Participant List App w/ Pascal Code

I shouldn't be surprised at how hard early Macintosh programming can be, but I almost always am. It is elegant, and I enjoy it, but sometimes it's very difficult to figure out how something is 'supposed' to be done.

Wanting to explore the TransSkel framework (circa 1987) for Macintosh application development, I decided to follow the lead of Wgoodf and MacTV with a RetroChallenge participant list project.

What was learned in bullet points...

* Think Pascal 4.5 and TransSkel 2.5 play well together.
* Think Pascal and BasiliskII running 7.5.5 play together well.
* TextEdit Records aren't the best choice for animated text.

I tried getting the text (composed of two TE records) to bounce around the screen. It did, but the flicker was bad, and I abandoned the idea pretty quickly. I was exploring the use of TE records for future app development, and didn't want to get off track.

So here is a link to the almost completely unexciting macintosh app that displays the RetroChallenge Winter Warm-up 2008 participants. Source code is included...

http://www.retards.org/projects/retrochallenge/2008-winter/RCWW2008.sit

It has a few display/update bugs, nothing serious. It was tested on 7.5.5 (BasiliskII), 6.0.5 (SE) and 9.1 (iMac).

In the end I'm very happy with TransSkel. It's a simple framework that doesn't get in the way, or require an outlandish frame of reference. I'll keep using it, and at 20 years old, it's very retro-computing.

Winter Warm-up 2/3 Over and Nothing to Show?

Ok, so the Winter Warm-up is 2/3 over, and I haven't made a post. What have I been up to? A nasty cold accounts for a missing week of January.

I spent a few days looking into the viability of coding a Blogger app for 68k macs...

I think a blogger browsing app would be possible, but I decided to shelve it. The original idea was to have an app that would let someone read all of the retro-challenge blogs hosted by blogger. There are 4 or 5 of us using blogspot.com, so it could be fun. Of course, after thinking about it, it seems like it'd be infinitely better if we could *post* to our Blogger blogs. No-brainer there. Well, the blogger api requires the use of https for authentication -- and SSL is a bit daunting -- but I decided to look into it anyway, just in case there's some easy library sitting out there.

Well, source code for MacSSH may or may not exist, but I was unable to find it. Even with a plug & play SSL library (which I doubt exists), it looks very unrealistic to get SSL working usably for a simple Blogger app. According to Raymond Ingles from the vintage-mac mailing list, it takes 30 seconds for SSH to make a connection on his SE/30 running NetBSD. Since I'm developing for an SE with MacTCP, I'd imagine it's pretty killer to wait a minute or more just to log into your Blogger account.

Obviously a Blogger *reader* would still be possible, and there's a 50% I might go for it. In the meantime I'm playing with the Macintosh application framework TransSkel, and will post more about it soon.

Swapping Accelerators at the Speed of Light

I recently received a Lenovo Prodigy SE Accelerator, and successfully installed it yesterday. Then, I took the Lenovo Prodigy board out of my SE today. That wasn't really the plan.

The plan was to open up the SE and take out the floppy drive and bay so that I could install the PDS ethernet card; I can't live without ethertalk evidently. Well, I couldn't find an easy way to remove the floppy assembly, and gave up pretty quickly.

At the point I might as well try out my new Mobius 030 accelerator. No beep. No screen.

So as it stands now, it's just a regular SE with ethernet again.

Gearing Up

I'm not sure what my project will be at this point, just setting up the blog. I have a few days to decide.