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From: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Subject: Re: How to improve CommToolbox...
Message-ID: <1991Mar27.183735.27833@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 91 18:37:35 GMT
References: <50881@apple.Apple.COM>
Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: University of Illinois at U-C
Lines: 41

The Apple Modem Tool (1.0.1):

It needs to learn about modems with MNP-5 or other forms of
compression.  It currently does exactly the wrong thing with them
(changes serial port baud rate to bps rate of the line).

It should be possible (and documented) for our support people to
teach it about new modem types.

It should behave predictably when cmQuiet is off; it some errors
gives the user alerts, others just returns error codes to the calling program.

It should be more tolerant of aberrant modem behavior; it's typical for
a strangely configured modem to bring the mac to a halt.

The Connection Manager:

MacTCP's SendWDS would be a handy addition.

It would be nice if Connection Manager synchronous calls gave time
to other processes, at least optionally.

Some form of connection sharing would be nice.  I'd like both a
locking mechanism ("It's mine now, hands off!"  or "Ok, your turn."),
as well as a 'tee' facility, where two different apps could have
a crack at the same data stream (handy for debugging...).

It would be nice if the app were notified when the user changed connection
tools in CMChoose (why?  because I'd like to restore the settings the
user was using the last time it used a particular connection tool).  Maybe
I could do this now with idleProc, but I'm unclear on how to do it
without causing compatibility problems down the road.


Finally, it would be nice if there was some sort of user-level scripting
facility built in somewhere; probably into the Connection Manager.  The
script would be 'run' before the connection was handed to my application,
and possibly another at closing time.  It wouldn't have to be really fancy.
--
Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner