Pour 0.9



Freeware but copyright ) 1993 Matthew Dixon Cowles. Please play with Pour, distribute it, and use ideas and code from it in your own work, but if you distribute it substantially complete, only a nominal download or duplication charge may be made. 



Pour has not been thoroughly tested. It appears to me to work, but I am sure that there are bugs in it. Use it at your own risk.



Pour is a little utility that will allow you to choose any soup from the available stores on your Newt (or an onion Q er Q union soup if you have a card) and will pour it down the serial port at 9600-8-N-1.



Pour sends the soup as text, with frames enclosed between braces and their entries labeled and arrays enclosed between square brackets.



Pour came about for two reasons. First, I wrote a little app to keep track of the hours I spend working for my various clients (anyone who would like a copy, please ask Q I haven't distributed it just because I haven't yet decided just what I want to do with it) and then realized that I probably didn't want to let the data accumulate in my Newt forever. I thought of adding printing to the app, but decided that to be really useful, printing would have to allow reports by day, week, month, client, and do forth. Not only would the coding be dull, it would also make a kinda slick little app big and fat and not very Newton-y. For that reason, I thought it might be a good idea just to slosh the data down the serial cable to my Mac and let it stay there. I can always turn Nisus loose on it there if I need a report.



Second, at some point, I decided that it would be an interesting exercise to see how to go about handling an object that my code didn't know the contents of in advance. (Turns out to be easy.)



So, instead of adding serial soup pouring to the billable hours app, I decided to make it generic and put it in its own app.



And besides, now that soups have been strained and slurped, I decided that I had to be responsible for pouring them.



I can think of about a bzillion ways in which Pour could be improved. For one, the serial protocol is more-or-less non-existent. Hit the button and the thing sends. It might be a good idea to look for a CR or something from the receiving side to allow the user to indicate that that side is ready.



For another, the output format is kind of primitive. Indents indicate the depth at which objects are nested, but that's about it. Frames and arrays could be handled in a more readable fashion.



In addition, the app (tries to) reset the textList to the top of the list when the store is changed. Doing this causes some highlighting goofs, but I think it's merely cosmetic.



Finally, I must to thank all the cool folks at PIE DTS without whose patience I wouldn't have learned the first thing about writing code for the Newt. Kent will find that his cool Serial Protocol app has been of great help.



Please send comments, bug reports, expressions of praise and lucrative job offers to AppleLink address MONDO or NewtonMail address MattC.



Matt