Hello Thomas,
Do they want to have applications working with their screen reader or not ?
Such an API is normally made for being publicly available. Look at
twitter and google, they are commercial companies but their respective
API are publicly available. Having to pay to use some of the services
provided by the API is another problem. The API itself can always be
downloaded freely.
Dolphin must understand that such an API is made to work with their
screen reader and improve existing applications, not to break,
decompile, crack it or whatever. Being so protective is suspect, it may
proof that their API is bad made and that it allows to do too many
things and/or enter too deeply in their proprietary code. That would be
a valuable reason to protect it so much, otherwise I don't see what's
the problem.
To be honnest, I haven't considered potential legality issues. I already
use JFW API for ages, and I'm sure FS completely don't care if I use it.
Anyway, their API is so made that you are totally unable to break or
crack something. You can just be collaborative and tell the API to say
something, or run a script.
Where I got my information: nothing is really secret there
* JFW: it was a long time ago, in a french blind programming
mailing-list. The creator of SoundRTS sent me a zip containing
jfwapi.dll and corresponding header. Nowadays however, we shouldn't use
jfwapi.dll anymore but use the COM interface directly. I got the
information about the COM interface by using OLE explorer and my though
was confirmed when I read say tools source later.
* NVDA: I have nothing else that what is publicly available, and it's
sufficient. Something is to mention, the return values of the functions
are pretty unclear. I tested myself with my copy of NVDA to exactly
clarify how it works exactly.
* System access: I don't remember who sent me a zip containing the DLL
and the headers, but it was by mail. Only recently I was able to ask
somebody to test.
* Window eye: I just allmost copied and translated from VB to C the code
in say tools package by jamal. I asked somebody else to test it. I was
unable to install window eye demo in a XP VM, the install systematically
crashes. I'm not a window eye customer and don't want to be unless I'm
obliged, so I never contacted them, I think this is rather impolite.
I'm sure we can improve that part of the code.
One interesting thing about my API is the following: if you quit jaws
and start NVDA, then my code notice that jaws was exited and
automatically connect to NVDA, without quitting the application using
the API. It works also if you do the reverse, quitting NVDA and start
jaws. For window eye and sytem access that thing doesn't work because I
don't have any info on return values from the say functions.
---
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