Technical specifications


AutoShare, a freeware EIMS companion application.
A list server and auto-responder for the Macintosh.
This document is copyright © 1998 Mikael Hansen.

Table of Contents

While technical specifications are, well, technical, they may lead to insight not offered elsewhere in the documentation and so serve as a useful source of information.

AutoShare Preferences and list-specific configuration

You may skip the section on The AutoShare Preferences file and its list-specific configuration, if you prefer to do so. All preferences, only in part supported by the user interface of AutoShare, are fully scriptable as described in the notes on the AutoShare scriptability. You may also wish to go straight to the AutoShare Admin application, whose user interface benefits from the full scriptability of AutoShare and so has access to all preferences.

The terms default and override are used often in this section. The generic meaning of these two words is applied to the list-specific configuration of AutoShare to indicate, that if you don't go out of your way to configure a given setting for a list, the respective general setting will be used instead. Many lists frequently share the same settings, which conveniently may be configured on the general level (a list-specific setting defaults to a general setting), whereas truly list-specific settings may be configured on a list level (a list-specific setting overrides a general setting). As a rule, strings being blank and numeric values of -1 are most often the override values indicating default.

The AutoShare Preferences file resides in the AutoShare folder within the System 7 Preferences folder and is created automatically by AutoShare, when starting up.

List-specific settings

AutoShare also initializes the list-specific settings in this file by creating standard default values, when starting up. The list-specific configuration is stored in STR# 1001 and upwards, one STR# per list. Index numbers for fields and description of values within these are:

General list settings

STR# 1000 holds the general configuration for lists and uses the layout of fields and values for the list-specific settings. You probably have to update the configuration for only some of the fields for a given list: if the fields marked in the general configuration contain the same data as you would like to apply to the list, they are considered default values for the list if you leave the respective list-specific fields alone.

Miscellaneous settings

Some server configuration not relating to lists is kept in STR# 201 (string values default to blank):

The user interface of AutoShare takes care of STR# 1000,2, STR# 201,3 plus all configuration in STR# 202, 203,1-6 and 204. The rest cannot be configured within the AutoShare interface. You may use a resource editor (such as ResEdit), or much better, an OSA-compliant scripting language such as AppleScript (specific commands are supported in most cases, the SetRes command is needed in a few instances only) to update your configuration for the above.

All of the configuration data may be viewed in the AutoShare Analysis file. Or perhaps best is the user interface of the AutoShare Admin, which communicates with AutoShare via scripting.

PowerPC native AutoShare

AutoShare, written using Metrowerks CodeWarrior Pro 4, is both 68K (in the 68K folder) and PowerPC (in the PPC folder) native. AutoShare is written in the Pascal and C languages. The 68K native server application requires 832K of memory.

The development environment of AutoShare does not rely on a framework such as PowerPlant or MacApp. The PowerPC native version is compiled and linked directly from sources to application and does not use a PowerPC conversion tool such as MacApp2PPC.

When AutoShare 1.0 was released, it was the first 68K list server for the Mac, and with the release of version 1.1, AutoShare was also the first true PPC native list server for the Mac.

Last updated on December 30 1998 by Mikael Hansen