Part of the Internet Config website. 6/5/96.

User Documentation for Internet Config

The Internet Configuration System was designed to make your life easier by reducing the number of times which you need to enter your Internet preferences into the various preferences dialogs of all your Internet applications.

For example, currently you need to enter your Email address into many common Macintosh Internet applications, for example Eudora, NewsWatcher and Anarchie. The goal of the system was to get each of these applications to get this information from one common place and to give you a tool to edit these common preferences.

It is important to realise that applications will have to be modified to take advantage of the Internet Configuration System. It will take some time for all applications to be revised and until then you will have to enter your preferences in those applications in the traditional manner. You can find a list of the applications that currently support Internet Config in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document included in this distribution.

System Requirements

The Internet Configuration system requires at least System 6 and works best under System 7 or later. It does not require MacTCP and it makes sense to install it even if you're not directly connected to the Internet.

Quick Start

Run the Internet Config application. If it asks you whether you want to install the Internet Config Extension, say yes. Click on each button in the Main dialog in turn, enter appropriate preferences. [If you don't understand an item turn on Balloon Help or look it up in the reference section at the end of this document.] Save and quit.

It is important to realise that you don't have to set every preference. For example, if you don't use WAIS then there's no need to set your WAIS Gateway preference.

Parts of the System

At the user level, the system contains 3 important parts:

The most important is the Internet Config application. When you run this application it creates and installs the Internet Config Extension and creates a default Internet Preferences file.

For the programmer there is a separate distribution that contains all the files needed to make an Internet Config aware program.

Internet Configuration Application Reference

The Internet Configuration application works much like any other Macintosh application. The basic document for the application is a Internet Preferences preference file.

Unlike most Macintosh application, when you launch the ICApp it does not create a new untitled document. Instead it opens the Internet Preferences file in your preferences folder (creating it if it isn't there). This is useful because, unless you're doing something strange, you need never use the standard document features (New, Open, Save, etc). Instead all you need to do is launch the application, modify your preferences and then quit with saving.

Menus

The following commands are available in the menu bar:

Dialogs

The Main dialog is opened whenever you open a preferences file. It has 8 buttons (with cutesy colour icons) that let you open other dialogs

The Personal dialog lets you edit all sorts of preferences related to your person. These include:

The Email dialog lets you edit preferences related to Email. These include:

The News dialog lets you edit preferences related to News. These include:

The File Transfer dialog lets you edit preferences related to the transfer of files (except file types, which have their own dialog). These include:

Archie is a protocol for searching archive sites looking for files. There are a number of Archie servers around the world. In theory these should all be the same but sometimes it's useful to use one in preference to another.

Info-Mac and UMich are two big archives of Macintosh software. They are often very busy and won't let you on. To get around this you can get files from other machines that mirror these archives. Some software will use the preferences here to automatically route requests to your preferred mirror.

The Other Services dialog is a collection of preferences that didn't fit in anywhere else. These include:

The Fonts dialog lets you set your preferred List, Screen and Printer font. The List font is used in summary listings, such as mailbox summaries or FTP directory listings, while the Screen font is used whenever non-proportional text is display, such as mail message or news posting windows. The Printer font is used when non-proportional text is printed.

The File Types dialog lets you view and edit the table that is used to set the Macintosh file type and creator of incoming files based on their extension. If you don't understand this dialog then please don't worry. We've done our best to set up appropriate defaults.

The Helpers dialog lets you view and edit the table that is used to determine which application to run when a specific URL is accessed. For example, ICeTEe uses this table to determine what application to run when you command click a URL.

System 6 Notes

All of the Internet Configuration documentation assumes that you are running under System 7. Under System 6 some things are slightly different from what is stated in the documentation. The most important thing is the placement of the files. Under System 6 the Internet Config Extension and the Internet Preferences file are always placed in the System Folder. Also some non-critical parts of the system may not work under System 6.

The entire Internet Configuration system has been tested under System 6 and should work happily. Having said that, you are warned that the system has had a lot more testing under System 7 than System 6 and there may be System 6 specific problems still lurking. If you find any, please report them to us.

Credits

The official support address for Internet Config is internet-config@share.com. If you find a bug in IC then please forward details to that address. If you want to discuss IC in general then I suggest you host that discussion on the comp.sys.mac.comm newsgroup.

The Internet Configuration System was written by Quinn "The Eskimo!" and Peter N Lewis over a period of too many late nights and weekends. Certain important chunks of code were contributed by Marcus Jager and Stuart Cheshire. We would like to thank all of those on the Internet Config mailing list and all of the developers who have adopted the system.

The entire Internet Config system is public domain and can be redistributed without restriction.

This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Wed, Jun 5, 1996 at 9:01:43 AM. Thanks for checking it out! Dave