Stephen Jendraszak <stevehj_at_mac.com> wrote:
>I don't understand all of what is being said here, as I am not a
>programmer. What exactly is the problem with AppleTalk in OS X? I use OS
>
>X almost exclusively. It has AppleTalk, which can be used for file
>sharing, etc. How is it different from OS 9s AppleTalk implementation,
>
>and what causes the problem with using it to connect to a Newton?
AppleTalk is a family of protocols.
You have the hardware layer (Serial = LocalTalk, Ethernet =
EtherTalk, you also have Token Ring, AppleTalk over IP and other
things).
And the data communication layer (including AFP, ADSP, etc.).
NewtonOS natively implements LocalTalk and ADSP. With Lantern
Package, you also have EtherTalk.
LocalTalk has officially been steved. MacOS X does not support it
(and MacOS 9 does not even fully support it, especially MacIP over
LocalTalk). MacOS X supports EtherTalk. There are also all the
protocols (well, at least ADSP) in Darwin (well, I've seen some
source stuff about it).
However, there is no documented way to access ADSP in a MacOS X
program. On MacOS, you could use AppleTalk libs (considered obsoletes
even in MacOS), the communication toolbox (steved) and OpenTransport
(unfinished on MacOS X).
If you tell OpenTransport to do ADSP under MacOS X, it tells you: no
such module. FYI, OpenTransport on MacOS X does not support serial
ports (but there are documented serial port APIs on MacOS X, via the
IOKit, unlike ADSP).
Also, while I'm talking about documentation. Either MacOS X does not
have IrDA capability (why not, after all, only their top laptops have
IrDA), or you have no documented way to do it. So DCL IrDA's support
will be limited to MacOS.
Anyway. I don't recall what was Mr Jobs rhethoric about the 18 months
or whatever in January. But he ships computers default-booting to an
OS I wouldn't call "finished". Normally, you start to finish the APIs
and then you make it the default for users, to give developers the
time to adapt. Apple has been providing ADSP for years in their OSes
(including NewtonOS). They also used to have good documentation, in a
nutshell, it used to be a pleasure to code on MacOS (I've been doing
that for something like 15 years). This is the first time I try to
code something specifically for MacOS X, and I definitely hate it (I
don't even talk about the problems I had to download the latest Dev
CD and Apple's stupid and painful way to now want to track website
visitors, etc.).
BTW, Philz accepted to BSD-License his MNP compression algorithm in
lpkg (and I correct what I said earlier here, apparently, UnixNPI is
an original work from Richard C. Li and doesn't include a single line
from Philz). This means that with Apple's documentation, once I'll
have reinstalled MacOS X here (apparently this OS only understands
the Windoze way), I'll work on serial support on MacOS X in the DCL,
until I finally get sick of the speed of the OS of the future.
Paul
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Feb 01 2002 - 16:03:19 EST