From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Fri Feb 28 2003 - 15:02:37 PST
Il me semble que le 28/2/03 à 14:48 -0500, Peter Cameron nous racontait:
> > I only put MacOS specific files there (i.e.
>> Delivery, NSOF To XML Converter X and DropNote
>> are not there).
> Does this mean those of us with less than OSX need not bother?
>I'm running OS 8.6 on both of my Macs and have no real need or
>desire (ir hardware) to go to X.
The DCL compiles for MacOS. I check that at every CVS commit. Nicolas
does the same when he uses CodeWarrior (ProjectBuilder doesn't
generate MacOS code). Michael does the graphics (and AppleScript and
XSL code) and converted the icons so they look nice on MacOS as well.
We try to do our bests for the library to work on as many platforms
as possible. In few weeks, we'll have an implementation of the files
for unices and there will be no reason to not have a package
installer for Unix. The only work to do will be to rewrite the less
than 1,000 lines of Delivery and a Makefile to make it work.
The DCL PrelimBinaries only include for MacOS the NSOF To XML
converter and the Notes XSL. There is the Dock module in the archive,
but it's as useful as Thomas Tempelmann's dock module if you have
MacOS and not MacOS X. It doesn't work exactly the same way. In
particular, I recall Nicolas complaining about -61001 errors and
weird problems that were caused by the fact that Thomas' module
doesn't ask which NIE configuration to use. I fixed that in our
module. But our module is more recent than Thomas and hence can have
undiscovered bugs and doesn't have bookmarks (since we promote
ZeroConf).
What you can do with the DCL on MacOS for the moment is to convert
.nwt attachements or other NSOF files (such as NTK files) to XML and
then notes in XML to HTML (well, XHTML) to read them on your machine.
We considered that MacOS users aren't that interested in package
installations because:
- NCU and NPI work quite well
- Thomas Tempelmann's DILTester does TCP/IP and IrDA if AppleTalk or
Serial don't suit your needs.
So we did a Cocoa (i.e. MacOS X only) interface to Delivery, the DCL
package installer sample code. It's also a test for us since before
Delivery, all our Sample code were command-line based or very simple
MacOS or Carbon-based applications. In fact some problem appeared and
the current binaries sometimes have workarounds instead of fixes for
these issues until we refactory some parts of the DCL.
Frankly, it's been something like 3 months that I switched to MacOS
X. 2 months that I didn't restart to 9 (because I have less disk
problems now that I do a manual fsck after every crash/reboot and I
gave up restarting to compile my Newton projects 15 times faster).
After these 3 months, my conclusion is that MacOS X is definitely not
the best version of MacOS for Newton connectivity. In fact, the best
platform for NewtonOS connectivity is MacOS < X. MacOS X exhibit
weird and painful behavior with MacOS Newton applications run in
Classic. The only big interest is that Hammer, the low-level
debugger, crashes less often because of a timeout with the Newton.
Nevertheless, Classic crashes once a day here while MacOS 9 nearly
never crashed when I did Newton development.
The DCL is aimed at fixing that problem of poor connectivity on other
platforms (I started that project in 2000 when I realized that at
some point my own desktop computer won't run MacOS natively, I didn't
know if I would go MacOS X or some other BSD unix then). This is why
it is multi-platform. As long as the DCL was developed on MacOS, it
had MacOS specific code (and still has), such as OpenTransport calls,
Communication Toolbox calls with IrDA/AppleTalk/Serial, MacOS 7.6.1
and higher files calls and so on (it also handles Carbon files). All
that works fine on MacOS.
You can prove me wrong, but the main interest of the DCL for MacOS
users will be better backups since NCU is pathetic, but NBE works
pretty well (except if you have too many Names). Or data exchange. At
the current point, I think the only interest for you in the
PrelimBinaries is the NSOF data converter plus the XSL of course.
Hence that light MacOS archive with:
- the dock module
- NSOF To XML converter for MacOS only
- the NotesXSL stylesheet
You can use the stylesheet with an XSL parser or by adding a line in
the xml document, just after the first line:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="notes.xsl"?>
Put notes.xsl next to your Document and open the .xml document with
Internet Explorer or Mozilla.
Paul
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