Re: [NTLK] Something the Community Might Pay Forr

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 11:08 PM, SteveCraft <steve@craftsathome.net> wrote:
>
> With Paul's recent - and awesome - contribution to the community by making
> ATA support free and open source, wouldn't it be safe to say that the NTLK
> community would pay as a group for a way to read/write a Newt-formatted
> PCMCIA card with a Mac or Windows box?

You should now already be able to just make a disk image (or use a
unix utility like `dd`) to back up & restored your ATA cards that are
formatted for Newton.

Not saying it can't be done, but it's actually a difficult fit to make
drivers that would allow one to read/write Newton-formatted ATA cards
under Mac OS X, *nix, or Windows because Newton is a different
database concept than more common drive formats. It's one big soup and
most of it doesn't translate easily to a file/folder hierarchy with
some file metadata.

What would be preferable would be to write a driver that requires an
editor app to allow you to edit the soup on the ATA card (and some
functionality to ease importing/exporting data). It might be a better
developer tool than anything handy for most users.

What would the intended primary goal be? Installing & removing packages?

I believe that installing packages actually requires some work by the
Newton OS as packages can have some at install-time hooks they need to
run. I could be wrong though.

Morgan Aldridge

---
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http://www.makkintosshu.com/
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