Posted 2026-03-08 | Back to blog index
Here's my second MARCHintosh project for 2026 - TalkCrawler Lite! A little program to keep track of which GlobalTalk printers and shares you've visited or left a greeting on!
I rushed this one out so I can get to using it, so it's less polished than Chat, and might not work so hot on 68k Macs. I'm not sure why opening files is so damn slow.
Demo video in the first reply. Available on Blackbird or landisk on the BaroNet share.
Again this is another re-creation of one of my 2025 HyperCard stacks as a native tool to make it more handy to use. The “Lite” signifier comes because it doesn't have the deep browsing tools or statistics of the HyperCard version.
All my C/Toolbox experience on Chat helped me get this into working shape much quick than Chat!
When I say I rushed it… The file creation date on TalkCrawler.c is Mar 4, 11 PM, and I posted the release toot on Mar 8, 10 PM. And on the weekdays I had work!
I planned to release it yesterday so today I could leisurely work on a print/calling card & have fun browsing GlobalTalk, but stayed up until 2 AM trying to nail down a memory corruption bug and just gave up.
Adding another day worked out well because I had the time to add this animation, making it all worth it!
And while I skimped out on implementing the main functionality (there is no reason this should need 1+ MB of RAM to function) I did make sure to manually implement the important MacOS-ey bits:
• Cmd-period for cancel
• Option-click for expand all
• The AppleEvent for opening a file actually works
• “Do you want to save changes" dialog with all it's edge cases (quitting with multiple windows open…)
• Cmd-D for "Don't Save”
• An actual help window
The original inspiration for making this native version was seeing that using native APIs on MacOS 9, I could scan all of GlobalTalk in 9 seconds flat. This video is real-time, not edited at all, real PM G4
The AppleTalk APIs have a way to ask how many concurrent requests are supported. Sys7 says 2-4, OS 9 says 10. Exceed that on Sys7, it gives an error. On OS 9... it works?
Problem is, 1/10 times you "cheat" like this on OS 9, you get invalid results - the OS puts machines in the wrong zone!
(I have to admit I've had an obsession with progress animations ever since this guy battled his way through our family Mac Classic hard disk back in like 1992)
1.0.1 is out now, fixing several memory leaks (before saving leaked memory so it would crash after you saved like 4 times) as well as reducing total memory usage during a scan.
TalkCrawler 1.1 is out. It adds search and you can click in the margin to add notes to an entry. Search will also search the notes so it's handy for putting usernames/socials or something in if you like me easily forget who is what zone.
(Notes are limited to 255 chars so your draft of a love letter will not fit)
