As we reach the end of the month, I wanted to take a little time to refect on my (mostly) Psion-themed December Adventure. While I didn’t manage to do much after [day 19, I thought it might be nice to summarize my efforts and set out my intentions for future developments.

Home infrastructure?

I’ve been really grateful for the feedback and engagement I’ve had during my explorations this month. Writing and publishing software can be a complex experience—I enjoy the creativity but the most vocal users tend to be critical and that has definitely caused me to stop working on more than one project. Conversely, feedback on my December Adventure has been positive and spportive without exception. I hope to find ways to unlock more of those kinds of interactions in my projects going forwards.

Thoughts

Thoughts for EPOC (or Thoughts Lite) formed the backbone of my experiements.

Reconnect

Using my Series 7 on an almost daily basis caused me to see all the areas where I could stand to improve Reconnect, my Psion conectivity for macOS. While working on this didn’t go as quickly as I might have liked—the latest updates to Xcode and the Swift compiler really make developing for Apple platforms a painful experience—I made pretty good progress in getting file drag-and-drop working which gave me an oportunity to sure up file transfer handling. I hope this will set me up well for adding explicit backup support in the future; crucial when working with devices that use RAM disks.

Psion ROMs (and Emulation)

I promised myself I’d complete my write up of Psion Emulation. I didn’t. Instead, I got distracted by trying to help consolidate the various ROM dumps the community has managed to collect in the hope of offering a clear place to start when getting the necessary files for emulation.

• Alex’s Mastodon post

Home Infrastructure and Syncthing

New Ideas

Giving myself the space to play during December also proved a wonderful oportunity to thing on new ideas. I doubt many will see the light of day, but it was fun and creative to think through them.

• EPOC32 app launcher
• nEzumi
• Psion Software Index and API
• EPOC32 screenshot utility—generates timestamped screenshots in a folder
• prototyping an offline-first syncing notepad using Automerge
• writing a proof-of-concept version of Folders for GNOME