This folder has some added utilities and toys to work with the PsiONtrack program. Mainly, there are a couple of ways to bring Contacts from your Psion into BeOS 'Person' files. There is also a demo of access to the Psion's RPCS server — not particularly useful at the moment, but there might be potential.
Contacts
There are two routes you can follow to get from Contacts on your Psion to
BeOS 'People'. One needs no set-up but requires a manual step or two each time
you want to do a transfer. The other is much more automatic, but requires
a server to be installed on your Psion.
It is a one-way trip at the moment in any case. There is no mechanism for turning Person files into Contacts. Maybe later. (BeBits lists a program called 'Rank&FIle' that purports to create VCards from Person files, which could then be read by Contacts, but the link seems to have sunk, like so much else, into the Sea of Lost Be-ing...)
Then, after connecting with PsiONtrack, drag that file from its BeOS window onto the vcard2people app in this folder. This should generate a Person file for each Contact in /boot/home/people/Contacts.
The equivalence between Contacts entries and Person files is very imperfect, of course, so the results are not dumped straight into the main people folder, possibly overwriting previous — better — entries! You can drag them there if you prefer after you've checked them for correctness.
vcard2people tries to be smart about the conversion, looking for the most likely candidate for a Person attribute where there is more than one possibly relevant VCard line. If the results don't suit you, and you feel like hacking on it yourself, the source is available (see below).
Under the hood, the scheme is a bit complex, but with the server installed on the Psion (and PsiONtrack running), all you have to do is double-click the contacts2people script icon. [You will need xicon installed for this. Things could be run from a Terminal, but you wouldn't want to bother on a regular basis!] As with the alternative route, Person files are placed in /boot/home/people/Contacts for safety.
As indicated, this scheme needs the 'SYS$SAYANCNT' server installed on the Psion. To do this, drag the SAYANCNT.SIS file from the SAYANARA folder here into some convenient Psion directory, go to that directory on the Psion, and execute the file (or use 'Add/Remove Programs' in the Control Panel).
As with other components of PsiONtrack, you shouldn't move the contacts2people script out of its folder and expect it to work. If you want access from a more convenient spot, make a link.
There are in fact three programs involved (in addition to PsiONtrack itself), each connected to the next by a pipe. First is the sayanara app that requests the data from the Psion. It receives the SSML text and pipes it on to ssml2vcard. This is the only link in the chain that has any of the original Sayanara code. (The sayanara app itself uses only PsiONtrack facilities to talk to the server on the Psion — it is not part of the Sayanara Project.) Finally, the VCard output from this is piped to vcard2people for the last conversion. Because the script runs in a (xicon) Terminal window, you will see vcard2people report each conversion as it does it.
(To be brutally truthful, all this is probably a longer way round than is worth trekking for most people... I started from the Sayanara angle, but when it became apparent that a VCard converter was a good idea anyway things shifted a bit to the simpler philosophy of the other scheme.)
RPCS Demo
PsiONtrack has an add-on called server-client that
gives some additional capabilities for communicating with server programs on
a Psion. The sayanara app above in fact goes through the
portal it provides.
Built in to the Psion is the RPCS Server, which allows remote programs to
request various actions not supplied by the file system itself, such as listing
running programs, or starting and stopping them.
Included here is a simple demonstration of calling this server. It's not intended to do much useful yet; it was just used to test the scheme, and is supplied mainly for interest. It is a Terminal-only program. Run rpcsdemo from there and it will print out the Owner Info from the Psion and then list the running programs and the arguments they were invoked with. (The "$nn" is presumably the process number of that instance.) (Note that this sort of also works on a Series 3, but it seems to only provide the owner info, and shuts down the link when it exits!)
Future releases may have more functionality. Perhaps eventually there might be a way of stopping all running programs before a backup, and restarting them afterward [like PsiWin does].
If you know of any other custom servers that it might be useful to be able to talk to, tell me about them. The server-client interface (which uses inter-application BMessages) is very straightforward and general, so the communication part, at least, shouldn't be hard.
If you are interested in the code of the demo, you can find it on the
PsiONtrack
web page.
May 2002