Created by ic@stairways.com
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 windows of all your Internet applications.
For example, currently you need to enter your email address into many common Macintosh Internet applications, for example Claris Emailer, 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.
The Internet Configuration system requires System 7 or late, and Component Manager.
If you've never heard of Component Manager, that's OK. It's installed as part of System 7.1 and above, and as part of QuickTime. So chances are that it's already on your computer. You can just run IC and it will tell you if you don't have it installed.
If you do not have System 7 or Component Manager installed, you can not use this version of IC. IC 1.4 and below do not have these requirement. You can FTP old versions of IC from the IC home site.
IC does not require MacTCP or Open Transport, and it makes sense to install it even if you're not directly connected to the Internet.
Run the Internet Config application. If it asks you whether you want to install the Internet Config Extension, say that you do. Click on each button in the Main window 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, there's no need to set your WAIS Gateway preference. The preferences that you most probably want to set (grouped by window) are:
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 (in the Extensions folder) and creates a default Internet Preferences file (in the Preferences folder).
For programmers there is a separate distribution that contains all the files needed to make an Internet Config aware program.
The Internet Configuration application works much like any other Macintosh application. The basic document for the application is an Internet Preferences preference file.
Unlike most Macintosh applications, when you launch the Internet Configuration application 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.
The following commands are available on the Apple menu:
About Internet Config
This opens the about box. Do not bother looking for magical Easter Eggs; we were much too busy to mess with that sort of thing. You can, however, click on the blue underlined text to view the latest IC FAQ or mail the Internet Config support address.
The following commands are available on the File menu:
These commands work as you would expect in a normal Macintosh application, with one exception. The application can only have one preferences file open at any point in time, so when you open a new preferences file, by Open or New , the previous one is automatically closed. The Open Internet Preferences command opens the default set of Internet Preferences (in your Preferences folder), which is useful if you accidentally close the window.
The Edit menu is used for editing text.
The Sets menu allows you to create multiple independent sets of preferences for different users of the computer, or different Internet personalities of the same user. The Sets menu contains the following commands:
The Duplicate command allows you to create a new set by duplicating the current set. The Rename command allows you to give a new name to the current set. The Delete command lets you delete the current set. The remaining items on the Sets menu allow you to switch between sets.
The Extension menu lets you install the Internet Config Extension in your Extensions folder. As IC does this when you first launch it, there is rarely any point to this. It also allows you to save a copy of the extension without installing it.
The Window menu allows you to open or bring to front any of the configuration windows.
The Help menu (under Mac OS 7.6.1 and earlier, this is on the right side of the menu bar with a question mark icon) lets you turn on Balloon Help. The application has full Balloon Help support.
The Main window is opened whenever you open a preferences file. It has 10 buttons (with cutesy colour icons) that let you open the other windows.
The Personal window lets you edit all sorts of preferences related to your person. These include:
The Email window lets you edit preferences related to email. These include:
The News window lets you edit preferences related to News. These include:
The World Wide Web window lets you edit preferences related to the World Wide Web. These include:
The File Transfer window lets you edit preferences related to the transfer of files (except file types, which have their own window). 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 window is a collection of preferences that didn't fit in anywhere else. These include:
The Fonts window 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. The Screen font is used to display monospaced text, such as the body of mail or news messages. The Printer font is used to print monospaced text.
The File Mappings window 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 window then please don't worry. We've done our best to set up appropriate defaults. If you have any problems with file transfers, then resetting to factory defaults will probably help.
The Helpers window 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.
The Firewalls window lets you configure firewall information. Most commercial organisations on the Internet have firewalls that prevent unauthorised access to the organisation's network from outside. Sometimes these firewalls require you to specially configure your Internet applications. Internet Config maintains a central copy of this special configuration for all applications to use.
If you find a bug in Internet Config then please forward details to the official support address for Internet Config. Please read the Internet Config FAQ before sending messages to this address. If you want to discuss Internet Config in general then we 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 way too many late nights and weekends. Certain important chunks of code were contributed by Marcus Jager and Stuart Cheshire. Craig Richmond provided a lot of help sorting out the default MIME mappings. Much of the extension to type mapping information was gleaned from Robin D H Walker's Extension-to-Type mappings file. Eric Kidd maintains the Internet Config web site and also gave invaluable insight into the problems of override components. John Norstad graciously contributed the resource fork sanity checking code from his legendary Disinfectant anti-virus utility.
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.
The latest version of Internet Config can be FTPed from the home sites in Australia and the USA.
This section contains information about the various released versions of Internet Config, in reverse order:
ICFindPrefHandle routine, which
supplants ICGetPrefHandle and provides better
semantics.
Comments: ic@stairways.com