On Sun, 11 Nov 2001, Kevin Fisher wrote:

> Well, what I'm ashamed of most is my blatant disregard for models in that
> particular code.  I've learned better since, which is why I've grown to
> dislike my old code so much.  I'll send you the work-in-progress...it
> doesn't do much though, I'll warn you...there are cross dependancies all
> over the place.

If it's not a problem of personal information being inside or of
bandwidth, the image would work fine for me. May be less problems that
way...?

> > As much as I'd like to, I'm on a budget.  $150-200 is a lot more
> > affordable (and rationalizable when I have a perfectly function Newton for
> > real-world use) than $400-500 for the color model.  I take donations
> > though, and with such a hardware donation would pledge to get Something
> > Done.
>
> Heh..I agree about the price.  The iPaq alone might make one look twice...
> when you start looking at the accessories then things really get a bit
> expensive for a PDA. :)

Indeed.  As of this year, all incoming ECE, CS, and IST (info sys & tech)
students are required to buy an $800 package for an iPAQ, PCMCIA sleeve,
802.11b card, and "server fees."  I think it's pretty sick, especially
when they could've had these students get the greyscale version,
which could have made the package at least $300 cheaper.  There's no way
in hell I would've enrolled in a university that pulled that.

Luckily, I just found a deal for an iPAQ 3150 and a CF sleeve for $165 on
eBay.

> Some people like the gesture stuff, and some people like the soft keyboard.
> I think variety is good.

Indeed.  They KeyboardMorph is done- I think I'll post it in a day or two
here.

> > > In my original design, I was going to keep things as Smalltalky as possible.
> > > The PDA app was going to be a "browser" not unlike the class browser..
> > > In one pane, you'd select the category (Addresses, Notes, whatever), which
> > > would expand into the list of objects in that category.  The large "bottom"
> > > pane would be the playfield on which the interface for the selected object
> > > would be drawn.
> > >
> > > There were no windows..the entire screen is filled by the "browser" morph,
> > > which contained all the display elements.
> >
> > That sounds really cool.  Was there any multitasking? Or would you just
> > have to switch app-to-app?  What percentage of the screen (vertically) did
> > the data-browser take up?
>
> No, it was more of a single-tasker, whatever app was in the 'forefront'.
> I basically had things divided up into Palm-style portions...the main
> playfield was roughly square, with the rest of the display taken up by the
> chooser.

I am going to have a whack at reimplementing your idea, if that's OK with
you.  Going to sit down and think about the problem of multitasking and
moving data (cut/paste).

> There was no dedicated "writing" space...Genie is active everywhere.  If
> there is a Text morph present anywhere on the screen, you can write on it.

That's something I liked about CharRecog and Genie.

> This is one area I've always been a little worried about...there's
> lots of work being done out there to recreate PDA UI's, but I'm not
> aware of any projects working on the not-so-glorious act of
> synchronization.  I know someone is working on reverse-engineering
> ActiveSync, and the pilot-tools are already open sourced, so I suppose
> one or the other could be used...

This soup db could easily interface with ActiveSync or Palm Desktop with
some work.  Even easier would be to write it in Squeak and serialize
objects and spit them back an forth.  But for those that dig the
intergration those other tools have with the outside world, (Outlook, &c)
something could be done.


Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "corporation, n: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit
          without individual responsibility."        :: ambrose bierce