A1.3. dataComet Release Notes 4.43B6 - 4.5.3A _____________________________________________________________________________ dataComet documentation (Rev. 5/6/00): Copyright 1995, 1996 databeast, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This document has information on (select and use "Find..." to go to the section): Release Notes: 4.5.3A 4.5.2B 4.51 4.50 4.50B1 4.43B8 4.43B7 4.43B6 ___________________________________________________ 4.5.3A 8/18/98 ___________________________________________________ Features: * There's now a Registration dialog to make registering more intuitive. * dataComet documentation is now listed in the Help menu (under System 6, it's listed in a Documents->Help submenu). The Documents and Sessions menus have been moved to the File menu. * "Shift-Open" now displays all files in the Get File Dialog and opens them as text, so dataComet can now be used to edit documents such as Apple Modem Scripts or NCSA documents (which are indeed text documents, but are set to a different file type). dataComet no longer adds dataComet window and font size resources to files if they are not dataComet documents (either originally created as dataComet documents, or saved used Option-Save) so that such documents can be viewed without modifying them. You can save the window and font size resources in non-dataComet documents using "Shift-Save" (this is not done automatically due to the low but real risk of Resource ID conflicts). * Switching windows is now faster; drawing of controls and menus has been optimized. * The "Find" dialog now has an "Ignore case" option; this is now the default behavior for the "Find" command. * The "Control Session..." dialog now includes a "Don't Beep" item so you can disable emulator beeps. * 5250 keys and menus are now available as alternatives to standard 3270 keymapping to make it easier to use the 3270 emulator to connect to IBM AS/400, System/36, and System/38 hosts. You can enable 5250 key-mapping using the "Use IBM 5250 Keymapping and Menus" control in the 3270 "Control Emulator..." dialog. * "Cursor Select" has been added to the IBM menu and associated with the Option-Tab key to provide this function on the keyboard. Control-Return now performs a Clear to make it easier to execute a Clear on the keyboard. * A large set of Translation tables have been added to the distribution, including IBM, ISO, and Windows mappings for MacArabic, MacCE, MacCyrillic, MacGreek, MacHebrew, MacPersian, MacRomanian, MacThai, and MacTurkish. * New indicators have been added to the left of the horizontal scrollbar in emulator windows; the 3270 busy symbol and VT100 LEDs appear here. In addition you can now display the current emulator cursor row and column coordinates in this area, using either the host cursor location or the mouse cursor location (you can control the display of the coordinates using the "Show cursor position" and "Use Mouse position" controls in the "Control Controls..." dialog). * A macro was added to send the 3270 ATTN key ("!PA"). * The new built-in support for NCSA and Brown document launches from Netscape now also supports Sets, so these documents can be used to open several documents at once. These documents can be edited using "Shift-Open" or by selecting the document in the Sessions menu with the Shift key held down (e.g., "Telnet Set Example" in the Sessions menu). * The 3270 emulator now supports the Structured Field Query Reply, so that session passthroughs to IBM mainframes which failed when the host (incorrectly) assumed Extended Stream support would be available will now succeed. * You can now set Leading in edit windows... this feature makes the dataComet on-line documentation much more legible! (The documentation uses the Monaco font, which really needs the additional leading...) You can also set Print leading independently of the screen leading. * The "Define Macro..." dialog now always uses a 9 pt. font when displaying the macro. * Horizontal scrollbars in both edit and emulator windows now update the contents as you are scrolling. * The File Transfer submenu now includes several items from the "Control File Transfer..." dialog to make it easier to change settings on the fly (e.g., "Use BinHex"). These items can be used with edit windows; the settings are applied temporarily to the target upload session when the File "Upload..." command is used to upload an edit window. Bug fixes: * Several dialog items which were truncated when displayed using the Chicago font have been resized so they display correctly. * Document and session names are now displayed correctly in menus when they contain characters such as "!" (which are interpreted by the standard AppendMenu() calls as commands to use special formatting for the menu item). * Pastes into edit windows are now checked to guarantee that adding the text won't exceed the 32K TextEdit limit, and an alert is presented if this is the case. * The Translation menu is no longer disabled for edit windows, allowing use of the Option-Translation feature documented in "0.1 Shortcuts". * When a window is closed and a dialog window becomes the frontmost window, the next frontmost emulator or edit window becomes the key window for the Find and other dialogs. * In some situations when an emulator window was opened on a second monitor, it would be resized so it had zero width... this side effect from adding horizontal scroll bars and window maximum size constraints has been fixed. * The IBM 3270 cursor is now hidden when drawing occurs. * The cursor is now updated promptly when a cursor motion key is held down, rather than not being displayed until the key is released. * Bugs in the 3270 Alternate screen to Default screen (24 X 80) fallback which cause the screen display to appear incorrectly have been fixed. Also, pressing the Clear key no longer automatically causes the scrollback buffer to be cleared when using an Alternate screen size. The buffer is still cleared if the size changes, since the 3270 buffer display routines can only handle one 3270 screen size. * Several emulator screen/stream printing bugs have been fixed... Printouts of VT100 scrollback buffers larger than one page may have had garbage appearing at the end, and the last line on a page is no longer duplicated at the top of the next page. VT100 print streams caused some Print drivers (and network printers) to hang due to failure to call PrClosePage() before calling PrCloseDoc(). Printing of emulator screens now works on PowerPCs. * ZModem upload throughput and reliability have been improved. ZModem now avoids prolonged "Sync" states which sometimes occurred when slightly out-of-date ACK packets from the host were counted as an error and NAK'ed. The default ZModem Upload Window is now set to 4096 by default to avoid host buffer overflows; you may be able to improve performance by changing this to 0, but be cautious... some hosts (e.g., UNIX hosts with small tty input buffers) may crash due to buffer overflows on Telnet ZModem transfers! (This generally only occurs during Binary uploads.) * The PowerPC version is now compiled with the Metrowerks Global Level 1 register optimization off. This option was found to cause some odd failures in code generation. ___________________________________________________ 4.5.2B 6/16/98 ___________________________________________________ Features: * dataComet is now distributed as a fat binary which offers native PowerPC support in addition to including 68000 code for older Macs. * dataComet can now handle Netscape launches directly, so the dataComet-NCSA and dataComet-Brown applications are no longer included in the distribution. (This means NCSA and Brown users can now try out dataComet without confusion from having the document icons change to dataComet icons, and existing NCSA and Brown documents will continue to work normally without deleting the dataComet-NCSA and dataComet-Brown applications.) * A "Sessions" submenu has been added in Apple menu to provide easy opening of emulator sessions. dataComet now checks the "Sessions" folder when performing URL or Netscape launches for existing documents with the same name, so session configurations can be retained between browser launches. * Horizontal scrollbars have been added to emulator and edit windows. Edit windows feature controls next to the horizontal scrollbar to allow easy execution of text reformatting commands using the mouse. The "Control Controls..." dialog now includes "Show horizontal scrollbar at bottom of window" so you can hide the horizontal scrollbar in emulator windows. * "Option-click sends cursor motion key sequences" has been added to the "Control Global..." dialog; this setting is now on by default. Formerly cursor-key sequences were sent whenever the mouse was clicked in an emulator window; now you need to hold down the Option key to send these commands when in ASCII emulator windows. This option allows you to switch this behavior so a simple click will perform cursor positioning. * An AppleScript "targetwindow" command has been added. This command selects a target window for dataComet AppleScript commands, rather than using whatever window is frontmost, so AppleScript commands will be executed in that window context even if the front window changes. * An alert was added to remind the user that selecting non-standard font leading and width options in emulator windows slows down drawing performance. * An alert was added to note that some menu commands are not executed when a window has been miniaturized (the commands are ignored in order to help avoid the possibility of mistakes caused by failure to notice that an iconified window is actually topmost). Bug fixes: * The IBM 3270 emulator now handles shifts back to 24X80 mode from larger screen sizes. This bug resulted in confused displays when the host application selected the smaller screen size. * Macro dialog fixes: The "Rename" button is now enabled when no macro exists yet for an emulator button; The "Set" button is now enabled without changing a macro (making it easier to configure empty key macros); selecting the "Global" check box now prompts an alert to save changes if a macro has been modified rather than updating a macro automatically. Renaming an emulator macro button twice no longer causes a crash. Assigning macros to buttons now results in correct display immediately when a session is configured with "Only one session per document" off (rather than being displayed correctly only after the window is closed and re-opened). * Macro handling has been modified so that the queue is resized automatically when macros add commands to execute which exceed the current queue size. This also saves a lot of memory, since each window saves up to 32K which had been allocated for the macro queue in previous versions. * The "Macro" menu is now always rebuilt so it appears after the "Control" menu after adding a menu macro to the Macro menu. * Pressing "Return" in the "Configure Session" dialog now works as an "OK" rather than being ignored. * PPP connections are no longer opened automatically as soon as a session document is opened (this occurred even when the session was set not to connect automatically on open; this premature PPP open resulted from resolving the host name before it was necessary). * Using Control-"Menu select" to get help no longer causes a crash under System 6. * The File menu item "Print now" is now disabled unless applicable (i.e., when VT100 a print stream has accumulated without a page eject). * Outdated items for setting MacTCP options used with obsolete versions of MacTCP were removed from the "Control Global..." dialog. ___________________________________________________ 4.5.1 5/4/98 ___________________________________________________ Features: * dataComet 4.5.1 offers a simplified registration procedure. Registered users will now receive via plaintext email a registration code which sets the registration when it is selected and the menu command Shift-"About dataComet..." is executed. The previous method of registering using a dataComet document still works; the new method will make it easier for users to receive registrations when they receive email on a host rather than downloaded to their Macintosh. * A session timer is now displayed next to the packet counters. The display of the timer is controlled in the "Control Controls..." dialog. * A "National" submenu has been added to the "Control" menu to set National Replacement Character sets (this does not yet apply to IBM 3270 emulators). * The "Find..." dialog now reverses the search or replace direction when the shift key is pressed. * An 8-point font has been added to the "Comet ISO-Latin-1" font family to make it possible to display 132-column screens on smaller monitors. A native Macintosh version of this font has also been added ("Comet Mona"). Bug fixes: * The error message "Application predates configuration version" has been removed, since it makes reversion to an earlier version a hassle. * Control-Clicking on the menu bar to get help on a menu item no longer brings up "Shortcuts" before user can get to the menu. (This worked, but the Control key had to be pressed after clicking on the menu bar.) * Native MacTCP sessions can now be reopened after they have been closed from the host end of the connection (as opposed to a "Close session" command). (This bug was not present under OT/MacTCP.) * Macros generated using the Record Macro feature now work correctly when used with an IBM 3270 host. This bug was introduced when 3270 translation tables were added. * The "Control" submenu "Bold Font" option "Use Normal Font" is now saved correctly in the window's font configuration. * The "Replace All" command in the "Find..." dialog now quits reliably after one time around the text in an edit window. * Selections in the emulator window which start on the bottom line and include the last character are now inverted properly; previously the selection was copied properly, but the selection was not displayed if the screen was scrolled so only the first line appeared. Also, selections made downward from the far right column of a screen row now add a Carriage Return as the first character when a "Copy" command is executed. * The emulator cursor is now updated promptly when the emulator screen is not the frontmost screen, so you don't have to bring the screen up to see the current location of the cursor. The cursor blink is now synchronized with emulator blink field blinking. * Closing an unsaved "Untitled" window no longer changes the window position and font/size settings of the "Comet Default" document, so new windows no longer inherit these changes. ___________________________________________________ 4.50 1/29/98 ___________________________________________________ Features: * The "Bold Font" submenu now allows you to select "None" as an option to avoid bolding, which may draw relatively slowly if a standard Macintosh font is selected. * The VT100 emulators now map the MacOS 8 "VT100" font graphics character symbols automatically when this font is selected without using a Comet font. * A "CharcoalMenus" resource file has been added so that menu items line up properly under MacOS 8. Bug fixes: * Prior to opening the Mac standard Select Color dialog the amount of memory available is tested to avoid crashes due to out-of-memory conditions. * When using MacTCP new host data was sometimes written to the screen when a window was scrolled. The scroll alert should now always alert you to scroll to the end of the buffer prior to screen updates, which should only occur after you have scrolled to the end. * Page sizes should now be correctly initialized when using VT100 print streams with QuickDraw printing, correcting a bug which printed pages with only one line of text. In addition, selecting an alternate print font should work correctly under all circumstances (formerly Courier was being substituted for the selected font in many cases). The serial print Top margin item in the "Control Printing..." dialog is now updated and saved correctly when it is modified. * The cursor is now reset to an arrow when it's moved off the left hand side of the emulator screen, correcting a bug in which it was left as a text selection cursor if "Show cursor-buttons on the left side" was not selected in the "Control Controls..." dialog. * A separate font translation configuration setting is now saved so that transitions from TN3270 to VT100 sessions will no longer produce junk screens caused by inapplicable translation table settings. * Resources in the "Fonts" folder are now left in the beginning of the resource chain so that international menu and dialog resources can be dropped in the Fonts folder rather than embedded in the application for maximum flexibility. ___________________________________________________ 4.50B1 11/28/97 ___________________________________________________ Features: * X/Y/Z-Modem file transfers are now supported, with BinHex and MacBinary file conversion and automatic launching of downloaded files using Internet Config File Mappings. Macros have been added to support Z-Modem file transfer: '!fFfoldername' to set the download folder, and '!fUfilename' to transmit a file. * Internet Config is supported directly, so that it's no longer necessary to install ICeTEe to resolve URLs in dataComet windows. * The Find dialog is now modeless and allows you to enter both the Find and Replace strings. It also includes buttons which allow you to perform "Replace/Find", "Replace All", and "Undo" operations (Undo does not undo "Replace All" changes). * The VT100 and PC-ANSI emulators now support VT220 commands which allow the host to set the PFKeys (User Definable Keys, or UDK). The UDK commands can also be used to independently set the labels and macros associated with the buttons in the button bar and the left hand side of the screen. * The VT100 emulator now supports displaying and setting an underline color using the "Extended" color mappings control in the Color Dialog... NOTE that if an older color VT100 session now displays underlined fields incorrectly (e.g., black on black!), updating the "Extended" color settings will fix the problem. * The "Control Print..." dialog now allows you to set top and bottom margins for QuickDraw printing. (Note: the right margin field does not clip the drawing; it is used only to center the page number). Bug fixes: * dataComet's timers no longer rely on a Macintosh Vertical Blanking Retrace (VBL) routine, since this routine fails to keep time correctly under OS8 (and must be removed anyway to port dataComet to the PowerPC). * Using "Control-Menu Select" to get help no longer causes crashes when items in the "Edit Selection" menu are selected (the memory allocated for the names is now longer to avoid overruns). * TFTP has been fixed so that turning off the server no longer causes an infinitely repeating error message ("no buffer return") under OS8. * The Telnet layer no longer reports errors in Telnet terminal type negotiation (since OCLC negotiations always fail...). * The File menu "Open..." dialog now shows all documents by rather than only dataComet documents, so it's easier to open text documents created by other applications. * The Clipboard is now updated correctly when dialog items are cut or copied. You can now use Command-A to "Select All" in dialogs. * Text wrapping in edit windows using the Edit menu command "Add Returns" has been fixed so it no longer replaces the first Carriage Return with a Space if the first character is non-blank. * Cursor motion in edit windows has been fixed so the text cursor moves up and down correctly from the last line when it contains only a Carriage Return and no text thereafter. * Edit window printing no longer adds a leading blank line on the first page of printed output. * "Record macros..." has been fixed so that a rare condition is avoided where the host returned output before the sent data was recorded for automatic match generation, resulting in the generation of a match-string which fails to work. * Using Enter to send text from an edit window to an emulator window now sends the selection to the host when Key Macros are turned off in the emulator window, rather than pasting it at the end of the edit window itself. Enter now sends the whole paragraph, including preceding lines, rather than just the text on and below the line containing the selection. * Bold characters are now drawn for Macintosh font families when color is on. * An error affecting the drawing of screens when scrolling in the scrollback buffer has been fixed, so that incorrect characters no longer appear on the screen. The problem occurred due to a bad blank count accumulating when fonts needed to be switched from a type which has to be clipped for drawing (e.g., Monaco Bold) to one which does not (e.g., Monaco), which could result in the failure to erase or draw a character position at the end of a field. * Likewise, a problem where garbage is left from previously drawn but not-fully-erased characters on the left hand side of characters which require clipping has been fixed. * 3270 session character translation is reset to default ASCII when IBM 3270 -> ASCII linemode fallback occurs so ASCII characters will display correctly while in linemode. ___________________________________________________ 4.43B8 9/15/97 ___________________________________________________ Bug fixes: * A bug afflicted 4.43B6 which allowed a junk "global key macro" to be "allocated" without being zeroed, which could cause a Type 1 Bus Error crash if 1) a key pressed matched the "key code" in the "key macro" and 2) the "key macro" also had a "pointer" to a "macro" to execute which contained an odd address. You might also have gotten "lucky" and execute the "macro" residing at, say, address 0. * The CopyPaste utility now works with dataComet, which now copies the TextEdit Scrap to the Application Scrap with every cut or copy. "Copy" commands used in QuickKeys macros should also now work correctly. You can turn this off if you like using the "Control Global..." option "Zero Scrap" if you wish to conserve memory. In addition, the scrap is no longer "lost" if you "pass through" dataComet with a TEXT scrap in either mode (the scrap was being zeroed on entry but was not being updated on exit unless it had been modified). ___________________________________________________ 4.43B7 9/3/97 ___________________________________________________ Attempted Bug fixes: * The startup code sequence was changed somewhat in an attempt to remedy mysterious crashing problems with 4.43B6 (evidently caused by the key macro bug noted above, fixed in 4.43B8). ___________________________________________________ 4.43B6 9/1/97 ___________________________________________________ Features: * NEW HELP FEATURE! "Control-Command-Key", "Control-Mouse Click", or "Control-Menu Select" will automatically open the relevant dataComet documentation and search for the menu name, button name, or dialog text item selected. * INTERNATIONALIZATION: dataComet 4.43B6 stores all string resources in Macintosh resources so they can be readily translated into languages other than English; see "A5. Internationalizing dC" for more information. * SOCKS: The "Configure Session..." dialog now allows you to specify a SOCKS V4 proxy for Telnet/TN3270 connections. * MODELESS DIALOGS: All dialogs except "Configure Session" have been made modeless, including the "Control Color..." and "Define Macro..." dialogs! Setting colors is now much easier than in previous versions of dataComet. * You can now set global key macros and menu macros using the "Define Macro..." dialog; these macros are saved in the "Comet Default" document, and work in all windows. Macros defined for a particular window will supersede the global macros. * You can now add user-defined macros to the "Macros" menu as named menu items. * "Command-Mouse Click" in emulator windows will now select a word and resolve it as a URL through Internet Config; note you MUST install ICeTEe to support this feature. * "Control-Mouse Click" in emulator windows will now perform an IBM light pen selection, or if that's not appropriate, perform a "copy word/paste/CR" operation (which works very well with host application command interfaces that expect words as commands and list them separately on-screen!). * Translation of "foreign" characters using standard Mac keyboard layouts now works correctly when using either the Comet-Fonts or standard Macintosh fonts. Selecting a new font automatically selects the correct option for "Translation"; you can translate from the Macintosh character set to a session's selected character set by using "Shift-Paste". Using the Enter key to send text to a host from an edit window with a Macintosh-native font will cause it to be automatically translated to the target window's character set. * Bold fonts are automatically selected when a font is selected using the "Font ->" submenu; if no font named " Bold" exists, QuickDraw bolding is used with the selected font, using dataComet's automatic character cell clipping, which will draw more slowly, but will allow the use of any font. You can still select alternate bold fonts manually using the "Bold Font ->" submenu. * New macros: "!AS" performs an IBM light pen operation on the field at the mouse position; "!As" performs an IBM light pen operation on the field at the cursor position. "!CV" and "!Cv" allow you to control the VT100 auto-print mode locally. "!Eg" go to mouse location for replacing single click. "!FD" now prints the selection using Serial Printing; "!Fd" now does a form feed. "!WA" opens items in the Apple menu by name. The "Define Macro..." modeless dialog now allows you to enter menu items directly from the menus using the mouse while you are editing a macro. * The "Control Global" dialog now include two new options, "Open "Comet Default" on launch" and "Clear scrollback buffers automatically". * The "Control Printing..." dialog now allows you to select Serial Printing as a global default, and also set the page length, top offset in lines, and right margin in characters for serial printing. Serial printing now also adds page numbers. * "Shift-Option-Page Up" now automatically deletes all spaces and tabs in the selected text of an edit window. * "Shift-Option-Page Down" now inserts '>' characters in the selected text of an edit window. * "Option-Add Returns" (Option-/) now allows you to set edit windows so that TextEdit's automatic line-wrapping is turned off; the text is shifted automatically so that the cursor will be visible as you move through the text (there is however still no horizontal scrollbar). This makes the edit windows much more useful for editing scripts. * The text selection is now preserved after an edit window is closed, so that the selection appears in the same place when it is re-opened. * The IBM 3278 emulator now indicates insert mode by changing the cursor to a vertical bar, and indicates the "X SYSTEM" wait state by swapping between a block and underline cursor (using the opposite of your preference), rather than displaying "HOST BUSY" in the control bar. * Registered versions of dataComet can have a graphic displayed rather than the standard splash screen (this graphic is stored as the 'PICT' 128 resource in the application; it will be displayed in the window 'WIND' 128 if it is defined, in 'WIND' 0 if it is not). Bug Fixes: * VT100 background and foreground colors are now set correctly when a single character is drawn. * The DEC-Multinational font now includes a 16 point font; the 16 point Bold fonts for DEC-Multinational Bold and ISO-Latin-1 Bold now have international characters properly bolded. * Serial printing wraps edit window text correctly, and inserts three spaces for each Tab character. * The print page count is no longer automatically reset whenever a new print is performed; "Shift-Print Page Now" allows you to reset the page number without causing page eject. * TFTP uploads now work correctly; large uploads crashed due to the failure of some *very* old PC/IP code to allocate a large enough buffer. * The stack size has been increased from 40K to 64K to help avoid situations where the stack overwrites the Macintosh heap (which contains the application's code and data, so this can be very bad!). This sometimes causes an ID=28 error when it occurs; note that the "Stack Sniffer" which generates an ID=28 error only checks for heap collisions every 1/60 second, so heap collisions can occur without being detected. _____________________________________________________________________________