Thank you for your interest of jIRC applet version 2.7.0.

We have made some important changes over the previous version, the following 
information will help you getting start with this new version.

License Key
-----------
The license key format has been changed in version 2.7.0
If you have a registered user of the previous vesion, you can easily 
upgrade your key from this URL:
http://www.jpilot.com/products/jirc/upgradekey.html

Simply enter your original license key value, and you should see the new 
license key value after submission.

It is also important to put "MAYSCRIPT" attribute in the HTML applet tag,
otherwise the applet will return unregister.
For example, 
<applet code="Chat.class"  ...... MAYSCRIPT >
                                  ^^^^^^^^^

Resources file
--------------
In order to reduce image files download time, version 2.7.0   
now support additional resource zip/cab file.
This is especailly true if you want to use image icons for user listing.
To do that, simply include the zip file in the appelt tag, seperated by ",".
For example, 
<applet code="Chat.class" arhive="jirc_nss.zip,resource.zip" ...  MAYSCRIPT>
.
.
<param name="CODEBASE" value="jirc_mss.cab,resource.cab" >
.
.
</applet>

In our download package, we include one resource.zip/cab file that only
contains user icons that appears on the user listing screen.

The applet will first load the images from the zip/cab file if they are presented, 
if the appelt cannot find the files from there, it will go back to the website
and load the image files from there.

In addition, image file starts with icon_* will have higer priority to
be loaded first.

If you put every image into resource file, it will slow down the 
applet initial download time. Therefore, we recommend you to only include the
images that you need at startup time in the resource file( e.g user icons). 
Other images will be loaded from the website behind the scene (which is okay 
because normally you won't need those images right away).

We also suggest you to leave the *.gif files in your web site even if you already 
put them in resource.zip/cab file. 
This is to help some browsers which does not support
multiple zip attribute in applet tag, like Mac OS X IE5.


Image and audio directory
--------------------------
In previous version, all image and audio files are located at the same directory
as the applet jirc_nss.zip/jirc_mss.cab file. To help you better organize 
your web site directories, starting from this vesion, 
all image files must be located in a sub-directory
called "applet_images" relative to the applet file. Similary, all audio *.au
files must be located in a sub-directory called "applet_audio" relative
to the applet file.

Our download package has also been updated to reflect these changes.


Animated gifs
-------------
Starting version 2.7.0, applet also support animation gif as smileys.
We suggest you not to use animation with high refresh rate, as each refresh
will cause the screen to repaint and may impact users who have old and less
powerful PC.