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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: kio-palm
From:       Adriaan de Groot <adridg () cs ! kun ! nl>
Date:       2002-02-17 15:11:56
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First off, "Pilot" designates Palm OS (tm) based PDA's, including the 
Handspring (tm) Visor (tm) in this message.

On Sunday 17 February 2002 00:46, Jörg Menke wrote:
> On Saturday, 16. February 2002 16:04, ian reinhart geiser wrote:
> > > > I'm currently writing a kioslave for accessing a palm. I'm
> > > > wondering if I can add it to kdenonbeta when it will be ready for
> > > > an initial commit.
> > My largest problem and why i abandon the effort was the Visor issue.  I
> > hate haveing to press <hotsync> everytime i wanted to do ANYTHING.

pi_tickle() is your friend in such a case to keep the Pilot alive, but 
consider that keeping it awake in the cradle will use up battery power. One 
of the worst things that can happen to you is putting your AAA-powerd Pilot 
in the cradle, firing up palm://db/AddressBook/17/ (f. ex to look at the 17th 
address record) and then forgetting about it. kio-palm would keep the Pilot 
awake, eating up batteries -- more than usual, since the serial hardware 
*also* needs to be powered on, besides the usual processor + screen stuff. 
Result: batteries empty, grumpy user. 

> Well, you have to do this with my version, too. But that's due to the
> architecture of the hotsync-stuff --> it is for a hotsync really and not
> for a longer connection. I think thats a problem that might be really
> hard to solve. You'll get a timeout if you hold the connection too long,
> that's it. I used the lib that came with pilot-xfer btw... Maybe there's
> something we could take profit of in the korganizer stuff. They had
> rewritten most of it if I remember right... But I had no time to take a
> look at it so far...

Pilots have the following view of a HotSync: The Pilot is the *client* and 
the PC is the *server*. This is because the Pilot starts the communication -- 
after that, the PC controls the rest of the HotSync. There is AFAIK no way to 
send serial data to the Pilot to get it to start a Sync (heck, the serial 
hardware is only powered on by explicit user and program action on the 
Pilot). So the communication model is completely backwards for the usual 
KIOSlave architecture (where the PC initiates the communication, be it to a 
real POP3 server, or an LDAP server, or the TOC of your audio CD, or the help 
files, and all those sources of information are considered the servers). This 
is going to remain the biggest problem with pretty much any kio-palm 
implementation: the hardware's model of client/server is just backwards from 
what KIOSlaves expect, and you're going to have to deal with it (preferably 
in such a way that it doesn't eat up batteries).

[ade], who still believes in KPilot
 
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