entered by pressing the insert key. The same function as Ctrl+N. - Auto Delete Attached files has been added to the Close Packet page. This option has also been added to the bottom of the Attached File Manager so a decision can be made whether to delete the attached file or not at extraction time. - The auto extract attached files method was incorrectly referring to uninitialized variable and causing a GPF. It now refers to the correct variable and works. - The conference number is now not displayed in Headers. Only the network and conference name is displayed. The conference number is still displayed in all input forms which is the standard for mail readers. Some people still prefer to just enter a number instead of searching for the correct name. As of yet I still haven't found a reader that does not display the conference number to the user. I have only done this compromise because the visual display is only cosmetic and my beta tester Darryl insists. - The confirm post dialog box has been removed when posting messages. This dialog box will still be displayed if the message has been modified and the ESC key is pressed in case a user mistakenly presses it. - Ctrl + P was being used for print message and post message. It is now only used for Post message. Ctrl+Shift+F12 the standard print short cut is now used for printing. - If switching between windows or performing tasks were the viewer lost focus and then returning to the viewer. The message was reloaded. Now the viewer will only load a message if it is different than the message already loaded. This improves performance while navigating the mail packet - The Grep and Print status dialogs windows were set to staying on top of all windows even when switching to another program. These dialogs are now contained inside the main window as child windows and will no longer do this. - The two conferences that the reader creates for replies and searches were becoming confused with each other. These two now are handled separately and will work together now. - If the reader was opening or performing a task and the applications close button or system menu close was pressed the program crashed with a GPF and did not release its used memory. The program will no longer close until its no longer busy. - When extracting a mail packet or reply packet, and when creating a reply packet, the status dialog now reports more accurately. A second gauge has been added to this dialog that represents the total completion status. The time it takes to open a packet has been decreased by removing the fli animation sequence. - The status dialog was flashing when switching from routine to routine when opening a packet. It now displays correctly smoothly, and contains the action it is processing. 0.8c - When extracting attached files the overwrite confirmation dialog now displace the last modified status of both the old and new files for better evaluations. - If a message has a attached file the message header now displays the attached files name. - All buttons now have quick keys associated with them for the keyboard lovers. - The buffers for moving or coping files has been increased from 2k to 8k for better performance. - When opening a mail packet and a previous reply packet is found a prompt to delete it is still displayed. But now if answered NO the old reply packet is added to instead of being renamed. - Messages can now be carbon copied to other parties in the same conference. The post dialog now has a carbon check box. If this is checked, when the message is posted the Carbon Copy Manager is displayed. Individual names can added or removed and a text file with names on each line can be imported to the carbon copy list. - Replies can now be viewed but not edited yet. 0.8b - When opening child windows they were being displayed then adjusted which caused a annoying flicker or visual effect. All child windows are not displayed until all adjustments have been made to them. - When reading a QWKE formatted packet the message viewers header was displaying short form fields then updating them to the extended fields. Now only extended fields if they exists are displayed. - When opening a packet the status gauge was being reset to 0 for every file being extracted. This caused a annoying flicker because most files within packets are rather small except the message.dat file. Now only the progress of the message.dat file extraction is displayed. - A erratic bug that caused the conference flags to sometimes not be displayed has been corrected. - When replying to messages the "To" field is now enabled so messages can be forwarded to another person. - A prompt that no "newfiles.dat" was being displayed if the packet did not contain one and the "show new files" setting in the options on "packet open" was set. The setting is now ignored if no "newfiles.dat" file exists in the packet. - The Post Dialog tagline field is now blank by default. A random tagline will be selected upon drop down of the tagline list. - A Tagline Manager has been added to the options menu. The Tagline Manager allows adding, editing, and removing of taglines in the tagline file. - A Search menu has been added with find, find next, replace, and goto line that can be activated when viewing or editing messages. The message Grep has been moved to this menu from the message menu. - Added Upper case and Lower case selected text to edit menu. - The message and search menus are now only available when the viewer or editor are the active windows. - When extracting attached files from packet they are now removed from the packet. - The version of Install Shield I have just is not configurable enough and doesn't uninstall the program completely for the 32 byte version. So this release comes with my own "Stryder's Installation Wizard". It certainly does a better job, it's faster, more configurable, smaller size overall, and the uninstall completely removes the program and the sub directories it creates. The installation creator is also less complicated. 0.7b - After searching for text within messages. If any found the Msg List window becomes the active window loaded with the search results. - The following options have been added to the options dialog box - Open Packet Page : X Maximize Viewer X Maximize Mail Reader - Added the following keyboard short cuts: Ctrl - R = reply to message Ctrl - N = new message Ctrl - O = options dialog box Ctrl - P = print message These keys are only available when mail packet is open. - All new installation for win 3.1 versions. - A much easier automatic registration method has been implemented. Details can be found in the Help under "Registration". - Prompts before overwriting files have been added. - Fixed a bug when mail reader was busy accessing the message.dat file and the navigator 'Arrows' buttons were repeatedly pressed pointers became confused and a GPF would occur. - Conference and message Lists now have adjustable header columns. - Worked on the helpfile. There is still holes but as I now have more time it will fill in faster. 0.6b beta - Fixed a GPF that would occur if navigating through the viewer and the message list window was not open. - The new files are now displayed in file request manager if packet contains the info. Its now even easier to download files through the BBS mail door if it supports it. - Fixed a erratic GPF when drag dropping a mail packet onto the 32 bit version. - The 32 bit version does not use ini files anymore. All information is now stored and loaded with in the windows registry. - Added send author message to help menu for easily reporting problems or receiving more information. - The following options have been added to the options dialog box - Open Packet Page : Show windows X New files X Conf list X Msg list Close Packet Page : X Nothing X Delete packet X Rename packet X Rename/Move packet - The mail reader does not start maximized anymore. - When opening a mail packet the mail reader does not halt the system anymore but allows multitasking to continue unless user input is required by the mail reader. - All conference message lists are now cached when packets are opened. - Lots of little quirks have been fixed and it is much faster and easier to navigate through mail packets. 0.5c beta - Fixed size of font to large in directory select dialog. - Added the ability to automatically extract attached files to default path that can be set in options dialog. - Fixed problem with the message arrow buttons being disabled after opening packet when they should be enabled. - Messages are now buffered before inserted into viewer. This eliminates a terrible flicker when moving among messages. - Fixed a pointer that received invalid data during a text search. This would cause viewer to read beyond end of file causing a general protection fault but staying within the loop. The reader was then unable to be closed and the computer required a cold boot. - The editors on key event was causing a delay between the entered keys and displaying them. This has been optimized so the speed of key handling doesn't slow down displaying the keys entered. - Signatures are now added after the end tare line; 0.5b beta - After adding the quick keys, some keys like up, down, pgup, and pgdn were not working. The inherited method is called and they now work properly. - When installing on a Win 95 system, the groups drop down list was empty. This now works correctly with explorer. This only applies to the win 3.1 version. - New improved open dialog that incorporates file management routines.(copy, move, rename, and delete) This only applies to the win 3.1 version. - Fixed a bug if a message did not contain a carriage return at the end. The viewer caused a exception and the message was not displayed. The viewer now checks and will stop reading at the last character in the last block of text. - PKZip/Pkunzip are not required by the mail reader anymore. All archiving is internal now. In the win 3.1 version the internal archiving can be turned off. At the present no command line archivers are available for win 95 that support long filenames. - Entering a alias name has been added to the user options for BBS's that allow aliases. - The send information dialog now remembers all posts. When selecting a name from the drop down box in the "To:" field all items are set the same as the last post to them. - Taglines are now enabled. The mail reader uses the file "CYBERQWK.TAG" in the installation directory. This file can not contain more than 4000 taglines or be greater than 64k in size. The file can be edited with a regular text editor or created with a standard tagline manager. One will be included soon in a future release. - When a mail packet is opened a information dialog box is now displayed with info derived from the mail packet. - Fixed a bug that sometimes chopped the first few lines of messages that contained imbedded fido headers. The parser now removes them correctly. - Some menus and buttons were not being disabled when the mail reader was processing information. This could lead to abnormal behavior if they were selected during this. - Fixed a bug were buttons and frames would be unaligned or in the wrong position in different video modes. - The "Setup" menu item has been replaced with a "Tools" menu item. This conforms to the latest windows menu standard. - Now supports UUencode/decoding with standard mime and unix base-64. 0.4c beta - If packet contained attached or requested files you were not prompted. Fixed. - Sometimes the viewer did not display last line of message. Fixed. - Added close to all quick right mouse popup menus. - Added the following quick keys: Alt-X Exit mail reader. Ctrl-N Enter new message. Ctrl- R Reply to current message. Ctrl-P Print current message. Ctrl-O Display options dialog box. - Added directory pick dialog box to install. 0.4 beta - When leaving the editor the toolbar was grabbing the focus. Now the focus returns to the message viewer like its suppose to. This prevented the viewer from receiving movement keys and the toolbar did not enable the movement buttons. - Add more error checking to the post dialog conference edit field. It now will not except anything but a valid conference number. - Added a description of the type of conference in headers based on QWKE flags. - The conference list now only updates itself when the conference has changed. - Lots of spelling corrections. - BBS control information to control the mail door such as add/drop conference has been reinstalled with OLMS compatibility. Depending if the sysop has them enabled for that BBS, the following functions will be available for off line maintenance : - Add/Set conferences - Drop conference - Change keywords/filters/twits - Request downloads - Include uploads - Attach files to messages If available they will appear in the menus. - Conference and Message arrow buttons on toolbar have been separated for less confusion. - Only one instance of CyberQWK can be run now. When run with the support DLL's it will become confused otherwise. - Under the "Conference" menu the following 2 items have been removed ("Open Msg List" and "Close Msg List") These two created confusion between the conference list items. The message list window is now opened and closed automatically when the viewer opens and closes. - The message list lines were cramped and long names were over running each other. It now displays with better spacing and truncates long names. - The message list now loads quicker. - A Registration key systems is now used instead of a internal lookup table. - Added search to message menu. This searches the packet for text within the subject and body of messages. - Added right mouse click quick menu pops up for common commands. - When quoting the reader does a better job of getting the correct initials from previous poster and formatting the quote if it contains a previous quote. 0.3 beta - Quote was not doing a very good job at quoting. Rewrote all methods dealing with this function and am quite pleased with the results. I had to write most of this code for the spell checker anyway. Sorry it doesn't correct misalign quotes in original message. - Optimized much of the code for much better speed and reduced the heap requirements greatly. - There is now no limits on the size of message packets the mail reader can handle. - Added a status gauge to the status bar for when ever the reader access the hard drive or memory. Just so you will no its reading a large message or conference and not locked up. - The BBS control functions have been removed only for this release. They will be included again in the next release. I am adding the control types for QWKE to the existing QWK types so the library is in pieces at the moment. - The reader now supports some of the QWKE packet standards seamlessly. Only the standards relating to the viewer and editor are supported in this version. : all message kludges are supported. : all conference flags are supported. This applies to the display only in the next release the post dialog will use this information to validate whether the message could actually be posted and the inform the user if any changes need to be made first. Full support for the QWKE specification will eventually be included. - Depending on the build information a dialog will proceed startup. All include a registration edit box. Once a valid registration number is entered this dialog will no longer appear at startup. - The mail reader logo has been redesigned because the old one was a crappie bitmap and became distorted depending on the windows video driver and card. The new one was done in jpeg format and I am quite pleased with it. It now appears after the program starts. 0.2 beta - Program repaints before long method calls. This is more visually appealing. - If program exit was selected while a message was loaded into the editor the message was discarded. Now a prompt to save the message is displayed before program termination. - While editing "Import Text File" was not working. It now works correctly. - Added the the following key functions while viewing message :Space bar - next message. :Right arrow - next message. :Left arrow - previous message. :Alt/Right arrow - next conference. :Alt/Left arrow - previous conference. :Insert - open different packet. :delete - close current packet. The keys only work when message viewer is the active window. - The total number of messages the mail reader could handle was 500 this has been increased to 1000. Methods for handling a unlimited number of messages limited only by amount of free memory are being worked on. This only applies to the 16bit version, the 32bit version already supports this feature. - A report from the tester Jeff Violot that the drag and drop in the 32bit version is broken. I have not found the cause of this exception yet so it is disabled until I can fix it. The 16bit versions drag and drop works just fine. - When viewing ansi files from the BBS the ansi codes are parsed correctly but only some of the BBS codes depending on the BBS software that was used. I am working on methods for each different boards software. 0.1 beta - First release to testers. This version contained only the basic mail viewer and editor.