[Ham-Mac] ARRL discrimination - Think different

[David Anderson GM4JJJ]

A few years (1997) ago I purchased some of the early ARRL QST View CDROMs. I
then found that they used their own indexing and search software, not for
the Mac.

I did manage to find a way to import the indexes into a Mac FileMaker
database and then wrote my own much better (IMHO) search system in
FileMaker.

I never published this because:

A) It uses the ARRL index data which is copyright.

B) In order to distribute it, the user needs FileMaker.

I guess I could get around B) if I had the FileMaker runtime maker or
whatever they call it, but that is mega$$$

I may look at this again and do something in another language and then I
could actually look up the file and display it.

on 20/5/03 7:34 pm, Steve Byan at stevebyan@mac.com wrote:

> On a similar note, in the past I've complained to the ARRL publications
> director about their use of proprietary Windows-only software for their
> CD-ROM publications. I see that even their newer issues, such as the
> Ham Radio CD-ROM's still use proprietary formats for the indexes.
> 
> I have confirmed with the ARRL that the scanned pages are indeed in
> standard TIFF format, though some are said to be compressed using some
> of the more obscure compression algorithms in the TIFF standard. I've
> used OS X's Preview.app to view some of the Ham Radio scans, and have
> been contemplating learning Cocoa programming by writing an OS X viewer
> for the ARRL CD-ROMs that at least understands how to navigate the
> month, year, and page organization of the directory structure.
> 
> Is anyone aware of a Mac application which already does this? Of an
> application that understands the proprietary index format? Of a spec
> for the index file format?

___________________________________________________________________________
David Anderson GM4JJJ     david@gm4jjj.co.uk      http://www.gm4jjj.co.uk