Using Chatter

Most of the following is ( if I designed Chatter correctly ) obvious, but the less-than-obvious features of Chatter are documented in here too so you’ll find out some neat stuff. Note that any underlined text indicates the title of a button or menu item or some text you'll see in Chatter, and bold text indicates a topic in the help documentation. 

Connecting to other Chatter users.

1) Select the network zone by using the Zone popup menu.  This menu will be disabled and say ‘None’ if you are on a network with no zones.

2) Select a Chatter user to connect to by selecting from the Users popup menu. If there are no Chatter users in the network zone you have selected, the Users menu will display found: 0 and will be disabled. Otherwise it will display the number of Chatter users that were found in that zone and the menu will be active.  Once you select a user, the Connect button will become active and the found: menu selection will gray out.

3) To look for more users in the current zone, press the Search button.  This makes Chatter update its list of zones and its list of users in the current zone. Use this if you can't find a user you believe should be on the network. If they do not appear after a few presses, try increasing the search time ( see the Search subsection in the Preferences section for how to do this ). If subsequent searching fails, that user is probably not on the network.  

4) Once you have selected a user to talk to, press the Connect button. The mouse cursor will change, and the Connection Status (see below ) will be Opening. When you have an open connection the Zone and Users menus will gray out with the name and zone of the Chatter user you connected to, the mouse cursor will be an arrow again, the Connection Status will be Open, and a message will be displayed in the top text box that says: “Connection established with <username> in zone <zone name> at <time>”.   The Search button will now say Disconnect, and the Send, Hold and Idle buttons will be active.

5) You can now send messages by typing text in the lower text box. When you press the Send button or the return key, everything you've typed since the last time you sent a message will be sent.  When the Send button pops back up, then all data has been sent. Unless you are sending large amounts of text, you shouldn’t notice any delay while data is being sent. 

The other user's messages will appear in the top box.

6) The Idle button will tell you the amount of time the other user’s Macintosh has been idle.  This is particularly  handy if the person you are connected to hasn’t sent anything in a while.  By examining the idle time you can determine if they’ve been called away, or if they’re just typing a lengthy  reply. If the idle time has been longer than 3 minutes, it replies with “Over 3 minutes”. 

If you hold down the Option key, Idle becomes Query.  In addition to the idle  time, option-clicking on the Query button will give you the remote computer’s owner and machine names,  the name they are using for Chatter (see the Options Menu for how to set this ), and the time it took for the reply to your request. The latter is reported in seconds and 60ths of seconds, since replies will come back pretty quickly unless the network is slow or the remote Macintosh is really busy.

7) If someone interrupts you while you are typing, you can use the Hold button hide what you are typing, and to send a preset message to the other user. See the Hold section under the Preferences section for more info.

8) To terminate the connection, press the Disconnect button.  The Query and Send buttons will become inactive, Disconnect will become Search, and the Zone and User pop up menus will become active after Chatter is done searching for any new users in the current zone. You will also receive the message “Connection closed at <time>  --End of Line--” in the top text box.

Connection information:

This section details information about the state of your Chatter connection. In the lower left corner of the window, the following text is printed: Connection Status: Closed. The Closed will change to Opening and then Open when you connect to another user.

If the Show All Connection Info checkbox in the General Preferences dialog box is checked, you will see the following:

  Connection Status. This is appended by one of the following:

     Open. A two way connection has been established and data can be sent.

     Closed. Nobody has been connected to, and there is no point in sending data.

     Opening. Chatter is in the process of connecting to another user.

     Closing. Chatter is in the process of disconnecting from another user.

  Local Socket.  The network net, node and socket number that this Chatter connection is using on this Macintosh.

  Remote Socket: Net, node, socket. 

   Net.  The numerical value of the Appletalk zone your other party is in.

    Node. The numerical value of the remote user's Macintosh network identity.

    Socket.  The network software socket that Chatter has connected to on the 

remote Macintosh.  There can be up to 256 network
sockets in 1 Macintosh.

Features:

•Cut and paste are supported.  Text can be cut or copied out of either text box, but can only be pasted into the lower text box, as there is no point in being able to paste text into the other user’s messages.

•The opening of a connection can be canceled by pressing command-period.

•You can send icons to the person you are conversing with by selecting them from the icon popup menu in the lower right hand corner.  To select an icon file that is different from the one currently being used, use Use Icon File... under the File menu.  For more information on icon files, see the Icons help topic.

Sneaky Features:

You can search for other Chatter users, other AppleTalk entities or guests logged into your Mac in one or all zones.

•  Holding down the option key will cause Chatter to search all zones. This works in conjunction with the command and control keys as described below.  When the option key is held down the Search button will  become  Search All.  When Search All is pressed, all network zones will be searched for other Chatter users.  The names of zones and Chatter users found in those zones will appear in the top text box.   

To cancel any search, press and hold the command and period keys until you see a dialog box that says “Action canceled by user “.

The next two features have absolutely nothing to do with communicating with other Chatter users.  They started as quick hacks to get network information, but because I thought somebody else might find them useful, they made it into the final release.

• If the Command key is held down while Search is pressed, all AppleTalk entities in the current zone will be displayed in the top text box.  It will list up to 400 entities. If anybody has more than that, let me know and I can increase it in the next release. 

To see all entities in all zones, hold down both the command and option keys. The Search button will then read All Ents.  Note that this might exceed the amount of text that Chatter will hold in a window (16K) , so the beginning of it may not be around by the time you reach the end.  

Question: Why does the text of the Search button change for all sneaky features except this one ?

Answer: I got irritated watching it flip every time I executed a command key combination, and figured that most users would find it annoying too.

• If the Control key is held down, Search will become Guests. When Guests is pressed, Chatter will search for other network users that are logged into your machine from the current zone.  For each login, all names registered on the network from that machine are printed.  So if they have file sharing on,  that registers itself with the network, and the Macintosh name will be shown. If they are running Chatter, their Chatter name will also be shown.  These names tend to be grouped together and I hope this will help you identify what the machine is and who owns it.    To search all zones for guest logins, hold down the control and option keys when clicking Search. The Search button will then read All Guests. 

Note: You’ll need File Sharing Extension 7.6.1 or later for guest lookup to work.

Question: I know guests are logged in, but I didn’t find any. What’s wrong ?

Answer: You are probably on a network with multiple zones and only searched one zone. If you do a Control-Option click of the Search button ( which will be All Guests once the control and option keys are down ) , Chatter will check all zones for the logins.

Question: I get a message that says "The following addresses were logged in but could not be found:". What gives ?

Answer:  Ah, then your network is probably screwed up. No, I'm not trying to avoid blame here. What is probably happening is that there are Macs out there that can see your Mac, but you can't see them. This can happen if AppleTalk broadcasts aren't being passed in both directions.  I was fortunate (?) enough to have this situation to test Chatter in.

Warning ! 

Do not terminate Chatter except by using the Quit command, or by sending it a quit event.  Most users won't have a reason or the ability to terminate it any other way.  But if you, say, shoot it down with MacsBug, it won't be able to remove itself from the network interface gracefully, as it does when Quit is used . Thus the operating system will think Chatter's network connections are still valid and will write any data for Chatter to a random location in memory. This will crash your Mac. If you do shoot down Chatter, don't run it again until you save everything and restart.