patm@omepd (Pat Mead) (07/10/87)
This is my first time posting so I hope I'm doing this right and my spelling isn't too bad. I just have a few questions. I'm writing a mac interface bulletin board (BB) program. It will work the same as fido etc. using text if you call it with red ryder, microphone or other favorite terminal communications program but if you call it with my communications package it will go to a full mac interface for use. I feel that there are a lot of mac users out there that would use bulletin boards if they all weren't so hard to use. One of the reasons people buy mac's is for the user interface. But to not hamper those calling with other than my communications package it will work either way. I'm off-loading as much as possible to the mac side of things for performance. My main two goals are to provide a easy (finder like) interface with the BB coming in as another (but special) disk to the user and to give performance close to disk speed for looking through the BBs *folders*, message section handling, etc., basicly everything but the actual file transferring (which as we know can only go so fast). Multiple file transfers like the finder will happen by dragging more that one file over. I've added packing and unpacking of files from inside my communications program for ease. Anyway enough about how I have it designed to work (and partly does). Now to my questions (and you thought this was just an advertisment). 1. Any thoughts on things you would like to see in this, pitfalls to avoid or just general comment would be gladly accepted. I would like to have a program that is very useful not just another shareware program to look at and say that's nice but it's not quite useful enough yet for me to use. I know theres a lot of you out there that use BBs a lot and I'd love to get good feedback on this. 2. In programming this I've found a couple of places that I'm sure there's already public domain code to use and I really don't want to reinvent to wheel so to speak. These area's are the xmodem transfer (macbinary) and the code to read the desktop files of disks in the mac and display the information as the finder does i.e. disks on the right, folders to windows, etc. Please e-mail such code (perferably in LS C) to me. If the person who wrote it would like credit on the about dialog I'd be happy to do so also. Any other PD code for features you may like to see put in would be fine also. 3. I know there lots of good experiance out there on using BB's so I'd like to have some beta testers other that friends around here to look this over when I get that far. I'll have a BB host running in the Portland OR area and will send testers the communications package to use with it. Any qualified people out there interested? Thanks for you time and help in this project of mine. Hopefully if will add to the usefullness of the mac for many people. Patrick Mead *********************************************************** usual disclaimers--- Patrick Mead ogcvax!inteloa!omepd!patm ***********************************************************