QVT/Net 4.0

 

Notes on this release

 

News: the storage format for downloaded news has been changed. You should unsubscribe, then resubscribe to all of your newsgroups. The next download will establish the new format.

FTP Server: a bug has been fixed that made it difficult or impossible to access the root directory.

Terminal: a ‘View’ menu has been added, which allows you to selectively hide or show various window elements, such as the toolbar and status bar.

FTP Client: a bug in the command-line interface, that made it impossible to send or receive files from the command line, has been fixed.

FTP Client: a progress bar is now displayed for downloads as well as uploads.

FTP Client: a ‘Minimize’ checkbox has been added to the ‘File Transfer’ dialog. If you check this box prior to launching the transfer, the FTP window will be minimized during the transfer.

FTP Client: the ‘File - Open’ menuitem now remains enabled during a session, so that you can change to a new user ID after opening the session.

Mail: a new feature has been added which allows you to attach your own notes to locally-stored mail messages. These notes remain separate from the message itself, and are a way for you to make comments on the message which are private and for your own benefit. This new feature is accessed via the ‘View/Edit Notes’ menuitem.

SMTP Server: performance during the downloading of messages has been improved. Also, the server is now multithreaded, so that several simultaneous connections can be serviced.

Mail: the interface for attaching binary files has been improved. First, a default ‘browse’ directory has been added to the ‘Preferences’ dialog. This will be the first directory searched when you click on the ‘Browse’ button. Second, an MRU list facility has been added. The five most-recently-used filenames are saved and made available by clicking the ‘MRU’ button, thus bypassing the ‘browse’ operation entirely.

Terminal: support for the ‘blink’ attribute has been added.

News: download performance has been improved.

Terminal: a ‘severity’ statement has been added to the script language. By issuing the statement ‘severity continue’ at the beginning of a script, you allow the script to continue even if a timeout occurs on a ‘wait’ statement (the default behavior is for the script to abort). This in turn allows the use of a ‘goto’ statement to modify the flow of a script depending on whether a ‘wait’ succeeds or fails. The two flavors of ‘goto’ are ‘if_err_goto’ and ‘if_noerr_goto’, which can be used as appropriate to the situation. The target of a ‘goto’ must be a label, which is a line consisting of the label text preceded by a colon (‘:’). This format is the same as that used in MS-DOS batch files.

FTP Server: the name of the ‘password’ file is now fixed. The name of the file must be ‘ftppass’, and it must be located in the FTP server’s working directory (as determined by the ‘Properties’ dialog). If you are now using a name other than ‘ftppass’, you must rename the file, and possibly relocate it as well.

News: it is now possible to unsubscribe a newsgroup even if no News session is open.

FTP: there is now a timeout on all FTP commands. If a command fails to complete within two minutes, the command will be aborted, and the connection will be terminated. Note that this does not mean that file transfers must complete within two minutes; the timeout refers to simple command-and-response situations, in which the client issues a command, and the server gives an immediate response (e.g., the PWD command). The general rule is, if the client is in a state where data is expected from the server, and a period of two minutes elapses in which no data is received, then the timeout process will execute.

Terminal: a ‘homedir’ directive has been added to the [defaults] section of TERM.INI. The value of this (optional) directive will be the name of the directory where TERM.CFG and other files of this type are stored. By placing TERM.INI in the \WINDOWS directory, and including a ‘homedir=’ statement, you can assure that QVT/Term will be able to find its configuration files even when launched from within a Web browser (rather than from a Win 95 ‘shortcut’).

News: a new menuitem - ‘Harvest URLs’ - has been added to the ‘Articles’ menu. Invoking this menuitem will cause QVT/News to search all articles in the current newsgroup for URL’s. The results of the search will be displayed in a text window, from which point you can cut and paste the information to another destination.

FTP Server: it is now possible (but not required) to associate an initial login directory with individual users.

FTP Client: you can now set up FTP so that it will not do an automatic listing of each directory that you access. This is to speed things up if you are caught in a very slow FTP session, and also to account for situations where you do not have permission to list directories.

News: there have been some changes in the way that articles are stored. First of all, the entire contents of each subscribed newsgroup are now kept in one file, instead of multiple files in a subdirectory. The file will have the same name as the newsgroup itself. Secondly, outgoing articles are kept in a file named ‘Postings’, rather than as separate files in a subdirectory. Lastly, articles that you ‘Save’, and extracted binary files, will be kept in a subdirectory named ‘Saved Articles’.

22. News: a ‘global’ killfile has been introduced. This can be used to suppress articles from certain authors, or on certain subjects, regardless of which newsgroup you’re reading. To store a new killfile entry in the global killfile, select ‘<All>’ from the dropdown newsgroup list before clicking on the ‘Add User’ or ‘Add Subject’ button.

 

nazaj