== PsiONtrack ==

— Access your Psion from the BeOS Tracker —

PsiONtrack lets you mount your Psion palmtop under BeOS. In other words you can open the directories on your Psion as Tracker windows, and drag and drop files in either direction. You can also use shell commands on the files from a Terminal of course if you like. It was first intended for Series 5 (EPOC) Psions only (including 5mx etc.), but as of this 1.2 release it also supports Series 3 units (though not as well as the 5s).

As well as adding a filesystem module for the Series 3, release 1.2 (2005 March 17) fixes some crash and deadlock possibilities. The facilities added in 1,1 are unchanged.

Release 1.1 (2003 May) added some facilities (as separate applications) for copying Contacts databases to BeOS Person files. (For conversions back to VCard and thence to Contacts see the separate VCard-People package below.) It also provides connectivity — toylike as yet — to the Psion's built-in RPCS server.

The package is heavily based on Michael Pieper's "PalmBeach" for the Psion Series 3 (SIBO) machines. It is essentially a revised edition of that program, with somewhat updated packaging as well. The "revisions" involved a large scale rewrite of the filesystem module itself as well as the serial communications. The user interface is almost unchanged. The "new packaging" is mostly the new name that I had the gall to give the progam: I felt that "PalmBeach" has the wrong connotations these days, especially in the US.

The PalmBeach package from which PsiONtrack was developed can be found on BeBits.

PsiONtrack is currently only available for x86 machines running BeOS release 5. I may get around to a PPC version yet!

Download: PsiONtrack v1.2 for x86 BeOS R5 (308KB)


Ancillary Stuff and Source Code

Programs for converting VCard files (from Contacts) to BeOS Person files and back again are published as a separate package for convenience (and because they're not Psion specific). Get them here (source included):

Download vcardpeople.zip for x86 (56 KB)

Download vcardpeople.zip for PPC (41 KB)

One of the applications added to the package in release 1.1 is covered by the GPL. Others I am providing as freely distributable source for anyone interested. The various source archives are downloadable here.

The app that converts 'SSML' text downloaded from the Contacts database into 'VCard' form is a slight modification of the GPL code from the Sayanara Project, and thus is also GPL.

Download: contacts_vcard.zip here

Full details of the Sayanara Project — including the source for the servers at the Psion end (not included here) — can be found at:

http://sayanara.sourceforge.net/

The source for the program that connects to the Sayanara server for Contacts on the Psion (not itself part of Sayanara) is

sayanara_link.zip

Source for the final conversion from VCard to Person file is

vcard_people.zip

A slightly newer version is in the VCard-People package mentioned above.


As an example of talking to the RPCS Server through the new server-client in v1.1, see

rpcsdemo.zip


Contact the author at: pete.goodeve@computer.org