PilotManager News 1/28/1998 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 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 1.105 released! New command line options for syncing without the gui, "Other" choice for serial port to enter a device not listed, True multiple file selection in Installer, Skip text editor backup files in SyncMemo. * New SyncPlan conduit gives PilotManager users a second choice of calendar software! * Important info about perl versions: perl5.004 compiled with "5.003 compatibility" == 5.003 libraries! * Linux binaries now available on the web page! * Progress report on SyncAB, the address book conduit.. ============================================================================= PilotManager 1.105 Released! Here are the new features/enhancements: +Command line options: -sync Perform a sync with your current configuration without bringing up the GUI. To change your preferences you must bring up the GUI. * Thanks to Brian Downing (bdowning@wolfram.com) for the idea. -syncwith [...] Perform a sync using only the specified conduit(s). The current list of active conduits is ignored (and left unchanged). * Thanks to Bharat Mediratta (bharat@visto.com) for the idea. +Dynamic choice for serial port: To better support various systems the "Pilot Port" menu list now has an "Other" option which lets you type in anything you like. * Thanks to Dwayne Forsythe (forsyth@cig.mot.com) for the idea. +Installer now _really_ supports multiple file selection: The file selection dialog in Installer has been improved to allow selecting any or all of the files in the current directory. This makes restoring your crashed pilot a snap by choosing "Select All" in your Backup/LatestArchive dir. Installing multiple new pilot apps is easy because you can click on them all instead of having to bring up the file chooser for each file! * BIG thanks to Adam Stein (adam@iset.scan.mc.xerox.com) for the code patches! Adam also contributed a couple minor patches for the main PilotManager code-> made cursors visible in text entry widgets, and changed "darkred" color to "red4" which is (hopefully!) a more standard color on all systems. Thanks Adam! +SyncMemo can ignore files with specified prefix/suffix: If you use a text editor to modify your memos on your workstation and the text editor leaves a backup file there, you probably don't want the backup installed on your pilot. New options in the SyncMemo configuration dialog allow you to specify files to skip, such as starting with "#" or ending with "~" or ".bak". * Thanks to Karsten Thygesen (karthy@kom.auc.dk) for the idea. +Also fixed a minor bug that could cause PilotManager to think you hard reset your pilot before every sync, or could cause all conduits to do a full sync every time instead of fast. * Thanks to Diego Zamboni (zamboni@cs.purdue.edu) for the bug report. ============================================================================= New SyncPlan conduit brings a second choice of calendar to PilotManager! For all the users out there who don't use Sun's Calendar Manager or CDE, there is now an alternative to SyncCM. The pilot-link package includes a perl script called "sync-plan" to synchronize the Pilot Datebook with a calendar package called "Plan". I just wrapped this script up into a PilotManager conduit, and voila! A new conduit is born! Plan was written by Thomas Driemeyer (thomas@bitrot.in-berlin.de). You can download it from: http://www.in-berlin.de/User/bitrot/plan.html Plan has no CDE requirements like SyncCM. All you need is X/Motif! sync-plan was written by Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com), also the author of the pilot-link package which make PilotManager possible. Thanks Kenneth! ============================================================================= Perl 5.004 can really be Perl 5.003!! The PilotManager download page now has separate versions of the libraries for perl 5.003 and 5.004. Seems simple enough to know which one to get, just by doing "perl -v" to check your version. However, the configuration script for building perl 5.004 has an option for "Perl 5.003 binary compatibility". If your installation of perl 5.004 is compiled with this option then you must download the libraries for perl 5.003, NOT 5.004! If you're not sure whether or not your perl has this option, try this check: prompt% /usr/ccs/bin/nm /usr/local/bin/perl | grep -i dbtrace Replace "/usr/local/bin/perl" with the correct path to your installation. If the result lists "Perl_DBtrace" then get the 5.004 libraries. If you see only "DBtrace" then get the 5.003 libraries. * Thanks to Derek Pizzagoni (drp@interlink.com) for the bug report which led to the discovery of this tidbit. ============================================================================= Linux binaries now available! http://www.moshpit.org/pilotmgr/binaries/ Thanks to Marco Kooyman (Marco.Kooyman@Holland.Sun.COM) for building Tk and the other required packages for Linux. ============================================================================= SyncAB progress report: I have completed support of Comma Separated Values (CSV) files, but have not yet finished support of the vCard format. A bug in the Internet Mail Consortium's (IMC- creator of vCards) code for reading vCards prevents me from creating fields with semicolons or newlines in them (which the pilot allows). This bug plus real work/real world distractions has made progress slow. However, I still hope to have a beta version out sometime in February.. Stay tuned! * Thanks to Brian Holtz (Brian.Holtz@Eng.Sun.COM) for pointers to the IMC code, submitting a bug report to the IMC, and for his work on Sun's Address Manager which supports vCards. =============================================================================