[NTLK] NewtSync Status Report

From: John Anderson (dearjohn_at_everchanging.com)
Date: Sun Mar 21 2004 - 19:54:07 PST


Hi all,

I had a few hours today during which I could work on NewtSync. The
Newton application will now handle special characters (quotes,
punctuation, and any non-Roman characters) more effectively. Before,
NewtSync would attempt to convert text to ASCII before sending it over;
it's now using newer functions which transmit and receive text in
Unicode. Thanks to Vincent for helping with this.

The groundwork is now also done, on the Newton side anyway, to reverse
the direction of TCP/IP connections. Currently you enter your Mac's IP
address into your Newton and connect the Mac to the Newton. Since this
involves punching holes in the Mac's firewall and trying to write an IP
address into the Newton, this has proven to be unreliable.

The other issue is that, with direct Ethernet connections, there's a
bit of a standoff. The Mac currently won't serve on a given Ethernet
card because it doesn't sense anything on the other side. The Newton
doesn't power up the ethernet card until it makes a connection. So the
Mac refuses to exist until after the Newton attempts to connect to it,
creating a catch-22 of sorts.

To combat these problems, the Newton client will connect to the
Internet and start listening for connections, then display its IP
address. The Mac then connects to this address.

As for fixing the plug-ins, this is my next goal. One of the things I'd
like to do here is make a higher-level API in AppleScript that's easier
to maintain, and easier for the user community to work on.

Dates are still sort of an issue, and I'm not sure what to do with them
just yet. I'm thinking of providing a method by which users can set up
their own field mappings (particularly for repeating date entries) and
save them to a file. The hope is that the Newton user community can
help me here too, correcting the mappings and sending the corrections
back to me. This is open-source, people :-)

Speaking of which, I'm no longer requiring registration to run
NewtSync. It's totally free now, and all of the source code is now
publicly available. if there are any developers out there who want to
participate in the NewtSync project, feel free to peruse the source
code and bugs on the SourceForge page at:

http://sf.net/projects/newtsync

Any other suggestions?

j.

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