Parlance features and compatibility

Features

• Careful adherence to Macintosh UI guidelines.
• Threaded display of conferencing messages and internal mail.
• One-touch browsing using the space bar and return key:
  • Hot keys for "Skip Thread", "Skip Topic", "Defer Topic" etc.
• One-keystroke blinks, automatable via AppleScript and robust enough to run unattended.
• Built-in, self-contained comms:
  • transparently uses telnet via any ISP;
  • no worrying about modem init strings and all that;
  • no messing around with extensions and plug-ins;
  • can be set to close the PPP session if Parlance opened it, minimising telephone bills;
  • carefully tuned to take full advantage of broadband connections.
  • SSHv2 support is planned (Mac OS X only).
• Mac-savvy downloads, automatically dealing with BinHex, MacBinary, etc.
• Tight integration with the Mac OS via drag-and-drop and Mac OS X Services:
  • system-wide, cross-application drag-and-drop text editing;
  • drag-and-drop of any object produces a URL or bookmark which can be invoked by any savvy Mac OS app (even the lowly Notepad and Stickies);
  • drag-and drop file upload and download is planned.
• Advanced integration with the Mac OS via AppleScript:
  • the entire messagebase is exposed to AppleScript in an object-oriented manner;
  • lets you extend Parlance even if you aren't a programmer;
  • lets you do your own processing of incoming messages, even involving lookups to other conferences, as in the famous backgammon reply script;
  • allows integration with for example:
    • Finder folders
    • Palm desktop
    • text to speech
    • Perl
    • other mail, web and ftp applications
  • users can script any task that the GUI can do and many that it cannot;
  • several starter scripts are provided.

Compatibility

Version 0.6 and later: PowerPC Macs running Mac OS 9 or greater and CarbonLib 1.5 or greater, or Mac OS X 10.1 or greater.

Version 0.5: 68020 or better, running System 7.5.5 or greater.

For version 0.5:

• System 7.1 and up is likely to work but not officially supported.
• Appearance Manager 1.0.4 is strongly recommended but not required.
• Navigation Services will be used if 1.1 or greater (1.0 was too buggy to link against).

RAM requirements for Classic Mac OS depend very much on the maximum number of messages that you'll encounter in any one topic, but an allocation of 10MB is suggested and 5MB is a minimum. If you have topics with shed-loads of messages, expect to have to increase the RAM partition accordingly.