About Chatter Listener

Chatter Listener is a faceless background application that monitors incoming Chatter connection requests. From a user’s standpoint, its behavior is exactly the same as an Extension’s

  To use it, select Preferences... under the Options menu. Then select Listener from the popup menu, and press the Install listener button. Chatter will then install Chatter Listener in your extensions folder.  It will be run when your Macintosh starts up, and when Chatter quits , provided that Don’t launch Chatter Listener is unchecked in the Preferences dialog box .  If Don’t launch Chatter Listener is checked, the Listener will never run.

The Chatter Listener tells the network that this Macintosh will respond to Chatter requests, and waits around for a request to come in. When this happens, it reads the Chatter Preferences file to find Chatter,  launches Chatter and quits.  If Chatter cannot be launched, it returns an error to the user that attempted to connect.  When  you quit Chatter, Chatter relaunches the Listener. 

  Thus you don’t have to keep Chatter running all the time for it to be useful. 

Question: Why is there no icon at boot time for the Chatter Listener ? 
Answer:  As the Chatter Listener is a faceless background app, it loads after all the Extensions and Control Panels. Thus if it drew an icon, it would be drawn on the desktop. I've checked with Apple to see if there was any standard way to let a user know that a background app was being run, but they didn't have one yet. Thus the Chatter Listener is a bit sneakier than I'd like it to be.

A few caveats:
Rather than scan the whole hard drive for a copy of Chatter to launch, Chatter Listener gets the location out of the Chatter Preferences file. Every time Chatter is run, it records it’s whereabouts in the Chatter Preferences file so that it can be found immediately.  Chatter Listener then looks for a program named Chatter at the specified location. If the Chatter program is named anything _but_ Chatter ( like: chatter, Chatter copy, Chatter with a space after it, Chatter with four 'M's and a silent 'q', etc. ) the Listener will become confused.  Chatter Listener must also be named Chatter Listener for Chatter to find it. I’m working on making this more robust.  

If you have multiple copies of Chatter around, the copy that gets launched is the last one run, since it was the last to update it’s location.

Question: why doesn't the Chatter Listener automatically install 
itself when Chatter is first run ?

Answer #1: Because, as a user, I hate programs that do anything without my permission. Creating stuff the program needs in the preferences folder is okay because, as a Macintosh user, I know that almost all programs do that. As a programmer, I know that it's an Apple approved way to store program info.  However, a program that would force my system to run something as unobvious as Chatter Listener  would go straight into the trash.  

Answer #2: It also keeps the network from getting cluttered with users who run Chatter, decide they don't have a use for it ( though I don't know why :) ) and toss it into the trash. Since the Chatter Listener would have installed itself without their knowledge, they probably wouldn't think to remove it.  Thus you'd have a bunch of people that showed up on the network, but couldn't be connected to.