TeleTalk enables you to open text conversation channels with other users on a LocalTalk network (much like the chat feature found on many BBS software, or the talk command on the Unix operating system). A conversation appears in a two-part horizontally split window: the upper part is the text your interlocutor sends to you, and the lower part is the text you are sending them. TeleTalk can handle multiple simultaneous conversations in real time. Outgoing text is sent immediately, as you type it, and incoming text is displayed in the proper conversation window continuously, even when the TeleTalk application runs in the background.
WHAT’S NEW
Version 1.1 now supports extended (multi-zone) AppleTalk networks with a Zone popup menu in the phone book dialog box. It also fixes a problem reported to occur when two or more users on the network have the same name.
INSTALLATION AND SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
If you’re reading this file, then you have probably already extracted the TeleTalk application from its original archive file. The application is self-contained. You may place it in any convenient folder on your hard disk.
Any Macintosh or Power Macintosh model running System version 6.0.7 or later will do. TeleTalk has modest memory and disk requirements. The base memory allocation is 384 kilobytes, which is more than enough for several simultaneous conversations. TeleTalk is not PowerPC native, but will run properly in emulation mode on Power Macintosh machines.
Note also that TeleTalk is compatible with Apple Remote Access. (Actually, it was primarily created to be used over ARA connections, for those of us who only have a single phone line…)
USING TELETALK
The TeleTalk application is organized in a very simple and straightforward way. To make things easier to understand, the following explanations go through the typical steps of a first session, and then give progressively more details about specific features. It is assumed that the default preferences are set, so the “typical steps” might be slightly different if you are using a copy that has been used before by someone else. Refer to the Preferences sub-section below for more details.
Opening a new conversation
When you launch the TeleTalk application, a “phone book” dialog box appears automatically, prompting you for an interlocutor with which to engage a conversation. As shown below, this dialog displays a list of interlocutors currently present on the chosen zone of the network. The zone defaults to the local zone (the zone in which your own computer is) when the dialog is invoked. The name of the local zone is also shown. Here, the asterisk stands for the local zone when the application runs on a non-extended network.
The list of interlocutors works just like a file list in a standard Open File dialog. Use the Zone popup menu above the list to select the zone in which the desired interlocutor is located. The scrollbar at the right of the list lets you scroll through the names if there are more than can fit in the window. To select an interlocutor, just click on their name. You may also use the up-cursor and down-cursor keys to select the previous or next interlocutor, or type the first few letters of the desired name to select it directly. To open a conversation with the selected interlocutor, click the OK button, or double-click on the desired name. If you don’t want to open a conversation at this time, click the Cancel button.
For a user to be visible in this list, the TeleTalk application must be running on that user’s computer. TeleTalk scans for interlocutors just before displaying the list. It may happen that some users start the application on their computers after the scan is performed on yours, and therefore do not appear in the list that you see. If so, you can try to poll the network again for interlocutors by clicking the Scan button. The scan is performed only in the currently selected zone.
The small black triangle in the bottom-left corner of the dialog box toggles the address display, which adds a line at the bottom of the window showing the numerical network address of the currently selected user. This is technical information which was useful for debugging. You might not need it at all. We left it available mainly for the curious! But it might be of some use to network administrators.
This same dialog box is available through the Open… command in the Conversation menu, which you can also invoke by pressing Cmd.-O (holding down the Command key while typing the letter O).
When you click the OK button, a conversation request is sent to the chosen interlocutor. While waiting for their response, a request window will be displayed that looks like this:
You may move this window around to any position convenient to you and switch to another window, for instance the window of an already open conversation, or you may even switch to another application. (If you are using System 6, you must have activated MultiFinder to do this. Refer to the documentation supplied by Apple for more information.) When your interlocutor responds positively to your request, a new conversation window will be opened, automatically dismissing the corresponding request window. If TeleTalk is running in the background at that time (that is, if you switched to another application while waiting for the response), you will be notified by the TeleTalk icon flashing on the right end of the menu bar, alternating with the Applications menu icon. When you switch back to TeleTalk, a message will appear informing you whether your request was accepted or denied by your interlocutor.
The Conversation Window
When a conversation channel is established, a conversation window like the one shown below appears.
This window includes two text boxes: the upper box displays incoming text, while the lower box displays outgoing text, that is the text you type. As with other windows, you may resize the conversation window by dragging its grow box, in the bottom-right corner. You may also click its zoom box to resize the window automatically to fill the entire screen. On machines with multiple monitors, the window is zoomed to fit the screen it is currently on. If the window spans more than one screen, it is assumed to be on the screen which it intersects the most. Clicking again in the zoom box restores the window to its previous size and position.
The close box closes the conversation channel, requesting you to confirm via a dialog box. It has exactly the same function as the Disconnect button on the bottom row of the window (the one with a cross). Yet another way to close the current conversation is to use the Close command from the Conversation menu, also accessible by pressing Cmd.-W.
Just to the right of the Disconnect button is the Bell button, which sends a beep signal to your interlocutor (the sound used for the beep is the alert sound as selected in the Sound control panel on the computer on which it plays, so your interlocutor might not hear the same sound as you do). You may also send a beep by typing the standard key combination Ctrl-G.
Finally, you may set the relative size of the incoming and outgoing text boxes by dragging the split bar up or down. TeleTalk constrains the movement of the bar to keep at least two lines of text in each box.
Managing multiple conversation windows
You may theoretically open as many conversations as memory permits! Each new conversation requires approximately 3 K of RAM. If you use TeleTalk intensively (and we mean _very_ intensively!), you can allocate more memory using the Get Info command from the Finder’s File menu.
Each new interlocutor with which you engage conversation gets their name added to the Conversation menu, so that you can quickly bring the corresponding conversation window to the front by selecting the interlocutor’s name in the menu, if for instance, that window is hidden by other overlapping windows. The names in the menu are sorted alphabetically for your convenience.
The first nine conversations to be established also get a keyboard equivalent to bring their window to the front. The conversations are numbered from 1 to 9 in the order they are opened. To select a numbered conversation, just hold down the Command key and press the desired number, from 1 to 9.
When a numbered conversation is closed, its number becomes available to the next conversation to be opened. The currently opened conversations are not renumbered to prevent the possible confusion of changing a conversation’s associated number to something unpredictable by the user.
Responding to conversation requests
When another user sends you a conversation request by choosing the Open… command from the Conversation menu and by selecting your name in the list of interlocutors, you will see the following response dialog box:
You may respond in one of three ways: the Accept button will establish a new conversation with the requesting user, here named Johnny. The Deny button will inform the requesting user that you cannot speak with them right now and will not open any conversation window. The Ignore button will not open any conversation window either, but will not reply to the request, so that it will look like you are not sitting at your computer at the moment. It will not inhibit further requests by that user, though.
Preferences
Choosing the Preferences… command from the File menu brings up the Preferences dialog box, which looks like this:
The available settings are as follows:
• Open a new conversation at startup: check this option if you want the “phone book” of interlocutors invoked automatically when you launch the TeleTalk application.
• Notify when conversation closed by interlocutor: When your interlocutor closes the conversation, the conversation window simply disappears. This might be a little confusing, especially if it happens when another window is active or TeleTalk is running in the background. To get notified of this event, check this option.
• Notify when conversation is established (background only): When waiting for an interlocutor to respond to your conversation request, you may switch to another application. Check this option if you want to be notified when the conversation is established and TeleTalk is running in the background (you will always be notified if your interlocutor denies your request).
Notification is always done by means of the Notification Manager, which flashes the TeleTalk icon over the Application menu icon on the right end of the menu bar, to indicate that some event has occurred that requires you to switch back to TeleTalk.
In the Preferences dialog, you may also set the font and text size to be used in conversation windows using the two framed popup menus. This will update any previously opened conversation window, but does not affect the display on your interlocutors’ machines.
Pressing the OK button makes the newly selected preferences effective and saves them to disk in a file named ‘TeleTalk Preferences’ in the Preferences folder on the current startup volume (the one with the currently active System folder). This file is created automatically the first time you run TeleTalk. (If you’re using System 6, the file is simply put in the System Folder.) The Cancel button keeps the settings unchanged. The Default preferences button restores the “factory” settings, without dismissing the dialog so that you may still cancel and keep with the previous settings.
The preferences file also records the position of the preferences dialog and of the request window that appears while sending a conversation request, the state (on or off) of the address display in the list of interlocutors, and registering information (see the REGISTRATION AND DISTRIBUTION section below). The Default preferences button does not affect these parameters, so you may want to drag the preferences file to the trash to restore them to defaults. But do remember your serial number!
Communication errors
On a crowded network, the quality of communication might become affected by particularly long transmission times, or even loss of data packets. It may happen also that one of the communication ends disconnects unexpectedly without signaling it to the other end, so that further transmissions by that other end will be addressed to a no-more-existing interlocutor. TeleTalk makes some provision for retransmission and error reporting in such circumstances with the following dialog box:
This dialog informs you that some error has occurred between you and the named interlocutor, here Johnny, and gives you a choice of two corrective actions: the Retry button will make TeleTalk try to transmit the data again to the same interlocutor, while the Abort button will dismiss the corresponding conversation window, immediately closing down the conversation channel. Both actions usually take a few seconds to complete. During retransmission, all conversation windows will be locked up (the cursor will turn into an animated watch), temporarily preventing you from typing until retransmission is complete.
Other error conditions may not be recoverable, and will be reported in an Alert dialog box with only an OK button. Depending on the exact situation, the dialog box might also report an error identification number, that is the result code of the failed operation. If you encounter such an error frequently and wish to report it to the author of TeleTalk, you should note down that number (see CONTACTING THE AUTHOR below for more information on bug reports).
TeleTalk is a real time application, which makes it unusually demanding on network resources. It does not transmit that much data, but it uses a large number of small packets, and so the actual transmitted data suffers from a certain amount of redundancy. TeleTalk was designed to handle critical situations as elegantly as possible, but it cannot be made infallible. If things mess up and you or your interlocutor begin missing some characters, just be patient; there might be some other intensive task going through the network at the moment. Try typing more slowly or even closing the conversation temporarily. You must be especially cautious on slow network links, like ARA connections.
In certain circumstances when the delay to send a packet is unusually long, you may get an error message telling you that the communications buffers are saturated. Normally, the buffers will have returned to unsaturated state by the time you click the OK button in the error message dialog box. However, if the message comes up too often, you can try to allocate more memory to TeleTalk, using the Get Info command in the Finder’s File menu. This will increase TeleTalk’s initial buffer allocation and should prevent too frequent saturation.
Non-roman script systems
Because TeleTalk uses TextEdit from the Macintosh Toolbox to handle text in conversation windows, it should be compatible with non-roman script systems included with international versions of Apple’s System software, such as the Arabic script, KanjiTalk, or Zhong-WenTalk. However, it does not support styled text, so it will not handle multiple scripts within a single window. We do not have the resources to test this, though, so if you use a non-roman script system, please tell us how TeleTalk does with it.
VERSION HISTORY
• Version 1.0.1 (96/05/12)
Neater user interface;
Largely rewritten network handler, which offers much better stability.
• Version 1.0
Skipped to differenciate 1.0.1 from 1.0ß1 in the communications protocol.
• Version 1.0ß1 (95/11/30)
First public release.
POSSIBLE FEATURES TO BE ADDED
• Buffered keyboard;
• Scrollable text boxes;
• Cut and paste (and maybe drag and drop?) inside conversation windows;
• Connections over TCP/IP and compatibility with the Unix talk dæmon;
• Yours to complete…! (See CONTACTING THE AUTHOR, below.)
REGISTRATION AND DISTRIBUTION
TeleTalk is Shareware. You may install it on your computer for a 15-day trial period without registering. If you find it useful and want to continue using it afterwards, you should register your copy by sending us the following information:
• Your full name;
• The name of your organization or company;
• Your street address (or that of your organization), including country and postal code;
• Your phone number (don’t forget the regional code);
• Your E-mail address;
• Where you obtained your copy of TeleTalk;
• What kind of computer and network you use.
Send us these at the address given at the end of this document, along with your payment for the single licence fee of US$ 10. Users in Canada can pay directly in Canadian currency for a special fee of CAN$ 12. Checks must be drawn on a Canadian or American bank. International money orders are prefered for orders outside North America. We cannot accept credit cards. You should buy a licence for every TeleTalk user on your network. The fees mentionned above hold for up to ten licences. Supplementary licences above 10 (within a single order) cost US$ 5 each (CAN$ 6).
Upon receipt of your payment, we will send you a serial number to validate your copy of TeleTalk. Validation simply enables multiple simultaneous conversations. Both communicating ends must have a valid and distinct serial number to be able to establish more than one conversation. To validate your copy, choose About TeleTalk… from the Apple menu. Be aware that registration information is stored in the ‘TeleTalk Preferences’ file inside the Preferences folder (or System Folder under System 6). Keep note of your serial number to be able to re-register your copy if this file gets lost somehow.
Your contribution is important to help us keep our software development efforts. Please support the shareware community.
The most direct way to keep up-to-date with the latest version of TeleTalk is to visit our World Wide Web site at the following URL:
<http://www.info.polymtl.ca/~roy/TTEng.html>
You may freely copy and distribute TeleTalk as is to your friends, colleagues, and through electronic bulletin board systems (BBS), FTP and WWW sites, and commercial on-line services, provided that you do not charge for it, and that you include this Read Me file along with the software. Any other forms of distribution or bundling is forbidden without the prior written consent of the author, Jonathan Roy.
VERSION FRANÇAISE DE TELETALK
TeleTalk est également disponible en Français! Pour l’instant, cette version n’est distribuée que par la page World Wide Web de TeleTalk, accessible à l’URL suivant:
<http://www.info.polymtl.ca/~roy/>
Nous sommes à la recherche de sites FTP francophones (c’est-à-dire mis sur pied par et/ou pour des francophones) qui pourraient en assumer la distribution. Si vous avez des informations à ce sujet, veuillez s’il-vous-plaît communiquer avec nous.
DISCLAIMER
The author, Jonathan Roy, makes no warranty or representation, either express or implied, to the quality, stability or suitability of the TeleTalk software. The author will not be liable for any damages, whether direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential, including data loss, resulting from the use or misuse of this software. You, the user, registered or not, are assuming the entire risk as to the reliability of this software.
CONTACTING THE AUTHOR
Comments, complaints, suggestions and bug reports are welcome. Please help us make this software better and more like you want it! The author can be reached at the following addresses.
Internet: <royj@propnet.qc.ca>
or <roy@info.polymtl.ca>
World Wide Web: <http://www.info.polymtl.ca/~roy/TTEng.html>
Mail: 35, de la Brunante Ave.
Outremont, Qc, CANADA H3T 1R5
Bug reports should be detailed enough for us to have a good idea of the exact context in which you are using the software and in which the error occurred. Please specify your computer model, the version number of your System software, a list of installed system extensions and control panels, and a description of your network configuration. If possible, try to reproduce the bug a couple of times, so that you can determine exactly when and how it happens. Also, try to reproduce it with all extensions turned off (restart your computer while holding down the Shift key). Thank you in advance for your collaboration.
