I’m talking about Macster, the Macintosh variant on Napster. (I would imagine that Napster has a similar “console” window, but I’ve never seen Napster so I don’t know).
It is a window, separate from the floating command pallete and the “Find” window and the “Results” window and the “Transfer Manager” window. When you first log on, it comes up showing messages from Napster.com, e.g.,
…anyway, down at the bottom of it it’s got a prompt and a place you can type, like a DOS window on a PC
>you can type something here like this
Anyone got a clue? I don’t!
Good question. I have no clue, either. I tried going to the Napster site Mac section, but that did no good. The help section was quite unhelpful, and the search thingie’s not working right now.
On the Screen Shots page, though, there’s a shot of the Console window and some blurb about getting all the latest news about Napster and related stuff from it. There’s no hyperlink to any Console-specific description or info, so I guess that’s it.
I’ve just downloaded Napster to have a look. This is the Chat section. You can join different channels, to chat to other Napster users.
This seems to have commands similar to IRC. The Up arrow repeats the last command. The ones I know of so far are:
/motd, /cls, /join, /part, /tell (private message), /whois
AFAIK, all these can also be accessed from clicking on the appropriate buttons.
Hope this helps.
dylan_73– That doesn’t work either. IRC commands were one of the first things I tried. I’ve also tried typing “help”, “hello?!” and “wtf” :), but those yielded nothing as well. Anything typed simply disappears when you press Return. It’s really odd.
I just tried joining a chat channel, and the Console has no part whatsoever with that function. When you join a channel, a new window pops up, and the text you type appears there. The Console sits in the background and doesn’t change a bit.
'Sfar as I can tell, the raison d’être of the Console is to annoy me. It pops up automatically when I launch Macster, and I can’t figure out how to disable the darn thing.
You’re referring the Windows version of Napster, right? From what I’ve seen in the online manuals, it’s almost an entirely different program from the Mac client.
OK, well, I’m afraid I don’t have a Mac around to try it out. My WAG is that when they ported the version to Mac, they disabled the commands, but didn’t bother actually removing the bottom line. Just think of it as a MOTD window instead.
I guess they figured Mac users didn’t type much 
I’m not sure what to make of it myself. My first guess was the same as yours-- that it was some half-way implemented feature. Then again, Macster was developed independently of Napster, by Blackhole Media, who just sold the rights to the program to Napster. They didn’t really have to port anything, so it couldn’t have been something that got tangled up in the transition. So, I dunno.