I just released a version of my Scrabble(tm)-like PalmOS game Crosswords (URL in .sig) that includes a robot player. Dictionaries are already available in seven or eight languages, and in several sizes in English, but the request I keep hearing is for the ability to edit existing dictionaries and to compile new ones. Editing requires decompile-edit-compile. And compilation is too computationally and memory intensive to happen on a palmtop. The complier I wrote for Linux takes several minutes and consumes >10meg on a 166mhz PC to produce a 180K .pdb. So I need to provide a solution that works on users' desktop machines. My tools are meant to be called from linux makefiles. I can port them to java easily enough, but is it reasonable to expect users to run java tools from a commandline? Will they have java outside of their browsers? I've never paid any attention to discussions of conduits, but now I'm wondering if this isn't a situation where a conduit is the best solution. Rather than download a dictionary as a .pdb, decompress, edit, recompress and finally upload it, a user just downloads a text file from the Palm and uploads it again after editing. (Digression: is it ok if the upload takes 2 minutes?) Finally, back to my question: is there any way of providing a conduit that'll run on win and mac? And of developing it without access to either platform? I'm afraid I already know the answer, but I welcome any suggestions you may have. Thanks, --Eric House ****************************************************************************** * From the desktop of: Eric House, [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Check out Crosswords for PalmOS: <http://www.peak.org/~fixin/xwords> * * "The instructions said 'Win98 or better' -- so I installed Linux" * ******************************************************************************
