[NTLK] Newton X Press - book oddities

I've been plugging away at making Newton X Press - its quite fun to
see things come together!

In deciphering output from Newton Press - I've noticed some odd things:

In the document Newton Formats 1.1, one is told that dates are stored
in a 4 byte, unsigned integer number on disk. This number is the
number of seconds since the midnight Jan 4th, 1904. They LIE!!!! This
number is the number of MINUTES since jan 4th 1904. This one was
rather confusing at first as all of the common tools for dealing with
timestamps of this sort expect a value in seconds :-/

Newton press has a really twisted sense of what "title" and "long
name" should mean. Newton books, as interpreted by my mp2100 have 3
different names in them. The package name - which is part of the
package header, and required by every package, and two entries in the
book specific section of the package, "title" and "shortTitle". On my
mp2100 - the name that shows up in Extras is the shortTitle, the name
of the book shown by opening the book, tapping the i button, and
tapping "about" is the title, and when one uses a tool like PkgInfo
by TKnollsys to get information about the package, one sees the
package name.

So it would make sense to me to put the full name of the book in
packageName and title, while putting the extras icon name in
shortTitle. NewtonPress even has two name fields you can enter, title
and long name. What does it do? it makes PackageName = long Name and
both shortTitle and title = the title you enter. Note that this means
one cannot normally see what one puts in LongName, and the shorter
icon name is all one can find on the newton side. Does this strike
anyone else as completely backwards?

I'm uncertain if NOS 1.x devices work in the same manner. Regardless,
Newton X Press will let you specify these three names separately, and
the input boxes will be named in a manner that makes it clear which
name shows where on a newton.

Someone on this list mentioned that having a feature to easily make
backdrop image packages for Avi's backdrop would be useful, so I will
be looking at incorporating such into Newton X Press.

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