Infrared Newton Beaming to Desktop Systems

Beaming between MessagePads can be a very handy thing, however, with so relatively few MessagePads in circulation, its value today is somewhat limited. Being able to beam information between Newtons and popular desktop systems, on the other hand, could have immediate value in a range of situations.

Enter Creative Digital Systems, publishers of several Newton software titles along with the well-respected PDA Developers magazine. The San Francisco-based company has announced the availability of two developer toolkits for creating Macintosh and DOS applications that can communicate with the Newton’s built-in infrared port.

The Macintosh toolkit, dubbed GizmoBeam, implements Apple Computer’s superset of the Sharp infrared protocol as a Macintosh device driver. This protocol is embedded in the ROM of the Newton and, using the GizmoBeam driver resources and Think C 7.0 sample code, developers can create Mac applications that are infrared-enabled.

The DOS toolkit, known as MicroWave, is available as both Borland and Microsoft-compatible linkable libraries that are accessible to any C program. Of course, both versions require the desktop system to have an IR transceiver, such as the Sharp CE-IR2 or CE-IR3, attached to its serial port before it can actually communicate.

GizmoBeam and MicroWave are priced at $250 for a single-seat SDK and a five-user distribution license for a single product. Licensing fees are available for corporate and commercial distribution, as well as a discount for subscribers to PDA Developers.

Creative Digital Systems
Steve Mann
293 Corbett Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94114
(415) 621-4252
[email protected]