About Chatter

Chatter is a program that allows more or less real time text message communication with other computers that are running Chatter and are connected to an AppleTalk network.  It can support up to 4 connections at once, and does not require program linking to be turned on.
 At the user’s request, it can install an extension, Chatter Listener, in the System Folder so that the user can be notified of connection requests when Chatter isn’t running. 

Network impact statement:

Chatter is very network friendly.  It only sends broadcasts when searching for other Chatter users.  Packets are sent when the user hits return, presses send, or selects a new icon during a conversation.  The icon data it transmits is only about 2 kilobytes ( this translates to be about 5 or 6 AppleTalk packets, which is fairly trivial. ) 

Quality Assurance:
It has been tested on Macintoshes ranging from a Mac Classic to a PowerMac 9500/120, and ran fine on AppleTalk, EtherTalk, and FDDITalk networks. It has been tested on both local and wide area networks ( wide here means from the East Coast of the United States to England ). Chatter works with or without Open Transport, but does require System 7 or later.

Chatter is essentially free.  It may be uploaded to BBSes, copied and passed around as much as you like, but with the following three restrictions:

1) Keep the  ReadMe, Version History  and Dangercon files with Chatter.

2) Any person or organization that plans to redistribute it commercially ( say, on disks of shareware ) must obtain my permission before doing so.

3)  If you like it, send me a postcard or an email message telling me how you’re using it.   Programmers love to get feedback about their code ( yes, even negative feedback ) because it tells them that someone out has looked at what they’ve written.  If you really  like it send me a disk with something on it (fonts, source code, other shareware, pictures, etc. )   I’d like to hear from you if you have suggestions or bug reports.  If you do have a bug report, please include your system software version, extensions/control panels being used, hardware configuration, and how to create the bug.

Send bug reports, feature requests, comments and fan mail ;^) to:

Alex Doyle
Caffeine Productions
68 Sutton Road
Newbury, NH, USA, 03255

Internet: doyle@ctron.com  (Note:  this email address is not guaranteed  to be up to date, but try anyway :) )

About the author

I'm a Macintosh consultant and programmer who is currently employed by a major networking company in the northeast United States.  I've got the more typical of programmer habits ( read Science Fiction, like foreign hot spicy food, played surreal amounts of Dungeons & Dragons™ in high school and I spend more time than I should in front of a computer ).  I cook, jog, listen to electronic music  and have a habit of permanently dismembering every VCR I try to fix. ( hey, I fixed one. Once. Well, cleaned it real good... )  

As my father was an English teacher employed in Saudi Arabia I spent ten years growing up in Dhahran and Khamis Mushayt,  before coming back to the US. 

I spent four years majoring in Electrical Engineering and discovered during my senior year that was a lot better at writing code and that I should have majored in Computer Science. (This was vindicated by my subsequent experiences with VCRs ). However, being out of time and money, I graduated EE and spent 9 months looking for a job and learning to program the Macintosh in my parent's basement.  

Those 9 months turned out to be more useful than 4 years of college (moral: don't let school get in the way of your education ), as I got a great job based on my Mac programming skills. ( Well, maybe the BSEE helped some....)   I currently live in southern New Hampshire with a roommate who believes that there are very few problems that cannot be solved by the proper application of a chainsaw.