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Mac Ph Client Modification History ==================================

Version 1.2. 1/6/95. --------------------

Version 1.2 can be used as a helper program with the new 2.0 beta versions of TurboGopher from the University of Minnesota Gopher team. You no longer need to use the special version 1.1.1G which Minnesota distributed along with TurboGopher. Unlike the Minnesota version 1.1.1G, our new version 1.2 does *not* change your default site when you use the program with TurboGopher.

Ph 1.2 supports the standard "geturl" Apple event suite. You can send Ph an Apple event to tell it to open a query window for a given Ph server and optionally do a query and display the results in the window.

The URL standard does not include ph URLs. Farhad Anklesaria (the author of TurboGopher), Steve Dorner (the author of Eudora), and I invented the following syntax for this kind of URL:

ph://server/query server and query specified ph://server no initial query ph://server/ no initial query ph:///query use default server

For example, the following Apple script tells Ph to open a query window for the Northwestern University Ph server, do a query for "norstad", and display the result in a window:

tell application "Ph" geturl "ph://ns.nwu.edu/norstad" end tell

The "NewsWatcher" Usenet newsreader uses this new "geturl" event to use Ph as a helper program for opening ph URLs. (This new feature is introduced in version 2.0b23 of NewsWatcher.)

Ph now includes an Apple event terminology resource, so you can use it in Apple scripts.

Version 1.1.1. 11/5/92.

- (Pete Resnick). The site list popup menu sometimes extends beyond the left edge of query windows. Fixed. - (Pete Resnick). The Cancel button does not properly cancel in the change default server window. Fixed.

Version 1.1. 6/30/92.

- Ph version 1.0.2 does not work at all with the new MacTCP 1.1.1. At startup, the following bogus error message is issued:"MacTCP is improperly configured. No domain name servers are defined." Ph version 1.1 fixes this problem. (At the time this is being written, June 30, 1992, Apple has said that MacTCP 1.1.1 should be released to the public sometime this fall. We recommend that all Ph users upgrade to Ph 1.1 now so they won't have any problems when the new MacTCP is released.) - Ph no longer strips leading blanks from field lines before displaying them in editing windows. - The remaining changes are intended primarily for the convenience of heros. - Only heros can edit fields which do not have the "change" attribute. Editing these fields, however, can be dangerous even for heros. To remind heros that they should think twice before editing such a field, they are marked with the special "section mark" character in editing windows in hero mode. - The "Open Ph Record" command now lets you open the record by alias, name, or id, rather than just by alias or name. Steve Dorner requested this change, and he wrote the code. - We now permit the use of the Edit menu commands Copy, Paste, and Select All with password fields in the New Ph Record, Login, and Change Password dialogs. For example, if someone sends you a request to change their password to "abc123", you can now copy the new password from the mail message and paste it into the Ph Change Password dialog.

Version 1.0.2. 10/21/91. ------------------------

- (Pete Resnick, Steve Dorner). With System 7 and MacTCP 1.1, version 1.0.1 would sometimes get "unexpected error -23048" on attempts to contact a server. This problem should be fixed in 1.0.2. We're not sure what causes this error, although we suspect that the MacTCP 1.1 domain name resolver may be the culprit. In any case, 1.0.2 contains a workaround which appears to fix the problem, at least in our tests. The fix involves closing and reopening the MacTCP resolver and trying again if the -23048 error occurs on any attempt to resolve a domain name. - Version 1.0.2 always puts exactly one blank line at the end of all help windows. This makes the help text a bit more readable.

Version 1.0.1. 10/16/91. ------------------------

- (Hal Bloom). Under System 7, when 1.0 is run on a new Mac (no "Ph Prefs" file exists in the Preferences folder), it fails to properly create the prefs file. This is a major error which is fixed in 1.0.1. The error was introduced by some code I added in version 1.0b7, but nobody caught it. - (Chris Chen). If MacTCP is not installed, Ph reports "unexpected error -43" on launch. This uninformative message has been changed to "MacTCP is not installed, or it is improperly configured." - (Pete Resnick). Pete wrote: "OK, I admit this was a silly thing to do in the first place: I did the following query: 'office_phone=*1265 return name'. I was in a mood to play. Well, as you can imagine this took a long time. While I was waiting, I switched into Finder to play with some stuff. Some time later, the application menu was flashing the ph icon. I switched back into ph at which point it gave me the alert: Unknown error -20008. That's connectionDoesntExist. In the query result area it said "CPU time limit exceeded for this session." Hmmmm... someone is misbehaving." This error is fixed - The bogus "unknown error" alert no longer appears.

Version 1.0. 10/15/91.

- (Audrey Rosen). If the user renamed the MacTCP control panel, Ph would get "unexpected error -43" on launch. This error has been fixed. - If a Help topic contains the substring "..", only the portion of the string following the first such ".." substring is displayed in the Help menu. Server administrators can use the characters before the ".." to determine the order in which the topics appear in the menu (they are sorted alphabetically). This makes the Help menu look lots nicer to the user. - (Hal Bloom). If no Ph windows are open, Ph is in the backgound under System 7, Finder is in the foreground, and the user double- clicks on the Ph icon to bring it to the front, the cursor is a wristwatch instead of an arrow. This error is fixed.

Version 1.0b8. 10/8/91.

- Correct an error which sometimes failed to properly report read-only database status on logins. - If you popup a site popup menu and select the same site in the popup menu which was previously selected, version 1.0b7 did not update the site domain name field. This has been fixed.

Version 1.0b7. 10/1/91.

- Fixed a minor error in the query window scroll bar. - IM VI 3-15 says not to call ModalDialog when the frontmost window is a movable modal dialog. I found out why when implementing Balloon Help - it screws up the menu bar, and the Help menu in particular. So I don't do this anymore. In cases where I need to present an error message when a movable modal dialog is frontmost, I dismiss the movable modal dialog, then I put up the error message alert, and then I bring back the movable modal dialog. - Ph has been tested with the new MacTCP 1.1. It works fine. - Implement Tech Note #304, "Pending Update Perils." This tech note discusses the proper handling of update events when a modal dialog is active. This is especially important now that we support balloon help. It also makes Ph behave properly when a modal dialog is active and a screen saver kicks in - when you deactivate the screen saver, Ph now properly redraws all of its windows. - Fixed an error which sometimes caused labels in some of the movable modal dialogs to be drawn in the wrong font and size. - Under System 7, Ph supports balloon help for all menus, dialogs, and windows. The Ph application icon also has a custom Finder help balloon. There's 96 help messages total (whew!). - Just for yucks, check out the help balloon for the Ph icon in the Ph about box (bring up the about box, turn on balloon help, and park the cursor over the copy of the Ph icon in the upper right hand corner of the about box). - The Help menu has been restructured. Instead of having a list of known Ph servers at the end of the menu, there is now a single command "Change Ph Help Server" at the beginning of the menu. This new command brings up a server site selection dialog which is very similar to the one used by the "Change Default Server" command. - Under System 7, there is no separate Help menu. Instead, the help commands are appended to the end of the standard System 7 help menu at the right side of the menu bar. Apple recommends that all help commands be located in this menu (see IM VI pp. 2-34 and 11-61). - Under System 6, the positions of the Windows and Help menus have been interchanged so that the Help menu comes last. This makes the menu bars under System 6 and System 7 a bit more consistent. - Under System 7, the "Ph Prefs" preferences file in the Preferences folder may now be an alias, with the actual prefs file stored elsewhere. I have no idea why someone would want to do this, but if they try it, it should work. - Ph now checks for System 6.0.5 or later. - (Ed Dewan) Ed reported: "I have discovered that if I click on several applications in the same folder at once (with the shift key held down), including Ph, then Ph opens up and all the other applications are dropped. Is this caused by Ph, or is it a system problem? It only happens when Ph is present in the mix." Ed said he was using System 6.0.5. I was unable to reproduce this problem under 6.0.5 with Ph 1.0b7, so for now I'm chalking this one up to cosmic rays. - Ph now supports the four required Apple events under System 7. - The Open Application, Open Documents, and Print Documents events have no meaning in the context of Ph. They are accepted but ignored (they do nothing). - The Quit Application event causes Ph to quit. - Local clients (clients on the same computer as Ph) may specify that Ph is or is not permitted to interact with the user when they send Ph a Quit Application event. If a local client specifies the kAECanInteract or kAEAlwaysInteract option, Ph interacts with the user just as if the user had selected the Quit command from the File menu: If any open edit windows contain unsaved changes, the usual "Do you want to save changes" alert is presented. If a local client specifies the kAENeverInteract option, Ph quits without presenting any save changes alerts. In this case, any unsaved changes in edit windows are lost. - If a remote client (a client on a different computer than Ph) sends Ph a Quit Application event, Ph never interacts with the user. That is, in this case, Ph always uses the kAENeverInteract option, no matter what interaction preference was requested by the remote client. - See Inside Mac VI pages 6-51 through 6-54 for more details on these user interaction complexities. - As distributed, Ph only accepts Apple events from local clients. If a user wishes to have Ph also accept network events, he must use the "Sharing" command in the Finder's File menu to enable remote program linking to his copy of Ph. - Ph can now run in the background. If Ph is in the background and needs to present an alert, the Notification Manager is used to inform the user that Ph requires attention. A diamond appears next to the name of the Ph applicaton in the Application menu (System 7) or the Apple menu (System 6), and the small Ph icon flashes in the menu bar by periodically alternating with the Application menu icon (System 7) or the Apple menu icon (System 6). When the user brings Ph to the foreground, the notification is removed and the alert is presented. - Added full color icon families for System 7. If you have been running any of the previous versions of Ph on your Mac, you'll have to rebuild your desktop file before you will see the color icons (sorry about that). - The login dialog now has a popup menu the user can use to select the login server. - (Butch Kemper and others). Added a Logout command to the File menu. This command closes all open edit windows and clears the current login status. Note that open edit windows are always "logged in" in the sense that if such a window is open, the user can make changes and save them. So to effectively "logout," we really do have to close all open edit windows. - The menu bar is properly unhilited when the movable modal dialogs are presented by the Change Password and Change Default Server commands. - Multiple-line server error messages are now handled properly. For example, "Your email field must not contain addresses ending in nwu.edu; Use a specific login and machine instead." In 1.0b6, only the first line of such an error message was displayed (in the example, only the text up through the semi-colon appeared in the alert). - (Steve Dorner). When entering a password, make the Delete key erase just the last character, not the whole password. - (Pete Resnick). In the query and edit windows, use shift-tab for backwards tabbing instead of option-tab. - Ph now reacts properly when the database is shut off. The message issued by the server on connection attempts is displayed to the user. E.g., "Database shut off (for maintenance)." For queries, the message is displayed in the query window. For all other operations (login, get help, etc.), the message is displayed in an alert. Note that Steve Dorner's "Rebuild" doc has a mistake - it says to put a line beginning with "stop" in file prod.sta. Actually, the line must begin with "off". Also, the server error code (555) is undocumented. - On queries, CPU time limit exceeded server errors are now handled properly. The server error message is displayed in the query result field. On our NU server, the query "office_phone=*4080" is a good test of this error. - (Steve Dorner). Fixed an error involving heros changing passwords for other open records. After changing such an open record, any attempt to make further changes to the record resulted in the error message "the alias or password is incorrect." - (Ed DeWan). In the query window, as you move the cursor over the window, it changes from an arrow to an ibeam when the cursor is positioned over any of the three text fields. In the query text field, the left coordinate of the ibeam rectangle was off by 6 pixels. This problem has been fixed. - The new MacTCP 1.1b1 appears to have fixed the problems I was having with the domain name resolver. The problem was that sometimes (often) my resolver result proc was being called with the result code still set to cacheFault, and I was reporting this to the user as a "domain name server timeout." I had abandoned the MacTCP resolver and wrote my own resolver to get around this problem. Now I do the following: I use the MacTCP resolver. If my result proc is called with the error code still set to cacheFault, I then try my resolver. This should make Ph work with both versions of MacTCP, and use the MacTCP resolver when possible.

Version 1.0b6. 5/1/91.

(Gary Jacobs). In 1.0b5, if you tried to create a record with a duplicate alias, Ph reported an "unexpected error 509." This mistake has been corrected.

In 1.0b6, the Quit command is active during movable modal dialogs.

Version 1.0b5. 4/28/91.

(Bruce Foster). When Bruce first ran 1.0b4, it asked him to select a default server, which he did (after playing with the menu for a while, he set it back to NU). When the initial query window came up, the site popup menu was all screwed up (it had width 0). I'm not quite sure why this happened, but I managed to reproduce it, and I fixed it. Sometimes the Mac toolbox is just too mysterious for words.

Version 1.0b4. 4/26/91.

(Steve Dorner). You will all be happy to hear that it is no longer necessary to use ResEdit to change the STR 128 resource to the domain name of your site's server.

The STR 128 resource is now the "default default server" rather than the "default server". The "default server" is chosen by the user the first time he or she uses the program, and it is subsequently saved on the prefs file. The "default default server" is only used to fetch the initial site list for the popup menu which is presented in the initial dialog asking the user to select a default server. Does this make sense to you?

The first time you run 1.0b4 you will see this dialog in action. 1.0b4 will blow away your old preferences and create new ones.

The new command "Change Default Server" in the "File" menu can be used to change your default server.

You can still use ResEdit to change the default default server in the STR 128 resource to your local server instead of ns.nwu.edu if you wish, and this is a good idea, but it is no longer required.

No, I have no plans for a "default default default server". :-)

(Gary Jacobs, jwn2). In 1.0b3, if no windows were open, typing anything caused a crash. The errror is fixed.

(Gary Jacobs, jwn2). 1.0b3 had horrible problems with really long query replies from a server, e.g., the >80K reply with 228 matches you get if you query ns.uiuc.edu for "restaurant". The dumb mistakes I made are way too numerous too mention. They're all fixed (I hope).

By the way, I use the built-in Mac TextEdit routines to display query replies, and those routines cannot handle more than 32K of text. Among the other problems I fixed involving big query replies, I now truncate any replies which exceed this limit and put the special message "----- The query reply was too long. It was truncated" at the end of the truncated reply.

(Gary Jacobs, jwn2). My syntax error checking of query replies was a bit too strong. 1.0b4 relaxes the checks to permit legal but unusual replies.

(Hal Bloom, Ron Rusnack). When an error occurs on an attempt to change a field value, I now display the server error message as received from the server instead of displaying my own error message based on the server error number.

If multiple errors occur on an attempt to save an edited record with several changed fields, I now display individual error alerts for each field which was in error. Each of the individual error alerts displays the error message as received from the server.

(Gary Jacobs, jwn2). The Mac Ph client uses the alias field to uniquely identify a record which is being edited. It cannot be used to edit records which do not have an alias. 1.0b3 didn't deal gracefully with attempts to do this.

If you tried to log in to a record which had no alias, 1.0b3 reported "unexpected server error 508". 1.0b4 instead reports "You cannot login to a record which has no alias."

1.0b4 does not permit a logged in user to open a record for editing if it does not have an alias. The error message is "You cannot open a record which has no alias". 1.0b3 let you open such a record, but any attempt to save changes failed with confusing error messages.

1.0b4 does not permit you to attempt to save an edited record if the alias field has been changed to be empty. The error message is "You cannot save a record with an empty alias field."

Version 1.0b3. 4/21/91.

- Option-tab now works in the query window - it backs up to the previous field. (Pete Resnick). - In edit windows, when the "Show field info" option is toggled, I now position the display in the window so that the current field is always visible. (Pete Resnick). - In 1.0b2 the Windows menu was not always properly activated, e.g., after a query. This error is fixed in 1.0b3. - Server error numbers are no longer presented to the user when errors occur in queries or when fetching help text. Only the server error messages are presented. E.g., "No matches to your query." is now displayed in the query window instead of "Server error 501:No matches to your query." - The Help menu no longer lists any help topics whose titles consist only of decimal digits. This eliminates all the native server error number help topics, which are completely irrelevant to the Mac Ph client, which never reports server error numbers to the user anyway. This makes the Help menu much shorter. In 1.0b2 the menu was ridiculously long and hence cumbersome when used with any site except for NU. You probably won't notice this change immediately, since the old Help menu topic list is kept on the Ph prefs file and is only updated every 24 hours. To force an update so you can see the new menu, select your site from the site list at the bottom of the Help menu. (Bruce Foster).

Version 1.0b2. 4/17/91.

- 1.0b1 crashed horribly if you tried to open a new help window when there were no open windows. - Fixed an error redrawing the server popup menu box in the Query window when the site list changed. - Fixed an error saving changed fields when both the alias and some other field were changed. - The page up, page down, home and end keys now work with all three kinds of windows (query, edit, and help). - The arrow keys now work in the query and help windows. - Fixed the error message that's displayed if you attempt to login with a valid alias but a bad password. - In query replies, if any line extends beyond 80 characters, the field containing the long line is reformatted as follows: field_name: field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text field text For an example, query the UIUC server for "weather". This used to look awful with 1.0b1. It looks much better with 1.0b2. - Fixed a stupid mistake: Non-heros who log in and then close their login window are now permitted to reopen their record with the "Open Ph Record" command. - The prefs file now has a creator, type, and icon. To see the new icon you will have to trash the old prefs file, rebuild your desktop, and then run the new version of Ph to create the new prefs file. (Sorry about that - don't bother if you don't care). - A much better error message is now displayed when a hero attempts to create a new record and specifies an illegal value for one of the fields (e.g., alias too long or too short or contains an illegal character).

Version 1.0b1. 4/11/91. First beta release.