ZetPsion v5.0 for EPOC32 Instructions ====================================== Written by Tony Walker. Queries, cries for help, and bug reports should be e-mailed to myself at:- tony.walker@zetnet.co.uk The program is supplied as is, though I will always try to help if I can. Though I believe I have made it as safe as possible to use, you use it at your own risk. Thank you for using my program Regards, Tony Walker. ===================================================================================== To install ZetPsion =================== See install.txt for manual installation instructions. Otherwise use the zetpsion.sis file with PsiWin 2.1 or later, or copy zetpsion.sis to your Psion and install that there if you have the option in control panel. ZetPsion can use Psion's RCOM file transfer program to do the PC to Psion copies automatically. I recommend you copy the file RCOM.PIF into your RCOM directory (usually located within your PsiWin directory). It allows RCOM, which is DOS based to run in a window and run in the background. Version 1.14f of RCOM can be found on the main Internet FTP sites such as Sunsite. This however is limited to a speed of 19,200bps. A later version (1.16f) can now be downloaded from Psion's website. You can use any version of PsiWin to do the copies, but why do something manually when there is something to do it automatically and it doesn't try and convert them! If you like, set up a Program Manager icon (Win3.x) or Shortcut (Win9x) to the file ZETPSION.EXE within the ZETPSION directory you set up earlier. You should now be ready to use ZetPsion. To use ZetPsion =============== Please don't run ZetPsion while Zimacs is running - you will probably get errors as both programs try to access the message database at the same time. On your PC ========== The first time you run ZetPsion, you will be asked to set some file locations. The location of ZETNET.MDB will be your Zetnet directory. RCOM.EXE is the directory where you have RCOM installed. It is usually in a subdirectory of your PsiWin directory. Leave this blank if you do not have RCOM installed. Now select which model of Psion you have. The first stage of using ZetPsion is to create the message files that the Psion side of things will use. Run the ZETPSION.EXE program file using either your icon/shortcut or from File Manager. You will be presented with the main ZetPsion screen. Select the "Get messages from Zimacs database" button. You can now select the newsgroups you wish to transfer (it is a standard windows list box so multiple selections can be made in the usual windows way). Two check boxes are available. The "Process unread newsgroup messages only" box allows you to process/transfer all messages you hold in a newsgroup by un-checking it, not just the ones you havn't read yet. The "Transfer unread mail" box when un-checked lets you stop your unread mail being processed. Click on the "OK" button to start the program processing your messages. The processing will advise you when it is complete and will remind you to copy the files to your Psion. It will also inform you of the total size of the files it has created so you can check your Psion has enough room. If there isn't enough room on your Psion, don't worry, just re-select the "Get messages..." button and choose fewer newsgroups (or delete some of those games off your Psion ). You should now be ready to do the file transfer from your PC to your Psion. You can do this two ways. You can manually copy (using PsiWin or RCOM) ALL files from the TOPSION directory the program has created within your ZetPsion directory, to the ZETPSION directory you created on your Psion. The best way though, is to let ZetPsion do the hard work for you and copy the files automatically using the RCOM transfer utility (you must have told the program where RCOM is installed. Use the SETUP button if you have not set the location already). To start the automatic transfer, click the "RCOM transfer of files to Psion" button. You will be asked to connect up your Psion and PC using your transfer cable. When you select "OK", RCOM will be run to do the file copying. You will see it delete the old versions of the files from your Psion, and then transfer the new files across, informing you when transfer is complete. You are now ready to read your messages on your Psion. On your Psion ============= If installed correctly, there will be a ZetPsion icon on the toolbar that appears when you click the "Extras" button on the main toolbar on your Psion's screen. Click on that and your selected newsgroups should be listed. You can navigate round the screens using a combination of the cursor keys, the "enter" key and the "Esc" key. Extra options are avaiable depending on which screen you are in. These can be accessed using either by pressing a certain key, or by selecting from the context-sensitive menu. A message count is displayed showing you the number of messages held in a particular group/subject. An asterisk is used to indicate if a message has not yet been read. The indication is carried up through the hierarchy so, for example, on the Newsgroup llist screen, a newsgroup with an asterisk beside it has at least one unread message in one of the subjects in the group. From the newsgroup list screen, you can also delete the message file for a particular group. This is indicated by a "D" appearing just before the message count. This option is handy if you are running low on memory for running things other than ZetPsion. Any replies you create while you are reading your messages can be viewed using the "Reply manager" option on the menu. While on this screen, you can edit or delete the highlighed reply. Back on your PC =============== Now you've created your replies and your new messages, you want to transfer them back to the message database on your PC. Either manually copy all "REPnnnnn.REP" files from the ZETPSION directory on your Psion, to the FROMPSION directory within your PC's ZETPSION directory, or, select the "RCOM transfer of replies" button to do the transfer automatically. If you use the manual method, you MUST delete the reply files from your Psion otherwise they will be transferred again next time, and you will end up with duplicated messages. The automatic copy does the delete itself. Now the files have been copied, you just need to select the "Load replies into Zimacs database" button. Before exiting ZetPsion, you may want to update the information Zimacs holds as to whether a message has been read or not. This option needs RCOM to have been installed. Selecting the "Reconcile read messages" button will transfer two files from your Psion to your PC. These files will be read and compared against the Zimacs database. The read/unread setting for all the messages you previously transferred from PC to Psion, will be updated accordingly. You can now exit ZetPsion and load Zimacs to send your replies and pick up your new messages. Summary of options on the PC ============================ GET MESSAGES FROM ZIMACS DATABASE - this reads your messages and collates them into files ready for transfer to your Psion. Files are preserved until you next run PROCESS. RCOM TRANSFER OF MESSAGES TO PSION - available only if you have set the location of RCOM. This copies the files you created in PROCESS, over to your Psion automatically. RCOM TRANSFER OF REPLIES FROM PSION - available only if you have set the location of RCOM. This copies the replies you have created on your Psion, back to your PC. LOAD REPLIES INTO ZIMACS DATABASE - this does the final job of loading the replies you have copied back to your PC, into the Zimacs database, ready for sending to Zetnet. RECONCILE READ MESSAGES - Allows you to update the read/unread indicator in the Zimacs database from the indicator used while reading the messages on the Psion. SETUP - Allows you to setup ZetPsion. EXIT - Leaves ZetPsion. Summary of options on the Psion =============================== An asterisk before the message count indicates if a message is read/unread. Also indicates unread messages within subjects and groups. A "D" before the message count on the Newsgroup list screen indicates that the message file for that group has been deleted. You can include a "signature" in your replies or new messages. Create a text file called SIG.LST within your ZETPSION directory with whatever you wish to have as your signature. The reader will find the file and give you the option of including it within your message. Keys ==== All screens:- ----------- Cursor UP/ - Move highlighted line up or down one line. DOWN PSION & UP - Move highlight a page up. PSION & DOWN - Move highlight a page down. or SPACE key ENTER - Selects highlighted item HELP - This screen ESC - Takes you up a level Q - Reply manager E - Exit program X - Also Exit program V - Create new message T - Toggle toolbar on/off While reading a message ----------------------- LEFT/ - Previous/next message in subject RIGHT N - Goes to next unread message M - Reply by e-mail F - Follow-up to message S - Save message to file G - Grab e-mail address of message's Author Newsgroup list screen --------------------- D - Delete message file for highlighted group ESC - Gives option to quit Subject and Message list screens -------------------------------- R - Set message(s) read U - Set message(s) unread Reply Manager screen -------------------- D - Delete highlighted reply W - Edit highlighted reply ZetPsion filenames and what they contain ======================================== On the PC --------- ZETPSION.EXE - the main program ZETPSION.INI - stores your preferences (not present until after program is first run) ZETPSION.TXT - these instructions RCOM.PIF - the file to allow your Psion RCOM utility to be used best from Windows DIRECTORY TOPSION - where the program stores files that are to be copied to your Psion DIRECTORY FROMPSI - where the files copied from your Psion are stored DIRECTORY FILES - used by the program for temporary files On the Psion ------------ GROUPLST.LST - contains a list of newsgroups with messages in them GROUPS.LST - contains the subjects discussed within those newsgroups SUBJECTS.LST - contains the authors of the messages within those subjects MSGxxxxx.MSG - contains the actual message text of all the messages The above four files are fully indexed for speed NEWSGRP.LST - contains a list of all the newsgroups you are subscribed to on your PC *MAIL.LST - contains your list of e-mail addresses *SIG.LST - contains the text to be used as your signature in messages *REPLIES.INI - contains a number used as a counter to create a unique filename when you create a reply *REPLIES.LST - a file generated by the reader when you display your list of replies REPxxxxx.REP - your actual replies. The "xxxxx" is the unique number generated from replies.ini KEYHELP.TXT - Gives a rundown on which key does what * These files will not initially be present on your Psion. Troubleshooting =============== The only problems I can forsee are lack of disk space on your PC, and lack of free memory on the Psion. Make sure you have plenty of free space on the hard disk you install ZetPsion to. Similarly, make sure you have enough space to copy the files to on your Psion. If you do think you have found a bug, please e-mail me at the address above giving as much information as possible. Technical stuff =============== ZetPsion on the PC will cope with a total of 4000 messages across all newsgroups. ZetPsion on the Psion will cope with lists of up to 550 Newsgroups/Subjects/Messages and will cope with messages of length - 550 lines by 80 characters. ZetPsion should support all EPOC32 devices with a screen width of 480 pixels or more. This is the smallest size you can get 80 columns of (readable) text into. The smallest is the Revo with 480. Future enhancements =================== To come in future versions of ZetPsion. PC:- None at present. Psion:- Allow installation as an SIS file so installation is done automatically. Your suggestions are welcome regarding other enhancements. The history of ZetPsion ======================= Well there I was, half way through the night shift at work, bored out of my skull, no problems on our Mainframes to keep me out of mischief. There, sat on my PC at home, downloaded just before I set off for work, were a couple of hundred postings just waiting to be read. With me I had my trusty Psion 3a (1mb version). Suddenly a flash of inspiration! What if I could read them on my Psion? ZetPsion was born. That started the ball rolling. No more boredom on night shift as I set about programming the Psion end of things at work, doing the PC end of things when I got home (with the help of the two World Cup Cricket Semi's). Finally today, the 20th March 1996, version 1 of ZetPsion is ready. A suitable pronouncement will be posted to the zetnet.local newsgroup at 1800. ZetPsion was designed on a P75 Pentium PC (running at 90mhz!) with 8mb RAM and 800Mb hard disk space, together with my 1mb Psion 3a and the Psion emulator on the PC. Well on the 28th March 1996 version 1.1 was completed. Rather than fiddling with your message packets, it now reads directly from the Zetnet database which Zimacs uses. New in this version as well, is the ability to select which newsgroups you want to process, and whether or not you want to just process unread messages. I had to give myself a very intensive course on database programming using just the data control in Visual Basic. Eek! 29th March 1230 bug uncovered. While e-mail addresses are being sorted, peoples names aren't. Easy to fix though. v1.1b will be ready by 1330. Also today, removed a spot of debugging code on Psion (print statement) that was causing a bit of screen disturbance. Also on Psion, corrected ret$ variable to 80 chars from 60 so prog didn't fall over when moving between messages when a line of > 60 chars (eg the line of spaces) was highlighted. New EXE, OPO, and TXT files. v1.1c created 11:10 1st April 1996. Checks for not records in table before trying to read anything from table. Error occurred on empty table. April fool! Spotted another bug that resets the "read" pointer in the database to unread. Have to get the Doc Martens out again (bug squashing tools extrordinaire). SQUASHED IT! v1.1d created at 01:08 5th April 1996. Was resetting the text box with the flag in (Duh!). When moving on to the next record in the database, the current record was being updated with the revised flag. 1.1d not released because....... v1.2 created 5th April 21:30. Amalgamated all the seperate message, subject and group files into just four files. Should enable fast copying even with PsiWin. New EXE, OPO and TXT files. 01:30 6 April 1996. Fixed a couple of bugs in v1.2 creating v1.2b 01:50 6 April 1996. Spotted a problem with dates that are stored as single digits i.e 4 Apr instead of 04 Apr. Sorted it by 0212. 0250 Tidied up an inconsistency where subject names were not considered same if case of any chars in it was different i.e "Subject" and "subject". Modified code to allow these to equal each other. 03:35 6 April 1996. Added in support to adjust date/time when message date/time is not GMT. 0315 14/4/96 v1.3 created. Now indicates unread messages. Added hook for when replies are possible. Tidied group selector so that when 1st shown, 1st group is selected. 0630 14/4/96 v1.3b with quicker unread message indicator. 0935 14/4/96 v1.3c now handles those silly posts where lines exceed 80 chars. One in partic. was about 400 chars long! They get broken down into 80 char chunks now. 1620 16/4/96 v1.4 born. Have got RCOM singing and dancing to do the file copy without a safety net. Also changed the front screen. Processing is now selected by a button. Wrote setup routine for setting Zetnet and RCOM directories. Put small routine in formload for all forms to centre form on screen regardless of resolution. 1915 24/5/96 v2.0 incepted. It has arrived! The ability to reply to news and mail. Fixed small bug that occurred when you ran the process a second time without leaving progam - did not reset variable "latest" to 1 nor clear list box. Fixed. 1800 20/6/96 Have added in new features for having a signature, saving messages as text, grabbing an e-mail address from a message, and creating a completely new mail/posting. Have just discovered a bug with this last feature. Killed it 1640 21/6/96. This version tweked into v2.1 4/7/96, the changes being A slight alteration to how mail is viewed (grouped by author not subject) and using the order messages loaded into database rather than sorting it again (already sorted by Zimacs). Eek. Big bug. On load replies. Had left a hard ref. to my sample database on drive J:. Squished with v2.1a. 22/9/96 Another hard coded ref. bug found. Squish! v2.1b founded. Tweaked the RCOM send to delete the old files before transfer so max space available on Psion. V.2.1c created 12:28 27/9/96 Finally found out what was corrupting big mail/news messages. Turned out to be the multi-line property for the text box. Was FALSE! Set it to TRUE and bingo! Bug no more. This has created a bigger headache now - how to handle these large messages on the Psion. v3.0 beta version created 22:57 27/01/1997. Many enhancements inc. Messages counts, split message file up into one per newsgroup-allows group deletion to free file space, Siena (40 col) support, displaying size of files to transfer, Saving messages,re-editing reply on reply manager, support Zimacs long messages, mark messages as read/unread, space key for page-down, help screen with list of keypresses, reconcile read/unread messages. Two bugs fixed - 1) Correctly sends mail as mail not as newsgroup on a reply - 2) Menus can now be accessed. 13:10 30/01/1997 Tidied up a couple of things. The subject title on the message list screen had the 'read' asterisk and message count still on it, so I fixed it. Vastly improved the speed of the reconciliation of the read messages. Will release this as 3.0. 08/07/97 Get a new Psion 5 and start tackling the conversion. Oh no!! the undocumented positioning within a text file has not made it onto the '5'. Scratches head has a few false starts, and finally comes up with a solution early August (7th i think). Also there is currently no easy way of editing a plain text file on the '5', so start work writing one. 21/08/97 Add a flag within the PC proggie for the Series 5. Check that RCOM will still zap stuff to the Psion 5 , yes, albeit at only 19200 bps - waiting for an answer back from Psion on that one. 12/09/97 RCOM v1.16f received from Psion after a bit of e-mail tennis. Does 115200 bps like a dream. 13/09/97 Took the opportunity to finetune the RCOM sending bit so that from within ZetPsion setup on the PC, you can select which Psion drive to zap the files to. 12/09/97-10/12/97 Wrestle with Psion 5 version ironing out simple bugs, adding a toolbar and even writing a simple text editor so you can edit your messages. Hope v1.1 of Psion 5 ROM has text editor. Added a next unread message feature. Strengthened the read/unread message code. It seemed to stop working on the 5. I wonder why (see text file positioning earlier). 10/12/97 Despite going to the dentist at 1030 later this morning, I stayed up until 0400 increasing the number of messages that can be read from the PC database. I then had a bright idea on how to check that all the files had been copied over successfully using RCOM. Got RCOM to do a DIR on both the Psion and the PC, and compared the filesizes. Had to change a couple of filenames to get this work. 11/12/97 Bleeaaarrgghhhhhhhhhhhh! Writing this at 0628. Only! 5 hours programming.Have converted message files to write out one per subject. Tweaked the Psion side of things to cope with it, then set to sorting out the conflict between next unread message function and the setting of the "read" indicator. Using much debugging code, I think I have finally sorted it once and for all, including all the way up to group level. Message loading is so much faster now with one file per subject. Was able to remove some duplication where the "read" flag update call to PROC subsred2 for PROC sublist was being done twice. Many thanks to Pulp, Texas, Fleetwood Mac, Radiohead and Ocean Colour Scene for keeping me going all this time. Now all I need to do for a release is update the instructions, write an installation routine, make a ZIP file and update my web pages. Not much heh? 11/09/98 Over the last week I have been tweaking ZetPsion on the S5 into v4.1. This is the first time I have touched it for 9 months. Changed the message file format back to one per newsgroup. The reason I can do this is the slight change in file format which improves the speed of things on the Psion side no end. GROUPS.LST, SUBJECTS.LST and MSGxxxxx.MSG files all have the record length as the first three bytes of the record. This format should enable me to write versions for other platforms relativly easily. Bugs tidied away include Mails having the author name as the subject. TextEd which does the editiing job on the S5 was only writing fils out with a LF not a CR+LF. Will change that later tonight. Also added a delete line option into TextEd. May have tweaked/fixed one or two other bits as well but have forgotton. Accreditations for this version go to Hauppage for their WinTV card. 07/03/2000 (look Millenium complient date format :-) Have been playing with ZetPsion for EPOC32 for a few weeks now since I got my shiny new Series 7 in mid January. Have whipped it up into a release version (v5.0) - the previous version (v4.1) was really a Beta version. Have coded support for the Series 7, and Psion's "Boy Wonder" machine the Revo - thanks to the Epoc32 Emulator. There looks like some hard coding ahead when Zetnet release v2 of Zimacs. Where's Tim Cole when you need him. About me - Tony Walker ====================== I became a subscriber to Zetnet in Novemeber 1995 after seeing their stand at The Northern Computer Market show at Bowlers in Trafford Park, Manchester. Call me a glutton for punishment as I actually work with computers as well as them being a hobby - though I actually work with Mainframes at the same place that spawned the comedy writing duo of Grant and Naylor (Red Dwarf). I first became interested in computers at the tender age of 14 back in 1980. My friend's Dad's friend (still with me!) brought a Sharp MZ80K round to my friend's house. I forget how long we were sat there playing a text based "explore the dungeons" type game (similar to Rogue on the PC). That was it. I bought my first computer, a ZX81, back in January 1983. I have since owned:- 2 x Spectrum 48K (the first one broke), an Amstrad CPC464, an Amstrad CPC6128, an Atari ST, an Archimedes A3000, an Archimedes A400, a 386sx clone, a homebuilt 486, and three generations of homebuilt Pentium class machines. The 486 and Pentium class machines have borrowed bits from previous generations and have usually had bits upgraded on the way.