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Beta Testing MacCTC/CTClib

Last updated Thursday 4th November 1999.

This is the CTC beta-testing page. This is the page where I will put the latest progress on the Beta testing front. This is the recommended first page for all Beta-tester of CTC whenever they visit this site.

What's New

Release 2.2 of CTClib is out and downloadable

The original damaged copies of the ZIP archives have been replaced.  I have downloaded these and confirmed that they are okay.  (The manual archive seems to have multiple copies of one file.  I don't know why.  It should be ignored).

What was new

More problems with MacOS8.5

I find that Symantec C++ won't run at all unless virtual memory is switched off.  (Getting off Symantec becomes increasing more pressing, although it will take some time.)

I now have the latest version of CodeWarrior.  I have yet to try to build MacCTC with it.  This will be the next operation, once the new release of CTClib is out.

Bugs found

Regretably a few bugs have shown up.  They are all CTClib bugs so effect CTClib and MacCTC.  Some may effect the Java stuff too.  None are too serious.  See the known bug list for details.

Cancelling Notifications

There is an annoyance (not strictly a bug) in the MacCTC/Eudora interface, that Eudora keeps trying to notify deleted more moved copies of MacCTC when mail arrives.  Eudora does not seem (-lite at least) does not seem to be very good at clearing these out.  The solution is to remove the relevant 'eNot' resources from the Eudora settings file.  To date that has required the use of ResEdit.  To provide a solution for people without ResEdit, I have written a small application StopNotifications which will remove all the MacCTC notification resources from a settings file.  It should be very specific.  It should remove resources only if all of the following are true:-
  1. The file is a preferences file (type 'PREF').
  2. The file is an Eudora file (creator 'CSOm').
  3. The resource is a notification resource (type 'eNot').
  4. The resource is a MacCTC notification (starts "MCTC").
To use StopNotifications you need to:-
  1. Download it.  It is tiny, under 5k even as an BinHex (.hqx)
  2. Shutdown Eudora so the settings file is not open.
  3. Double click on StopNotifications.
  4. Select the appropriate settings file in the open file dialogue. The dialogue will only display Eudora Settings files.
This will delete all MacCTC notification requests.  You can re-establish the ones you want simply by running Eudora and the appropriate copy of MacCTC at the same time.  Provided the 'Process mail on Arrival' box is checked it will request notification.

MacOS 8

Version 2.1 was built on MacOS 7.5, but since then I have installed MacOS8.5.  The good news is that this does not seem to have had any effect on MacCTC at all.  It works fine under both.  The bad news is that the HTML editor I was using (AOLPress) won't run at all, and the development environment (Symantec C++ v8.5) has developed some minor problems.

CodeWarrior

Due to problems with Symantec C++ (mainly that Symantec have dropped the product), I have been planning to move to Metrowerks CodeWarrior for some time.  The difficulty is that I need Think-C Class Library (the Symantec class library that MacCTC is built on) ported to CodeWarrior.  There are ports available but they seem to be fairly specific about the version of TCL, CW and MacOS you are using.  My best attempt so far has get the library compiled without errors (first time yesterday).  However I still cannot load it.  (Even when that is done I then have to port the application.)
I conclude that I need the latest version of CW (I am on Pro-3, the latest is Pro-4), and more disc space.  The latter requires a new Mac.  I was thinking of upgrading some time this year anyway.
Moving to CW would in someways, (especially for other people wishing to build their own variants) a retrograd step.  It would mean that there would be two development systems that needed to be purchased to do the build.  This is regretable but I cannot continue indefinitely on an unsupported system.  It does add extra doubt to the likely longevity of the C++ version.  It is increasingly likely that future versions of MacCTC will be built in Java.

Scripting

MacCTC would be a lot more useful if it was more scriptable.  This is the next planned improvement.  The released version already has some minimal scripting.  The development version has extended this, and the 'edit' and 'windows' menus are now scriptable.  [This is true if the operations are invoked in other ways, e.g. by command-keys;  The programme is 'factored' so that it will record scripts.]
The next development will be 'factoring' and hence making scriptable the main cryptographic operations.  However this requires careful thought.  If anyone with experience of AppleScripts has any opinions on how this should be done please drop me a line.

Download Problems

People attempting to download two of the CTCjava files were having problems, due to the files being returned as content-type "text/plain". To fix this the files have been put in .zip archives that the server does return correctly.

Release 2.1 is out!

This is not a dramatic change, but does include a lot of bug fixes and new key management functions in MacCTC. See the release notes of CTClib and MacCTC for details.

CTCjava

Mr Tines has been doing a lot of work with Java and there is now a separate page for this aspect of the project.

New Web-site Style

The web-site look has been changed with a few icons and a background change. The change should have very little effect on download times. There is only about 13kb of images in total.  The pages have only been increase in size by a few hundred bytes. However the effect is, I hope, a significantly better looking site. Please tell me what you think.

As yet this has not been extended to the manual pages. I may do this at a later date but for the moment they are simple text.

Where we are

Known bugs list
This is the list of everything that I know is wrong with the current release.
Wish list
This is the list of things people have asked for, but wish aren't planned yet. Comments on these are welcome.

Where we are going

Originally I had expected a number of applications on the lines of MacCTC. However that does not seem to have happened. Basically there are no other full CTC based applications around, or at least none we know about.

In the meantime, Java has arrived and looks like forming a way of building platform independent applications. For cryptography, Java has another major advantage. The virtual machine enforces the encapsulation of Classes. That is if you build a secure cryptographic class and link it to other code, the other code cannot interfere with its operation. By contrast in C, any part of the program can overwrite any other part of the program's data. You can properly audit a Java program merely by auditing the cryptography components. To proper audit a C program you need to audit the whole program.

Ultimately I think this means that in the medium to long term, Java is the way to go. That said CTClib(in C) and MacCTC are likely to be around for some time. MacCTC is going to be my personal crypto-engine for a year or two at least. However I expect that MacCTCjava will take over the top-of-range Macintosh offering in our range within a few years. MacCTC will continue to serve the role of providing for people with older machines which may not have a suitable Java VM. (My current development Mac. hasn't got one for example.) While there are still people with Mac.s that need it, MacCTC will continue to be supported even if it isn't developed much further. Likewise CTClib will continue to be available for programmer who are using C. 

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