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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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.

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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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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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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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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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.

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.

Measurement in Motion is a pioneering math and science analysis and investigation tool. It lets students take measurements from real-world video footage, then tabulate, graph and derive secondary measurements from their data. Conversely, students can generate data algorithmically and superimpose it over video to provide visceral confirmation of hypothesized behavior.

FinderHider was a neat hack prompted by Joe Sparks' lamentations over the occasionally unprofessional look of Macromind Director animations. At the time there were several different screen sizes in use, 512 x 384, 640 x 480, 832 x 624 and even (for the well-heeled) 1024 x 768. But the 'stage' (the playback area) of any particular Director title was always fixed in size, and the computer's desktop would be visible when using a title on a computer with a monitor larger than the stage.

FinderHider simply put a border round the stage that would dynamically size to fill the entire screen.

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The Creative Whack Pack was a software version of Roger von Oech's famous creativity-enhancing deck of cards. Scott Kim collaborated with Roger on the application's design, which had some neat features including a system-wide hot-key that would bring up a random card, a click on which would seamlessly invoke the application. The app's window also showed animated transitions between screens (dissolve, rotate etc).

MediaMaker was a ground-breaking application that provided a Finder-like interface to manage multimedia content, coupled with a timeline for assembling that content into a finished production. It controlled laserdisc players, VCRs and CD-ROM drives, managed video overlay cards, played AIFF files (no mp3s back then), MacroMind Director presentations and displayed PICT files (no JPEG either).

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Almazz is another Commodore 64 game. This time I had the benefit of the Zoom monitor program, and a macro assembler whose name I forget. Technically Almazz was ahead of the pack, featuring a playing environment 1700 screens in size (8192 x 8192 pixels), with a 2 ½ D view letting you see your Indiana Jones-esque player walk in front of and behind trees, bushes, huts, rocks, obelisks and water fountains.

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Bug Squad is a 'Centipede' clone for the Commodore 64. It started as a BASIC program with machine code only for time-sensitive portions, and over the time the BASIC scaffolding got replaced until it was all machine code. Unlike the PET there was no built-in monitor program, so I used a snippet of BASIC that took hex and wrote it to memory, or took memory and dumped it out as hex. The downside being that to this day when I see A9 XX, or 8D XX XX I can't help but read 'Load Accumulator Immediate', or 'Store Accumulator Absolute'.

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1983 saw the crest of the early computer gaming wave. The crash came later, but before it happened Pan Books in partnership with the magazine "Personal Computer News" published a series of books titled "Sixty Programs for the Commodore 64", "...for the Sinclair Spectrum", "...for the BBC Microcomputer" etc. The bulk of them were initially written for the Spectrum or C64, and then ported by a small cadre of subcontractors to the other platforms. I was one of that group, doing about 7 ports between C64 and Spectrum. I'd forgotten all about my early foray into freelance software development, until I stumbled across a copy of my port of Battleships at www.gb64.com.

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