March 2009

ZooLib BBDaemon
The ZooLib BBDaemon lets multiple Mac applications talk to USB-connected BlackBerrys concurrently. Obviously this is something that Research in Motion could make possible, but as they haven't we're posting a pre-built installer that takes the pain out of getting things working.

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February 2009

The Missing Sync for BlackBerry
Mark/Space has released The Missing Sync for BlackBerry 2.0. This latest version provides a rich suite of synchronization options, made possible by a device-side Java application developed by Electric Magic. The Mac application uses our ZBlackBerry Mac/Black SDK for its USB communications.

March 2008

Mac/BlackBerry SDK
The BlackBerry is a very popular mobile communications device. Official Mac support from Research in Motion is limited to providing the PocketMac utility as a free download. With no official SDK the Mac/BlackBerry ecosystem has seen very little activity.

ZBlackBerry is a suite of code that implements the BlackBerry USB communications protocol in a generic fashion. A few hundred lines of code let Macs use that protocol. A few hundred more allow multiple Mac applications to talk to a single BlackBerry simultaneously, something that has not been possible till now.

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January 2008

iMobimac Modem
The Research In Motion BlackBerry is famous for its connectivity. iMobimac Modem runs on a BlackBerry and the Mac to which it is connected, and lets Mac applications access the Internet using the BlackBerry's connection.

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May 2006

Knowledge Forum 4.6
Knowledge Forum 4.6's minor version number change belies just how different from its predecessor it really is.

Under the hood KF 4.6 has moved from using ZDBase for its backing store, instead using a tuplebase. This makes it possible to split HTML page generation into separate processes, potentially running on multiple front end machines. It also restores support for a rich client application, now written in Java, using ZTSoup to efficiently communicate changes in the tuplebase, whether made by other clients or by the web interface.

January 2006

WebDAV

WebDAV is an extension to the HTTP protocol. It is the basis for Apple's iDisk and Windows' Web Folders, standard features of Mac OS X and Windows XP. It is thus the easiest way for a server to make data available to a client machine without requiring that client software be installed first.

ZooLib provides a generic WebDAV server. Your application need only implement subclasses of ZNodeRep to represent nodes in your desired hierarchy. Standard subclasses of ZNodeRep let you lay one tree over another, or expose part of the server's file system to clients.

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August 2003

Knowledge Forum 4.5
Knowledge Forum 4.5 was a significant refinement of Knowledge Forum 4.0, with a much richer web interface, although still constrained by the need to support Netscape 4.x-era web browsers.

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September 2002

Knowledge Forum 4.0
Knowledge Forum 4.0 took the radical direction of being web-only. We'd had some support for web access by virtue of a perl program that used the client's communications protocol to talk directly to the server, but perl wasn't pre-installed on Mac OS (Classic) or Windows, and it had some performance problems. So we ported the perl software to C++ and incorporated it into the server directly.

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January 2002

ZStreamMUX

There's a maxim, a citation for which I can't locate now, which pours scorn on the idea of multiplexing streams over TCP. It kinda made sense when I first saw it, but in these days of ornery system adminstrators and their firewalls that sometimes allow connections seemingly on the roll of a die, there's a lot to be said for the all or nothing of getting a connection to a server, and then sharing it locally.

I wrote ZStreamMUX after coming across an early draft of WebMUX. ZStreamMUX takes a read stream and a write stream, and runs a lightweight protocol over them to support multiple independent sessions. The overall interface is similar to that provided by sockets. The protocol is asynchronous, and uses buffer credits to prevent deadlock at the protocol level.

December 2000

ZooLib
ZooLib is an Open Source (MIT License) C++ library that makes it easy to write one set of source and build an application for Windows, Mac and UNIX. It provides a foundation suite of facilities that in essence form a virtual operating system API, and wide range of higher-level facilities that build on that foundation.

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January 2000

Knowledge Forum 3.0
Knowledge Forum 3.0 took advantage of major enhancements in ZooLib that let the client be released for Windows as well as Mac OS. Much of Knowledge Forum 2.0 had been built around the Mac-only Zoom framework, and so had to be reimplemented. The parts of Knowledge Forum 2.0 built with ZooLib were simply carried forward, with refinements and enhancements.

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August 1997

Knowledge Forum 2.0
Knowledge Forum 2.0 is a computer supported collaboration environment designed to foster the growth of knowledge building communities. It's based on the CSILE project, developed at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and is published by published by Learning in Motion.

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April 1996

DigiPhone
The publishers of Digiphone, a VOIP application for Windows, took a shortcut to getting Mac compatibility - they (indirectly) bought NetPhone from Electric Magic, and had me add support for DigiPhone's communications protocol and audio codec.

January 1995

NetPhone
In 1994 the Internet was just starting to be available in people's homes and offices. NetPhone was the first application to support what's now known as VOIP (Voice Over IP) without requiring a high-speed connection.

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