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CocktailJE & CocktailPE

Rating: (four burnt toasts)

Did something dramatic happen with CocktailTE - something that made the art of software engineering suddenly fall off into an abyss? No. Both CocktailJE ('Jaguar Edition') and CocktailPE ('Panther Edition') contain the same basic bloopers - and in some cases unique gems of their own.

Read on.

CocktailJE

The DMG for CocktailJE is 1309483 bytes. It has 156 files before full expansion. It has the same basic layout with embedded executables in 'tar' format. Three 'droplets' for the 'Cocktail Extras' are again found, and are again identical, but are this time slightly larger, their executables now weighing in at 46928 bytes each.

The icons in the droplets are again identical, and again it is only the AppleScript file in each which differs.

Each droplet again contains the same useless 'critical info' icon which the system already provides for this purpose. (Add another 240 KB to the package.)

Untrimmed NIBs are again provided, with no benefit to the user save wasted bandwidth and disk space.

A feedback NIB is provided (lacking in CocktailTE - perhaps the author felt the application had attained perfection) and the menu NIB contains two TIFF files, 'msg.tiff' and 'warning.tiff', both of zero size [sic]. [The attention to detail here is simply breathtaking. Ed.]

The AppleScript files (which it must be remembered are needed with this hi-tech app to run the minimal Unix shell scripts at the bottom of it all) are there again, consuming a nauseating 962560 bytes of your precious disk space.

The Unix shell scripts are only 22 in number and consume only 14924 bytes of disk space. [This is the actual code of the monster: effectively four clusters and no more. Grab your barf bag. Ed.]

CocktailPE

The DMG for CocktailPE is 1437644 bytes. It has 190 files before full expansion. It has the same basic layout with embedded executables in 'tar' format. Three 'droplets' for the 'Cocktail Extras' are again found, and are again identical, but are this time slightly larger, their executables now weighing in at 46928 bytes each. [Compared with CocktailJE, they are equivalent builds but not identical. Ed.]

The icons in the droplets are again identical, and again it is only the AppleScript file in each which differs. [The AppleScript files for the CocktailPE droplets have 'mutated' - grown bigger in size. Ed.]

Each droplet again contains the same useless 'critical info' icon which the system already provides for this purpose. (Add another 240 KB to the package.)

Untrimmed NIBs are again provided, with no benefit to the user save wasted bandwidth and disk space.

A feedback NIB is provided (lacking in CocktailTE - perhaps the author felt the application had attained perfection) and the menu NIB contains two TIFF files, 'msg.tiff' and 'warning.tiff', both of zero size [sic]. (These files follow from the previous version.)

[The attention to detail here is simply breathtaking - again. And engineering expertise? Quality control? When you don't even know you're shipping empty files? Twice in a row? Over a two year span? What a laugh. Ed.]

The AppleScript files (which it must be remembered are needed with this hi-tech app to run the minimal Unix shell scripts at the bottom of it all) are there again, consuming a nauseating 1064392 bytes of your precious disk space. [Yes, Patricia, they have grown! Ed.]

The Unix shell scripts are only 22 in number and consume only 14920 bytes of disk space. [This is the actual code of the monster: effectively four clusters and no more. Grab your barf bag. Ed.]

Note the reduction in size - a walloping four bytes - from last time. The files are identical except for 'cppp.sh'. Jaguar and Panther namely use different paths for the 'ppp.log'.

From ('JE'): cd /var/log/ppp/ [sic]  To ('PE'): cd /var/log/ [sic]

Otherwise the core Unix code is identical.

Eighteen months between releases; this is the only 'improvement'.

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