Release notes for version 1.0.0.
Indolence is a disease brought on by wealth, I swear it! (grin)
See the deal is, now that we're a two Mac household,
we're just too
damn lazy to run up and down the stairs to ask each
other
questions. Do you have the phone books? Did I leave
my protractor
on your desk? What was that job number again? You get
the picture:
the added convenience and productivity was wearing us
out...
Hence: Ping!
We needed the simplest features of a network mail package
without
all the bells and whistles, without the hardware and
INITwitware
commitments, and without the damnable expense. In the
service of
stupid questions, Ping! is a workable if largely brain
dead answer.
And the price is right...
That Ping! thing...
Ping! works like this: you run it on two or more PEER-TO-PEER
networked Macintoshes. "Peer-to-peer" is important,
which is why I
screamed it: Ping! is not built to work on networks
where the Macs
are merely docile slaves of a tyrannical Serverobot.
Ping! expects
the Macs it talks to to be servers in their own right,
full peers
of the other servers on the net. We're using it with
System 7's
file sharing, but I built it in such a way that it _should_
(famous
last words) work with any peer-to-peer topology (e.g.,
TOPS or
other EtherTalk set-ups).
You launch it from each of the Macs. The memory footprint
is small
(96K), so the ideal case would be to put an alias of
Ping! in you
Startup Items folder, so that it launches with every
boot. When you
Send a Ping!, the text you type is kicked across the
net to the
workstation you specify. On that machine, the ping sound
rings out,
and the user has the option of taking a look at what
you wrote or
ignoring you. When another user sends you a Ping!, you
get the same
results. Ping! runs unobtrusively in the background,
so you can
attend to the message when time permits.
Even though Ping! is designed to take advantage of certain
System 7
features, it is nevetheless System 6 compatible.
Under the hatch...
Ping! cheats. It doesn't really do the network thing,
it presents a
net-like face to what is actually pretty pedestrian
data
processing. Why is this so? Two reasons, one sound and
reasonable
and the other mercenary. The mercenary reason: deep
net-hacking is
time-consuming, crash-prone and very, very boring; anything
more
than a few hours work would have defeated _my_ purpose
in writing
this: to get the thin slice of netmail I need without
spending a
lot of money and time on a commercial netmail package.
The sound
and reasonable reason: a deeply net-hacked solution
would present
compatibility problems with every different network
topology in
MacLand. By faking our way to the same end, we have
a solution that
_should_ work irrespective on the hardware details of
the network,
and, in principle, could be adapted to work on mixed-platform
networks.
What we're doing is this: a Ping! message is a file
named "Ping*".
Ping! looks for that file each time through its event
loop. When it
finds it, it immediately renames it (to "Pingo")
to avoid having
it hosed by other incoming messages, then opens it and
reads and
displays the (first 240 characters of) the contents,
then deletes
it. When you Send a Ping!, you're simply writing a file
named
"Ping!*" to the selected station. Very simple...
We're cheaping it out as regards the stations, also.
We're showing
all mounted volumes, not all of which are necessarily
network
nodes. You can't Ping! your own node, however, which
probably
wrecks utterly your chances of getting on Geraldo...
(grin)
Ping! messages are impermanent and cannot be copied
or saved. If
you need a file from a user, you need that person to
send you a
file. Ping! messages are intended to shuffle off this
mortal coil
without leaving footprints. If Ping! is not in memory,
incoming
messages will overwrite each other, one after the other,
and only
the last will be visible when you relaunch Ping!.
Question 1: why not an INIT? Because I hate INITs, shared
memory in
general, and plaintive Email from chrashing users. So
there...
Question 2: why not the Notification Manager or some
other more
elaborate scheme? Because ignoring electronic mail is
everyone's
right. If you don't want to suffer the pings and arrows
of other
people's misfortune, you shouldn't have to.
Question 3: what gives with the name? Ping was a Unix
utility that
did something not completely dissimilar to Ping!. It
polled the net
looking for users, reporting who was logged on. It didn't
actually
initiate communication, just pinged for users like a
sonar device.
This Ping! thing does more than that, but the truth
of the matter
is that I like the name and _love_ the cool sound. (grin)
That's it, I think. If Ping! doesn't work for you, let
me know. If
you gain weight, it's not my fault...
Best,
Greg Swann
gswann@primenet.com
1006 West Main Street, #101
Mesa, AZ 85201
5/7/93
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