BBS in a Box 7

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ BBS in a Box 7 / BBS in a Box - Macintosh - Volume VII (BBS in a Box) (January 1993).iso / Files / Tele / N-O / New Feature Files 11.cpt / New Features #1 next >

Wrap

Text File | 1989-10-12 | 24KB | 518 lines

New Features In White Knight 11 (#1 of 2 files) ----------------------------------------------- There have been literally hundreds of minor fixes, detail work, and "mini-features" added to White Knight 11, and because of their volume, they won't be enumerated in this document. Suffice it to say that all bugs reported in Red Ryder 10.3 have been eliminated, and that this list uses Red Ryder 10.3 as a basis for existing features - only new features will be listed here. Manual ------ • It is my goal to make this version very suitable for beginners, much more so than previous versions, so I have taken a lot of time to get the manual right. The manual runs 270+ pages, contains several step-by- step's for beginners, and contains a keyword index as well as a Procedure command index. General ------- • Did lots of work to make White Knight 11 much more Multi-Finder friendly. Among the most famous problems resolved are the "sticky window" problem, and time-greedy INIT's degrading file transfer efficiency and character throughput. • White Knight 11 now fully supports Color Quickdraw and the standard Color Picker dialog box is used to select the foreground, background, and hilighting colors for the Terminal Window, Phonebook Window, RLE Graphics Window, File Transfer Window, Macro Keys Window, And Status Bar Area. The full 2 to the 48th power of colors are available. • All of the undocumented 10.3 features have been placed in appropriate dialog boxes in White Knight 11. No more messy PUTPARAM commands are necessary to take advantage of them. • Dialog boxes appear centered on the display screen no matter what size screen is being used. • The size and position of the following windows are remembered from session to session: Terminal Window, Phonebook, Dialing/Redialing Status Window, File Transfer Window, RLE Graphics Window. • The pulldown menus have been completely reorganized to reflect a more intuitive and more logically related grouping. Hierarchical menus have been implemented to reduce the amount of action needed to find and select a menu choice. However, since hierarchical menus require horizontal mouse movement in addition to vertical, and because some people find this awkward, I have invented a new method of keyboard menu choice equivalents. All hierarchical menu choices can now be selected by typing a two character sequence while holding down the command (cloverleaf) key. These two character sequences are highly mnemonic, and it shouldn't take much time to get comfortable with them. The two sequence key is typically the first character of the hierarchical menu title, followed by the first character of the menu choice. For instance, under the "Modem" hierarchical menu, the "Hang Up" choice would be selected from the keyboard by holding down the cloverleaf key while typing an "M" and then an "H". The most often used commands (i.e. "Dial or Redial" and "Initiate Procedure") have been kept out of hierarchical menus. • A "Convert Settings" utility is provided to convert Settings files (example: "Red's 10.3 Stuff") created with Red Ryder 10.3 to the format that is used by White Knight 11. • The overall character throughput has been increased by an order of magnitude. High speed connections will show a vast improvement in text display speed. • VT102 emulation has been added. All VT102 functions are supported, including all automatic printer operation sequences. • White Knight will now support disk initialization when an uninitialized disk is mounted in a drive. • The Status Bar display can now be turned off (hidden) to allow extra lines of data to be displayed in the Terminal Window. • If the billing cost is set to zero, the billing clock is not shown (only the elapsed time clock). • It is no longer necessary to hold down the Shift key while choosing White Knight Options to turn off the option "Display title screen at startup" (blush). • The contents of the Terminal Window buffer can now optionally be saved and restored from session to session automatically. • The "Locate Text" feature (previously "Find Text") now has an option to make the search case insensitive. File Transfers -------------- • For text file captures, you can now create a new file, or append incoming data to the end of an existing file. Additionally, you can suspend and resume capturing without having to close and reopen the capture file. • Several new file transfer protocols have been added, and an entirely new Protocol Engine has been implemented. All previous file transfer protocols have been completely rewritten, and will run at the highest possible efficiency with no compatibility problems. The file transfer protocols now supported include: classic XMODEM/Checksum - 128 byte blocks XMODEM/CRC - 128 byte blocks XMODEM/CRC - 1024 byte blocks Supercharged XMODEM (throttled ACK-ahead) classic YMODEM/CRC - 128 byte blocks YMODEM/CRC - 1024 byte blocks YMODEM - G ZMODEM Classic Kermit - 10 to 94 byte blocks Long Packet Kermit - 10 to 9024 byte blocks Sliding Windows Kermit - a/k/a SuperKermit (1 to 31 Windows) Flash Protocol "Flash Protocol" is a proprietary protocol I created for use with error correcting and/or high-speed modems. It is essentially a "lowest possible protocol overhead" scheme, and offers the highest efficiency of any protocol I've seen yet (other than blind block sending - which isn't practical). It can be used for 9600 baud modems with either hardware or software modem level handshaking. Note that you must be using error correcting modems on both sides, because this protocol cannot recover from a transmission error. • CompuServe 'B' protocol support has been removed from White Knight 11, however, support of CompuServe 'B' and 'QuickB' protocols has been provided as an RCMD module (discussed later). • The Edit menu is now being supported properly for desk accessories during a download under regular Finder (not MultiFinder). • All of the above protocols support batch file sends and receives except XMODEM (which doesn't provide for this). When sending, a batch of files are sent if the file selected to be sent is a Batch File (created with the "Create Batch File..." menu choice). Otherwise the single selected file is sent. Because of the new scheme, the only time you will be asked to specify a filename is after an XMODEM receive if the file was not MacBinary format. In other words, it now works like the old Auto-Receive option all the time. ZMODEM allows you to automatically resume a cancelled file transfer at a later date, picking up where it left off. You can now specify the following for protocol transfers: • When sending, MacBinary format should be used for all files, all files except type 'TEXT', or no files. If "no files" is selected, only the data fork of a file is sent (making it easy to export files to IBM versions of MicroSoft Word, Excel, WordPerfect, etc). • If a file being received is MacBinary format, and a file by the name specified in the MacBinary header already exists in the destination folder, you can now opt to either destroy the old file in favor of the new, or give the new file a unique filename (Excel Data #1, Excel Data #2, etc.). • At the end of a MacBinary format file receive, you can opt either to rename a file to the name specified in the MacBinary header or not. Unless the protocol itself specifies the filename (all protocols do except XMODEM) the default filename is "Untitled". • During the reception of a non-MacBinary format file, you can specify either no conversion, or paragraph format conversion. Paragraph format conversion strips out all carriage returns that are either not followed by a carriage return or a tab. This makes it easier to import files to Macintosh word processors as it is the format preferred by them. You can also specify that the data in the file is to be filtered. Filters are discussed later. • The "Auto-receive" option now means something different than in previous versions. Now, it simply means whether the sequence is sent telling a remotely connected White Knight (and some other Mac communications programs) to begin receiving a file automatically without the remote user having to select a menu choice, and on the receiving end, whether or not to react to such sequences. • Whether or not to include a "final report" at the end of a file transfer (or after each file transfer in a batch transfer). The final report is sent to the Terminal Window, and includes the file name, size, time spent transferring, and efficiency of the transfer. • Files transferred with Kermit can be specified as "Text" or "Binary" to properly support auto-linefeed adding (when sending) or stripping (when receiving). • All of the file transfer protocols have been extensively tested with a large number of Macintosh and non-Macintosh communications programs to insure the widest possible compatibility. • The File Transfer Window has been rewritten for clarity and contains much useful information during a file transfer. This includes: 1) The filename being transferred. 2) If the file will be renamed after the transfer, the name it will be renamed to. 3) Bytes transferred (number, total to transfer, percent transferred, and a graphic pie). 4) File format (MacBinary, MacBinary II, Not MacBinary). 5) Cumulative transmission errors. 6) Number of files transferred. 7) Status (Holding for start, receiving data, sending data, waiting for data). 8) Efficiency (percent and characters per second). 9) Estimated time left (minutes/seconds) and estimated time of day when transfer will finish. 10) File type and creator. 11) File destination path. • The File Transfer Window is draggable, and it remembers its position on the display screen. A spinning beach ball cursor appears when the window is frontmost and the cursor is inside the window to let you know the protocol is still working. Serial Port And Modem Support ----------------------------- • The Serial Port dialog box implements pop-up menus for all of the parameter selections to speed things up while maintaining a proper interface. Additionally, White Knight can now support hardware handshaking, and can hold the DTR line (actually, _whatever_ line is connected to the output handshake serial port line) continuously in a low condition. Therefore, the "Drop DTR For One Second" button has been changed to "Invert DTR For One Second" to reflect this. • An additional parity type "Ignore Parity" has been implemented to replace the old "Don't Zap High Bits" option in 10.3. If "Ignore" parity is used, the most significant bit of each byte is not zeroed, as "No" parity does. This is useful for sending and receiving special characters at the high end of each font. Note that many host services (notably CompuServe) require "No" parity and will not function correctly with "Ignore" parity. • Support for 38,400 baud has been added. • The size of the serial port buffer is now user-definable. • A complete set of automatic Hayes-compatible modem handling routines have been added. There is now menu-level support for dialing and redialing, Initializing the modem, turning on or off auto-answer, and hanging up. Additionally, a new type of Procedure file, called a "Modem Driver" has been created to allow White Knight to transparently support non-Hayes compatible modems, or to take advantage of up to 20 additional brand-specific modem features. • The initialization command and inter-character delay for modem commands are user-definable. Filters ------- • White Knight supports the optional use of three separate Filters. One for the Terminal Window, one for file captures, and one for protocol file transfers. Filters can be loaded from and saved to disk. A Filter allows you to specify how each received character is to be handled. For each of the 256 ASCII byte values, you can specify that the character is to be passed through, stripped out, translated to some other character, or numerically enumerated to its ASCII code value (example: "<127>"). Keyboard Support ---------------- • White Knight 11 will now automatically recognize the Mac Plus, Standard Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) and Extended ADB keyboards. The "Install Special Keys" utility should only have to be used for third party keyboards, or if the user doesn't like the arrangement White Knight uses as a default. • Macro Keys can now be activated with a user-defined keyboard sequence, which can be any key on your keyboard in combination (optionally) with Shift, Option, Cloverleaf, and Control. Yes, it does support the Function keys on the Extended ADB keyboard or third party keyboards. • The Backspace key can now be selected to send either a Backspace (ASCII code 8) or Delete (ASCII code 127). Shift-Backspace can be selected to send Backspace, Delete, or a modem BREAK signal. • The following "Serial port settings shortcuts" are optionally supported: Shift-Option-1 Change to 1200 baud Shift-Option-3 Change to 300 baud Shift-Option-2 Change to 2400 baud Shift-Option-9 Change to 9600 baud Shift-Option-7 Change to 7 Databits Shift-Option-8 Change to 8 Databits Shift-Option-N Change to No Parity Shift-Option-I Change to Ignore Parity Shift-Option-O Change to Odd Parity Shift-Option-E Change to Even Parity Shift-Option-M Change to Mark Parity Shift-Option-S Change to Space Parity Shift-Option-F Change to Full Duplex Shift-Option-H Change to Half Duplex Shift-Option-X Change to Null Duplex Shift-Option-D Inverts the DTR modem line for one second Shift-Option-R Sends a Delete (ASCII code 127) character • Option-1, Option-2, and Option-3 can be optionally selected to switch the active Macro Keys set to Set #1, #2, or #3. Printer Support --------------- • One of the problems that have plagued 10.3 users is that Apple has decided not to implement low-level printing routines in LaserWriter driver versions after 5.0 and a number of third party printer manufacturers have decided to follow suit. This caused 10.3 to crash when printing to a LaserWriter or certain third party printers. Also, although we did support AppleTalk ImageWriter printing, it was interminably slow. The new printing routines solve these problems. In order to accomodate the greatest number of various printers, I've decided to let the user decide whether to use low level (line-at-a-time printing) or high level (page-at-a-time printing) routines. Low level routines are best used by directly connected (non-AppleTalk) ImageWriters. High level routines are best for AppleTalk connected printers, or any directly connected printer besides an ImageWriter (although testing may prove that some third-party directly connected printers will work best with low-level routines. Which routines are used is set in the "Printer Options" dialog box. • The only change made to the low-level routines is that two blank lines are printed above the Date/Time header. If you have a problem with your printhead snagging on the perforation corner, turn on this header and the problem should disappear. • The high level routines allow you to select which font and point size to use in printing, which may be different from the font and/or point size used in the terminal window. It will also correctly display VT100/VT102 special graphics characters. A standard "Page Setup" dialog box is supported. Phonebooks ---------- • More than one person mentioned that they would like an easier way to open a default phonebook without going through the file selection dialog. Therefore, if a phonebook by the name "Phonebook" resides in the same folder as White Knight, the menu choice "Open Default Phonebook..." will be added to the end of the Phonebook menu. Selecting this choice will open the "Phonebook" file automatically. • The phonebook no longer has a "door" that closes when switching pages. Page switches are swift and painless. • The phonebook remembers the page that was displayed the last time and opens to that page the next time. • The phonebook can be run completely by keyboard. When the Phonebook window is frontmost, the following keystrokes are supported: 'A' through 'Z': Move to Phonebook page corresponding to the letter. Up Arrow: Move page up one notch. Down Arrow: Move page down one notch. Left Arrow: Move selected item up one entry. Right Arrow: Move selected item down one entry. Return: Same as clicking on Phonebook "Call" button. • A new feature has been added to the Phonebook that I call "Gang Dialing". Here's how it works. If you open a Phonebook and hold down the Option key while clicking on a entry, a small bullet character will appear to the left of the entry's name. When this bullet is there, it defines that entry to be a member of the "gang". Option-click on it again to turn off the bullet. When you edit an entry, it's bullet is automatically turned off. Now, if you choose "Gang Dial" under the "Phonebook" menu when the phonebook is open, each of those gang members will be dialed in a round-robin fashion. Unlike redialing, this round- robin dialing will continue forever (or until you cancel the dial). If a settings file has been defined for that entry, it will be loaded before that entry is dialed (each time). If a Procedure file has been defined for that entry in the Phonebook, it will be automatically executed upon connection, otherwise, a dialog box will appear telling you which service you are connected with. I felt this feature would add a neat way to dial a group of busy BBS's in a daisy chain fashion while I was doing other work. Macro Keys Window ----------------- • A new feature with the simple name "Macro Keys Window" has been implemented. This window may be turned on and off under the Macro Keys menu. You'll note that in the first "Edit Macro Keys" dialog box, you can now specify that this window's size and location should be remembered and restored. This works only when Macro Keys are loaded from a Macro Keys file, not from a Settings file. Additionally, you may specify up to a 40 character title for the Macro Keys window. If you leave the title blank, the Macro Keys window will appear without a title bar (and will therefore will have to be closed with a menu selection). In order to drag a titlebar-less window, hold down the Shift key, click anywhere in the window and drag. The window itself is draggable and sizeable, so you could display all three sets of Macro Keys simultaneously in the Macros Window. • When you edit a macro key, you'll notice that you can now specify that this key is to be shown in one of four basic ways in the Macro Keys Window (it will always be shown as a button in the Macros Status Bar). It can be shown as the familiar pushbutton as in the Macros Status Bar, as a standard (32 bit by 32 bit) icon, as a double-sized (64 bit by 64 bit) icon, a color icon, a double-sized color icon or as a bitmapped picture (that has been saved in the Scrapbook). White Knight 11 allows you to select from the following resource types contained in any file: ICON, ICN#, cicn, and PICT. It supports color icons and, yes, even Color QuickDraw pictures. You can arrange each item in the window by simply holding down the option key, clicking on the item, and then dragging it to where you want it in the Macros Window. Additionally, each item can be made visible or invisible in the Macros Status Bar and/or the Macros Window through dialog box or Procedure commands. Therefore, this feature could be used to setup a personalized graphic interface of your own device. You can also specify whether or not individual items will respond to mouse clicks (you might want to use a picture containing your company or VAR product logo in the window that is a "non-item", for instance). • Keystrokes are passed through to the terminal window whenever the Macros Window is frontmost. • There are "Arrange Items Horizontally" and "Arrange Items Vertically" buttons in the first "Edit Macro Keys" dialog, which will automatically layout the items in the Macros Window in a grid oriented fashion (like the Finder's "Clean Up Selection" menu choice). Host Mode --------- • Host Mode has several new features. If anything other than TTY emulation is being used when Host mode is entered, TTY emulation is automatically switched in. The mouse must now be clicked in the Status Bar area now to cancel Host Mode, which allows Host Mode to operate in the background under MultiFinder. • There are several new Host Mode commands: SENDZ filename - tells White Knight to send the file "filename" using ZMODEM protocol. SENDF filename - tells White Knight to send the file "filename" using Flash protocol. RECZ filename - tells White Knight to receive the file "filename" using ZMODEM protocol. RECF filename - tells White Knight to receive the file "filename" using Flash protocol. RECN filename - tells White Knight to capture all further incoming text to a new file (destroying any old files by the same name) titled "filename". RECA filename - tells White Knight to capture all further incoming text, either creating a new file titled "filename" or appending to the end of any existing file by the same name. DRIVES - tells White Knight to print out the volume names of all mounted disk volumes. The volume names are enclosed in brackets so that any leading or trailing spaces are obvious. DIR pathname - tells White Knight to print out the volume names of all folders and files contained in the folder "pathname". Pathname can also be a volume name. File and folder names are enclosed in brackets so that leading and trailing spaces are obvious. Folders are designated with a colon as the first character. Some examples of this command would be: DIR HD would show all files and folders on the disk volume titled "HD". DIR HD:Comm would show all files and folders in the folder "Comm" which resides on the disk volume "HD". DIR HD:Comm:BBS would show all files and folders in the folder "BBS" which resides in the folder "Comm" which resides on the disk volume "HD". HANG UP - is equivalent to choosing "Hang Up" under the Modem menu. HELP - sends a file named "Host Mode Help" which resides in the same folder as White Knight. A sample "Host Mode Help" is included with White Knight 11. PASSWORD string - enters the user's password (discussed below). • There are three levels of password protection that can be entered for Host Mode: Full Access, Send-Only Access, and Receive-Only Access. If all three passwords are left blank, Full Access is automatically given to the caller. The caller enters their password using the PASSWORD Host Mode command. This command is in the following form: PASSWORD string The string contains the password (up to 8 characters), and upper and lower case letters are _not_ significant (they are considered the same, so "BOBBY" and "bobby" is the same password. Here are the commands available at each Access level: No Access Level (or any Access Level) ------------------------------------- HANG UP PASSWORD Full Access Only ---------------- DRIVES DIR DO Receive-Only Or Full Access --------------------------- RECX RECA RECN RECK RECZ RECF RECY *CLOSE* Send-Only Or Full Access ------------------------ SENDA SENDX SENDY SENDZ SENDK SENDF Any Access Level (except No Access) ----------------------------------- HELP The access level is automatically downgraded to No Access whenever the following happens: 1) The DO command is executed. 2) Host Mode is entered (even with a Procedure HOST command). 3) The string "NO CARRIER" is received. 4) The string "CONNECT" is received. 5) The HANG UP command is executed. Therefore, if the user wishes to execute a Procedure which later returns to Host Mode, the PASSWORD command will have to be reentered. This security is not by any means foolproof, but it should provide a very satisfactory level of insulation from malcontents.