Corrupted Date Book!

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Message-id: <9311121402.AA24825@trantor.harris-atd.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 93 09:02:19 EST
From: starnet!apple!trantor.harris-atd.com!chuck (Chuck Musciano)
To: zoomer-list-1993@grot.starconn.com
Subject: Corrupted Date Book!
X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII
Content-Length: 3039
Status: OR

     Well, it finally happened.  My Zoomer blew away my Date Book.

     My free space dropped below 50%, so I decided to reset the Zoomer to
shake out all the cruft.  My mistake: I pressed the reset button with the
power turned on.  (I wanted to see what, if anything, got displayed in such
a situation).  The DateBook happened to be open, and just as I pressed the
button, the hourglass appeared.  Turns out, the hourglass appeared because
the DateBook was saving all my appointments to the Date Book.

     [ An aside: isn't it confusing that the app and the document have the
       same name?  I'm using DateBook for the app, and Date Book for the
       document, just to keep this all straight. ]

     The Zoomer booted back up, and I tapped the DateBook icon, and it came
up in "year" view, no problem.  Tap on November, and wham, "KR-04, Cannot
Read File.  Press the right button to exit".  Press the button, reboot,
try the sequence again.  Bang!  KR-09!

     I was able to recover the text data using this process:
     
     1	Create a batch file somewhere using the AOL text editor that copies
     	b:\geoworks\document\date_boo.000 to b:\recover.txt.
     	
     2	Hack your INI to let you run batch files.  (I had already done this
     	long ago)
     
     3	Run the batch file.
     
     4	Remove the original Date Book document.
     
     5	Open b:\recover.txt in the AOL editor.  The text of your appointments
     	and stuff will be discernable as your scroll through the document.
     	
     6	Ping pong between AOL and DateBook, re-entering all your appointments.
     
     Bleah!  Lessons learned:
     
     1	[For users] Don't press reset with the power on.
     
     2	[For Palm and Geoworks] You need to provide better error messages.
     	DateBook should not barf on bad files; it should provide a nice
     	"Your data is no longer readable due to a system error.  Here is
     	how to recover" type message.  GEOS should not be putting up these
     	goofy XX-nn error codes, *ever*!  Give me an English description of
     	the problem, and a way to fix things.  GEOS uses the worst possible
     	scenario: cryptic codes, and no published list of what the codes
     	mean!  This is very bad, especially in a device intended for use
     	by non-computer types.
     	
     3	The lack of a general clipboard for cutting and pasting is a real
     	drawback on the Zoomer.  I should be able to cut text from the AOL
     	editor and paste it into the DateBook.  In general, data should move
     	between any two apps via the clipboard, seamlessly.  Even the old
     	Casio BOSS PIMs had this ability.  The Zoomer is actually less
     	functional in transferring data around than these much more primitive
     	devices buitl years ago!
     	
     4	Palm definitely needs to publish the file formats of the various
     	documents.  If those formats were available, people could write
     	recovery tools and data interchange tools that would enhance the
     	value of the existing Palm apps.