PilotManager News 4/3/1998 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Alan.Harder@Sun.COM www.moshpit.org/pilotmgr ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction - PilotManager is a tool that allows you to synchronize databases on your 3Com PalmPilot with applications on your Unix platform. It is a full Hotsync daemon that is user extensible. Developers can write their own conduits to synchronize Pilot databases with the desktop application of their choice! PilotManager was originally written by Bharat Mediratta (Bharat@Visto.Com) and is currently developed and supported by Alan Harder (Alan.Harder@Sun.Com). ============================================================================= Headlines - * PilotManager 1.106 released! Quick access to Installer and adding new conduits, increased stability in SyncMemo and SyncPlan, moving date window in SyncCM, and more! * PilotManager usage report.. ============================================================================= PilotManager 1.106 Released! This release is full of lots of small changes to make things nicer. A description of the new features and bugfixes is below.. PLEASE READ THIS SECTION: The most important change (from the user's perspective) in this release is that the method PilotManager uses to keep the connection to the Pilot alive has changed. This change has resulted in improved stability in SyncMemo (avoid mysterious deletes and duplicates) and SyncPlan (avoid crashes). I have done a little (but probably not enough) testing to make sure all the conduits keep the connection up. However, if you are doing a sync and your pilot says "the connection was lost..." PLEASE EMAIL ME and tell me which conduit was running and exactly when the connection was dropped. Technical explanation: Previously the "watchdog" service was used to automatically tickle the pilot every twenty seconds. Watchdog uses alarm signals to activate each ping. However, these signals were causing some problems and even crashes in some conduits (thanks to Robert Terzi for indentifying the cause of these problems!). Now it is the responsibility of each individual conduit to keep the connection alive. This can be by activating the watchdog for the duration of its sync, or by manually tickling the pilot at regular enough intervals during the sync..... Other New Stuff in 1.106 (see the ChangeLog file for more details): +New menu options and command line parameters for quicker access to the Installer! Use the -install command line option to instantly activate Installer with the specified prc/pdb file(s), or use the new menu options to quickly popup the Installer config dialog or start a sync with Installer. All without having to reconfiguring PilotManager! +Load new conduits without having to restart! The new "Load New Conduits" menu option will search for new *.pm files that are not already loaded and allow you to load them without having to restart PilotManager. Thanks to Adam Stein for this patch! +SyncCM now supports relative dates! In SyncCM's "Date Range" mode you can now enter relative dates. This means you can sync your pilot with a moving date window on your desktop calendar. For example, you can make your pilot always contain your appointments in the range 3 months before today to 9 months ahead... Thanks to Andy Poggio for this patch! +New tools available in the contrib section! -SyncAB I still have not had time to finish vCard support in this conduit, but I would like to make what code I have available to everyone. The conduit currently supports CSV (comma separated values) format. This can be useful for those out there with some technical ability, as you can easily add records to the pilot by appending to the CSV file. Also, the conduit can *write* vCards with the current state of your pilot. To test this out edit line 647 in the SyncAB.pm file and uncomment one of the "writeVCards" methods, setting the output file or output directory to what you want. Still use CSV mode to access this test of vCard output. Selecting vCard mode in the config dialog will still say "unsupported". -SyncQMate There can't be many people out there who need this, but I use it so here it is. If you use the QMate pilot app by Steve Dakin but don't like having to sync on your PC to retrieve the records for importing into Quicken then this is what you need! I figured out QMate's data format and wrote this conduit to read all the records and write QIF files you can import into Quicken. Those records are then marked as "synced" in QMate. -SyncMail This is a little conduit for emailing messages from the Mail app on the pilot, submitted by Andy Poggio (andy.poggio@sun.com). -ImpactImport For you Sun employees only. This script will take exported data from IMPACT and import records into the pilot address book. WARNING- this script is unsupported and not too user-friendly, but if you follow the directions at the top of the file carefully you should be able to get it to work. It requires the SyncAB conduit mentioned above. ============================================================================= PilotManager spreads world-wide! For those interested in who uses PilotManager, here is some random info.. The announcements alias currently has 885 members.. I don't know what percent of users subscribe to the alias, but I'd guess this means there are 1500-2000 users out there.. wahoo! PilotManager is being used in at least 23 countries around the world! Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Hong Kong, Israel, Japan, Korea, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, US, UK, Venezuela PilotManager is being used on at least 6 unix flavors/platforms! Solaris(sparc), Solaris(x86), SunOS 4.1.x, AIX 4.1.5, Linux, Irix The web page is averaging over 50 hits per day, at nearly 20000 hits in the first year! ============================================================================