Haven't had a chance to add a news entry for it yet, but early last week fTelnet was added to HP's webOS App Catalog! Already a few people have pointed out that the webOS virtual keyboard doesn't have arrow keys (and the bluetooth keyboard's arrow keys don't seem to be supported outside the core webOS OS), so I have an updated release in the queue that adds an arrow icon overlay to the bottom-right corner of the flash control. It's been 'Ready for Review' for a few days now, so hopefully it'll be updated and available any day now.

In addition to a webOS version, I also ported fTelnet to run on the BlackBerry PlayBook as an AIR app. I really didn't have any interest in going further than the TouchPad, since that's all I own, but then I read about the free PlayBook tablet offer and couldn't resist! Just received confirmation earlier this afternoon that my app has been accepted, so it's now on RIM's BlackBerry App World! As with the webOS version, this one has a new release in the queue that will address the missing arrow keys, but it'll probably take somewhat longer for this update to appear since there's LOTS of developers trying to get a free PlayBook, so their review team is stretched pretty thing right now.

In the next little while I'll probably investigate porting fTelnet to Android, which also supports AIR apps, so it should also be pretty simple. Since my TouchPad is running an early alpha of "ice cream sandwich" I'm not sure how useful it will be for debugging, so I may or may not be able to work on this right away.

From what I understand iOS also supports AIR apps now, which means the $600 barrier to entry (bottom of the line Mac mini) should no longer exist, but until Apple removes the $99/yr developer program membership fee, don't expect to see fTelnet on your iPad.

Another oops...I uploaded the wrong WBA.exe yesterday, so Chrome 16+ was STILL broken! So if you downloaded 11.11.02 yesterday or earlier today, then please download it again. Hopefully that's got it fixed now!

Oops, totally forgot to upload the new release with the updated WBA, which added support for the latest version of Chrome. I've now finally uploaded it, although since it was only WBA and not fTelnet that was changed, I didn't bother increasing the version number. So if you use WBA, please download 11.11.02 again, and if you don't use WBA, then just ignore this post.

On somewhat related news, fTelnet was finally accepted into the HP webOS App Catalog early last week! I've already got a second release in the review stage, so an update is already on the way. And in addition to that, someone pointed out there's no way to use the cursor keys (since the TouchPad's virtual keyboard doesn't have arrow keys, and the bluetooth keyboard's arrow keys don't work in Flash), so a new update should be coming shortly with an on-screen overlay that will allow you to use arrow keys.

Also on a somewhat related note, I've ported fTelnet to the BlackBerry PlayBook, since they're running a promotion giving free PlayBooks to developers right now. So anybody with a PlayBook can look for that in the BlackBerry App World soon! (They're backed up due to the large number of submissions they recently received, so I'm not too sure exactly how soon though!)

Happy New Year! Thought I'd share this screenshot of fTelnet running on my HP Touchpad! I picked one up during the fire sale awhile back, and haven't had much use for it until now! And the coolest part of all is that webOS allows me to embed a proxy server, so you can use it like a REAL telnet client, and not require the remote side to be running a flash socket policy server!

Also, for those of you using WBA, I'm hoping to get a new release out later tonight to support the latest version of Chrome (HtmlTerm currently won't work with it).

(click to enlarge)

Forgot to put the crossdomain.xml file in place, so RIP mode was unable to load a necessary file from www.ftelnet.ca, which was causing it to fail. It's now in place, so hopefully RIP will finally work!

I've just released a new version with an update for WBA and a (hopefully) fix for the RIP icon problem. I don't have LORD installed to test right now, so please let me know if it does or does not load the RIP icons now.

I've just released a new version with a bugfix for WBA and a bunch of changes to fTelnet. Most of the changes to fTelnet are rather unimportant feature wise, but helped reduce the size of the .swf greatly! I'm a little concerned I may have broke something in the process, so if you notice anything not working right, please drop me a line.

I've just fixed a bug in fTelnet that was causing the RIP parser to work incorrectly in some cases, resulting in a blank screen. This was known to affect NetFoss and Renegade, and there were possibly others. So if you tried to use fTelnet in RIP mode with your BBS and found it didn't work, then try again and hopefully it works now (and let me know if it doesn't!

OK, the updated HtmlTerm and WBA have just been uploaded. If you are using either of these products, then I would definitely recommend upgrading (or users of the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome won't be able to connect). If you only use fTelnet, then it's not such a big deal to upgrade since that wasn't updated at all.

Looks like there has been some progress on the HTML5 WebSocket front, and this has caused some problems with HtmlTerm. Basically some of the major browsers have upgraded to a newer version of the WebSocket protocol, and this means that the WebSocket servers (like WBA and Synchronet's websocketservice.js) need to be upgraded too.

I now have the websocketservice.js upgrade complete and am testing it out...if all goes well then I'll upload it to the CVS for everyone else to download, and then I'll use the new logic to upgrade WBA next so I can make a new release of it as well.

Additionally, as of Firefox 6 the WebSocket API has been "temporarily namespaced in prevision of upcoming changes to the specification", which means I'll also need to update HtmlTerm to support it and future versions. I'll make this release at the same time as the new WBA release, so it'll all be made available at once.

The good news is that with these changes, all the major browsers should be supported in one form or another:

• Chrome as of version 4
• Firefox as of version 4
• Internet Explorer as of version 10 developer preview
• Safari as of version 5
• Opera as of version 10.70

Some users have been reporting that ANSI screens haven't been displaying correctly in the latest releases of fTelnet, and it looks like it's because I broke something when adding VT100 support! BBSs expect that the cursor will wrap to the beginning of the next line when something is written to the 80th column of the screen, but that wasn't happening in the newer versions, so some screens displayed poorly as a result.

So that's now fixed, and so screens should be displaying correctly again. If you notice any other issues, please let me know!

fTelnet was hanging when attempting to upload a file under certain circumstances, so I've updated the telnet option negotiation code (which seemed to be the culprit).

A new javascript function ClientSetLocalEcho() has been added, allowing you to enable or disable local echo at the push of a button. Probably could have added a configuration option for this as well, but I guess that'll have to wait for the next release now!

The new WBA was complaining about a missing AutoUpdateURL parameter, so I've removed the auto-update code. It wasn't ever used anyway, since I don't have WBA available as a stand-alone release.

So if you use WBA then this should fix the error, and if you don't run WBA, then I wouldn't bother upgrading because there were no changes to fTelnet since yesterday.

Left a bit of debug code in the last release, which caused the close button to prompt you to open a local file rather than to disconnect you.

Maybe this local file loading will interest somebody, so I've left that functionality in there, but it only works in the disconnected state (so when you're connected the button will act as a disconnect button again)

A new release with experimental RIP and VTxxx terminal emulation support has just been uploaded! As usual, the change log will have a somewhat complete list of changes (I'm bad at keeping a list, so may have forgotten some changes).

I developed a test suite that I'll now use for future versions, which will hopefully catch any obvious bugs in the major features, but if something got through feel free to let me know.

Also, the RIP and VTxxx support is incomplete. For RIP most things work, but there's still a few things left on my TODO list. For VTxxx I've been testing with vttest and most of the displays are correct, but I think the input isn't quite there yet.

Just wanted to post an update about the next release...I was really close to uploading a new version but I had a request for VT100 support come in, and in looking into that I discovered some of the escape sequences were being handled incorrectly, so I'm now in the process of implementing a much more complete, yet simpler, parser. So I apologize to those who I told I would be "uploading a new version later tonight", since that obviously never happened! But hopefully in the next couple days I'll have time to work on and complete the new parser.

Just uploaded a beta version of fTelnet that supports RIPScrip! Support is still in the early stages, so only a small portion of the protocol has been implemented, but it's somewhat usable so I thought I'd upload it for people to have a look at.

With the recent release of Firefox 4, I've had a few people email me letting me know that HtmlTerm isn't working. The issue here is that early beta versions of Firefox 4 did support WebSockets (which is why the message in HtmlTerm mentions Firefox 4 beta suports HtmlTerm), but then support was removed after it was shown to be vulnerable to attacks.

Unfortunately there's nothing that I as the programmer of HtmlTerm, or you as the administrator of your website, can do to fix this -- it's up to each user to individually enable WebSockets support in their browser if they want. I'm working on updating the error message in HtmlTerm to give instructions on how to enable WebSocket support in both Firefox and Opera (since it suffers from the same "disabled by default" problem). Hopefully I'll have a chance to upload this new version this weekend.

I've just uploaded fTelnet and HtmlTerm (and Web BBS Assistant, though it wasn't updated) v11.03.14! It's a fairly minor update from the last beta, so if you've been running that then there's not much new in this, but if you're still using the last non-beta version from last September, then there's been a lot of changes to digest.

Probably the biggest change is that HtmlTerm is now quite functional, so you have a decent alternative to fTelnet for users who don't run an OS supported by Adobe Flash! Although it comes with its own compatibility issues, since not all browsers support all the required HTML5 features yet.

Check out the change log to see exactly what's new, and then download v11.03.14 here.

This is kind of old news, but it slipped under my radar until just now...apparently Apple finally enabled WebSocket support in Safari on the iPhone/iPad as of the 4.2 update. So this means that HtmlTerm will now work on those devices!

The screen is REALLY tiny on my iPod Touch, so I'm not sure how useful HtmlTerm will be on that device, but it might look alright on the much larger iPad. Unfortunately the closest thing I have to an iPad is the iOS Simulator that ships with XCode (which I run on the closest thing I have to a MacBook, my Toshiba Tecra running OSX in VMWare), so it's pretty hard to tell exactly how well it works on that device.

So if you have an iPad, please check it out and let me know how it works. You'll have to click in the textbox to bring up the on-screen keyboard, but after that things should work pretty good. Well except for the fact that the on-screen keyboard doesn't have arrow keys, so if your BBS needs them (lightbar navigation or something), then you're going to have problems. But maybe I'll see about adding arrow key buttons to the webpage so you can use those as necessary.

Just uploaded Beta 4 of fTelnet/HtmlTerm/WBA. Didn't expect to have time to make these changes so soon, or I wouldn't have released Beta3 yesterday!

Anyway, this release includes several changes:

• ClientVars.js has a new ConnectAnsi parameter that you can use to specify a custom location for the connect.ans file. Both fTelnet and HtmlTerm will understand this new setting
• ClientVars.js also has a few new codepages added to support Atari ASCII (ATASCII) systems. Unfortunately this is only partially implemented at this time, so it only half works in fTelnet, and doesn't work in HtmlTerm at all
• HtmlTerm will no longer throw errors when run from IE8. It still won't work, since IE8 doesn't support Canvas or WebSocket, but at least it'll fall-back to fTelnet for those of you using that setup
• WBA had it's interface changed around a little. Now you'll use the close button to hide the form (and double click the tray icon to restore it), and to actually quit theres a File -> Exit menu option

I think that's it. As usual, let me know if you run into any problems.

Just uploaded Beta 3 of fTelnet/HtmlTerm/WBA. The only change in this release fixes a Firefox related fTelnet problem, where the client wouldn't display. Turns out this is due to a change I made to allow for the transparent portions of the border to actually be transparent (rather than white, like they originally were), so unfortunately the only fix for now is to take the transparency back out, which means those of you with dark backgrounds are going to see white pixels in the border again. Sorry!

Just uploaded Beta 2 of fTelnet/HtmlTerm/WBA. This release doesn't change anything for fTelnet/HtmlTerm, but it fixes a bug in WBA that prevented it from acting as a socket policy server in many cases. So if you were having problems getting fTelnet connecting to your BBS while using WBA, please download the updated version.

Oops, forgot to include a DLL necessary for WBA to operate. I've updated the Beta1 archive, so if you previously downloaded it, please download it again.

I've just uploaded a beta version of fTelnet packaged with HtmlTerm and WBA (Web BBS Assistant). This archive includes examples for running either fTelnet or HtmlTerm in stand-alone mode, or for running them in fallback mode (so if the users browser doesn't support the preferred client, it'll try the other client too). It also includes WBA, which implements both a Socket Policy server (for fTelnet) and a WebSocket to Telnet redirector (for HtmlTerm).

If you're feeling brave and would like to give it a try, here's Beta 1. Please let me know if you run into problems with any of the 3 pieces of software, being beta quality I didn't put as much testing in as I normally would for a release version.

I've uploaded a new release of fTelnet...nothing too major in this release (aside from open sourcing under the GPLv3), I've just disabled the min/max buttons (confusing to users), and added Amiga font support (as per a user request). Download the latest version here

I've also implemented a few more features to HtmlTerm (such as file uploads), but I've also transitioned from a proof-of-concept to a full port based on the fTelnet source, and the port isn't ready yet so don't look for the new features to be available on the test page yet. Soon though!

Fixed a bug which prevented Safari from working with HtmlTerm. All should be good with it now.

Made a few minor improvements to HtmlTerm, and also fixed a bug with the ESC[K ANSI escape sequence.

hTelnet has been renamed to HtmlTerm (which in turn has had many improvements made). The hTelnet name didn't really make sense, since the Telnet protocol wasn't being used at all.

For those curious to try the client, I've also created a simple WebSocket to Telnet redirection server. It's also available on the HtmlTerm page.

I've just added a new page to the navigation menu at the top: hTelnet. It's a proof of concept plugin-less BBS client using new HTML5 features. There's no servers supporting the connection yet, so it doesn't do anything, but I thought it was cool enough to upload anyway!

A minor update was released today. It corrects a problem where ProBoard wasn't detecting ANSI, so if you run ProBoard, download the previous version here!

A new release containing a few bugfixes was just uploaded. Rather than repeat all the changes, I'll just point you to the Change Log!

As usual, you can download the previous version here.

A couple feature requests came in, so a new build of fTelnet is available. This release implements a custom ANSI escape sequence that will allow the BBS change the font codepage/size dynamically. Simply have it send ESC [ CP ; WIDTH ; HEIGHT Q, so for example to set CodePage 866 at 9x16, it would look like ESC[866;9;16Q (where ESC is byte 27 (or 1B in hex)). The code to handle incoming TAB characters was also fixed so it is position only, and not destructive. The code to handle outgoing TAB keypresses was also fixed so they're actually sent, rather than having the focus move to the minimize button. A new Screen Capture option is available on the right-click context menu, allowing you to save the screen as a PNG. And lastly, incoming data is processed 1024 bytes at a time, so long/large ANSI screens will display and scroll correctly, rather than pause and just display the last screen of text (I'll probably make the 1024 block size configurable in the future).

As usual, you can download the previous version here.

OK, I guess the last build wasn't the last for awhile, as I've just uploaded a new one already. This one adds one final font optimization to reduce the SWF size without sacrificing performance, but I can't think of what else to do, so this should really be the last for awhile now.

As usual, you can download the previous version here.

What may be the last build for awhile has been uploaded. This new build fixes an annoying problem I had with batch downloading (having to save each file individually) by saving the files in a single TAR file. Hopefully most users will have software to handle this file type. A Save File(s) button also now pops up with a download (batch or otherwise) has completed, making it that much simpler for a user to complete the process. Shortcuts for starting uploads/downloads have also been implemented in the way of CTRL-PAGEUP and CTRL-PAGEDOWN keyboard combos, and the minimize/maximize buttons. And lastly, many new font codepages were also created at the default 9x16 size.

The reason this may be the last build for awhile is because I think I've pretty much got all the features implemented that I want, so I'll only be working on it as problems arise and are reported. I'm still open to feature requests if you think there's something useful that could be added!

As usual, you can download the previous version here.

I've just uploaded a new build of fTelnet. The biggest change in this version is that it's compiled in release mode, shrinking the SWF and speeding it up some. The fonts were also optimized for size and speed, and re-embedded into the SWF (so you can remove them from the img subdirectory, if you have any in there). (Notice the download size dropped from 900k to 150k...that's a lot of optimizing!)

As usual, you can download the previous version here.

I've just uploaded a new build of fTelnet. This version adds a 9x16 font for CodePage 866 (Russian characters), fixes a display problem with custom connect.ans files, removes the statusbar for a cleaner look (popup messages will be added later, if necessary), and updated the file transfer screens a little.

Another release archive has been created, so you can download the previous version here.

I've just uploaded a new build of fTelnet. I don't keep very good track of what I implement between releases, but I think this one implements a new file transfer dialog for uploads and downloads. It also adds new fonts from different codepages, which will hopefully help our international users (please let me know if it does help or not!)

This build is also the first with a release archive, so you can now download fTelnet and try it out for yourself. As always, feedback is appreciated.

(I also resized the website to be a little friendlier to the 1024x768 users, although I couldn't quite shrink it enough to eliminate the scrollbar!)

I've just uploaded a new build of fTelnet. This one fixes a screen clearing bug, where systems sending FORMFEED instead of ESC[2J weren't having the screen cleared. It also implements a new connect button, along with the ability to change it on a per system basis. There's also an intro ANSI that can be changed on a per system basis. And lastly, I rewrote the file transfer code to be easier to maintain (and possibly add fallback support), so hopefully I didn't break anything in the process!

If I don't hear about any problems by end of day today, then a release package will be put together and released tomorrow.

I've just uploaded a new build of fTelnet. This one includes a couple fixes identified by users, and implements batch downloading. The method for starting a transfer has also changed, rather than the CTRL+ALT+U and CTRL+ALT+D that previous versions used, there's now options on the right-click context-menu. After files are downloaded, options to save them will also be added to this context-menu.

If no big errors exist, I hope to put together a release package in the next day or two so it'll be easier to implement fTelnet on your own site.

I've just launched the new website for fTelnet. It's just a copy of my personal website, partly because I really like the design, partly because I'm too lazy to find another design I like better!

I still need to replace some of the stock images, but as I just mentioned, I'm a little lazy and would rather spend my time coding, so who knows when I'll get around to it!

Today, work has begun on fTelnet! There aren't a lot of choices out there for sysops who want to provide telnet access to their BBS from their website, so I've decided to try to give them a new option.

My aim is to be as good as some of the existing clients out there, while also implementing some much desired features they lack. I don't know if I'll be able to deliver everything that everyone wants, but I'm willing to give it a shot!