nFoldMan Preferences

nFoldMan's Preferences menu will open a window for setting application-wide preferences. The preferences panel has two tabbed areas.

Auto-opening documents

The AutoOpen pane allows you to add and delete references to saved nFoldMan documents. These documents will be automatically opened any time nFoldMan is launched stand-alone. (If nFoldMan is launched by double-clicking on a saved document, only that saved document will be opened).

This features is intended to help you automatically start folding when you log on. You can use the "startup items" feature of the Mac OS X system settings to launch the nFoldMan application and then use this preference pane to tell the application to automatically launch the specified documents.

Note that the location of the documents is recorded by their absolute path name (e.g. /computer/users/richard/home/fah1/fah4). So if you move your saved documents you will need to return to this preferences pane and re-specify their location.

Application Avoidance

nFoldMan allows you to specify applications to which the folding processes should yield all of their computing cycles. In the "Avoidance" tab of the preferences window, you can create a list of applications. If any of these applications are running, all folding processes will be paused. Folding will be resumed when all of the listed applications are terminated.

In the above example, folding will always be paused any time the Address Book application is running (although there is no reason why you would need to do this).

Note that these applications are listed by their absolute path name, so if you move or rename an application you will need to delete and re-establish it in this preference for the avoidance feature to continue to work.

Network Monitoring Preferences

The Network pane specifies information related to monitoring remote processes, or being monitored remotely, over the network. Most of the time the defaults (except for the password) are good settings and should not be changed.

Port Number
If this copy of nFoldMan is making any of its processes available for monitoring over the network (called "publishing" the processes), this is the network port number on which it listens for incoming requests. Likewise, if this copy of nFoldMan is trying to monitor any remote processes, this is the port number it will use for the outgoing connection.

You should leave this set to the default value. Change it only if you have a conflict with some other application that is not complying with the port number allocation standards, or if you are behind a firewall and your firewall administrator dictates which port you must use.

Note: as I write this help information, I have not yet received my standard port allocation from IANA. For now, a port that is supposed to be unused has been set up as the default value.

Connection timeout This is the number of seconds that a network connection attempt will wait before failing. Keep the number small to avoid delaying your system, but raise it if you are on a slow network or are trying to connect between slow and overloaded machines.

Incoming password You should specify a password to prevent unauthorized people from monitoring or controlling the processes being run by this copy of nFoldMan. If you type a password here, then any other copy of nFoldMan will have to specify that same password in order to remotely monitor or control any of the processes being run here.

Always enable control menus
This is an optimization which you should normally leave on. nFoldMan's Process menu is status sensitive. For example, the Pause menu item will not be enabled unless you have selected a running process that can be paused.

Across the network, however, this would require that nFoldMan constantly have to send status queries to the remote process, just to correctly enable the menus. This would cause a noticeable and annoying lag.

With this preference checked, process control menus are always enabled for remote processes, even if they are not an appropriate command. For example, Pause will be enabled even if the remote process is already paused or stopped. (Selecting one of these inappropriate options will do no harm.) This eliminates the need for sending these status queries across the network, and speeds menu response in your program.

If you want your menus to properly reflect the status even of remote processes, de-select this option.

Special Debugging Preferences

If you hold down the "option" key before clicking the mouse and while selecting the Preferences menu, you will be brought to a special preferences menu that controls various debugging settings. These settings generally cause a large amount of information to be written to the system console, and can be useful in debugging. They are not documented in detail here.

Port Number	If this copy of nFoldMan is making any of its processes available for monitoring over the network (called "publishing" the processes), this is the network port number on which it listens for incoming requests. Likewise, if this copy of nFoldMan is trying to monitor any remote processes, this is the port number it will use for the outgoing connection. You should leave this set to the default value. Change it only if you have a conflict with some other application that is not complying with the port number allocation standards, or if you are behind a firewall and your firewall administrator dictates which port you must use. Note: as I write this help information, I have not yet received my standard port allocation from IANA. For now, a port that is supposed to be unused has been set up as the default value.
Connection timeout	This is the number of seconds that a network connection attempt will wait before failing. Keep the number small to avoid delaying your system, but raise it if you are on a slow network or are trying to connect between slow and overloaded machines.
Incoming password	You should specify a password to prevent unauthorized people from monitoring or controlling the processes being run by this copy of nFoldMan. If you type a password here, then any other copy of nFoldMan will have to specify that same password in order to remotely monitor or control any of the processes being run here.
Always enable control menus	This is an optimization which you should normally leave on. nFoldMan's Process menu is status sensitive. For example, the Pause menu item will not be enabled unless you have selected a running process that can be paused. Across the network, however, this would require that nFoldMan constantly have to send status queries to the remote process, just to correctly enable the menus. This would cause a noticeable and annoying lag. With this preference checked, process control menus are always enabled for remote processes, even if they are not an appropriate command. For example, Pause will be enabled even if the remote process is already paused or stopped. (Selecting one of these inappropriate options will do no harm.) This eliminates the need for sending these status queries across the network, and speeds menu response in your program. If you want your menus to properly reflect the status even of remote processes, de-select this option.