Testing, 1, 2, 3, Testing, ...

Testing, 1, 2, 3, Testing, …

Most of the pieces in Blunt 2 for sending data from the Newton seem to be in place - I can successfully discover devices, pair, get services and connect using a regular NewtonScript endpoint. This last part is actually pretty important. There are however still some quirks, the most annoying issue is stability. I think that both the server and the CommTool have problems in this area. The server probably because it is using the TSerialChip directly, and there are lots of funny things going on with DMA and interrupts, and the CommTool looks problematic because it is tied very closely to the NewtonScript world and its event loop. nn nnStill, I think this will not be magic to sort out, and in the meantime, I’ll try to get an idea what the performance of Blunt 2 will look like. One promising thing is that the always on and multiple simultaneous connection features look feasible. And that opens the door to fancy things like browsing your Newton from a desktop PC via OBEX, mapping for example Names to vCard “files” which can simply be copied, or Notes to “files” with multiple representations (e.g. “Note.nwt”, “Note.xml”, “Note.txt”). nn nnPS: Native Bluetooth support in Windows XP is pathetic, third party software like Widcomm is unstable and Mac OS X is so much better - there, I just had to say that after a day of fighting with Windows ;)

2006-08-02