Welcome
Welcome on the Infitra homepage. The intention of this site is to give you "easy"
access to the latest version of Infitra.
Beside that you may find some usefull information about Infitra and, in the future,
related subjects.
Quick about me
Before I start talking about Infitra, I'll think I should introduce myself. My name is
Eabe Kuik, I'm living in the Netherlands and at the moment of writing this I'm 30 years
old. In 'normal' live I'm youth worker and support other 'special' groups within the dutch
community. This work currently takes up a great deal of my time what has it's effects on
my programming time for the last year.
The welfare foundation I'm working for does not have a homepage. But this is only a matter
of time before the foundation will have a homepage. Till that time you can not 'click' on
the logo and surf to the homepage.
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Me and computers
Since I bought my first computer back in 1988, I'm programming programs for own use
and fun. This first computer happend to be a old Atari 800XL. Well I can say that the
computer you start with, will last the longest. So I still own a few Atari's including
that first800XL.
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On that old XL I learned myself programming in the basic language of the XL. Soon I
reached the "speed" limit and switched to programming in machine code. Machine code?
I hear you think, should that not be assembler? Yes and No. Yes assembler is almost the
same as machine code and No because machine code programming is done "live" in the
computers memory by directly entering the cpu instructions.
BTW: click on the XL to see a history overview of the
computers made by Atari
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In 1990 I bought my first520ST and directly started to learn myself programming in
assembler on this machine. Now, nine years later, I had a 520ST, 1040STf, 1040STfm,
1040STe, TT030 and a Falcon. The last two I still use for programming and other jobs.
They are connected in a STinG
TCPIP network.
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O, almost forgotten. That picture on the right is a very worse photo of me. So you
can actualy see who Eabe is...
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Infitra
Lets talk about Infitra staring with a brief history. When I connected my Atari to the
internet, now almost seven years ago, the choise for programs was very limited. Ok there
was Ant-Mail for the mailing stuff, MG FTP for the file transfer etc. And I must say in
all respect, these programs worked fine. They did the job and that's it. Only after
several crashes of my mailbox in Ant-Mail, I wanted more. A program that can do the job
and something more. A program with a nice user interface. A program that won't lock itself
when online. A program that can use all features availible but doesn't need them. All this
and what ever is relevant in future development. But most important, a program that would
not crash.
With this in mind I started with Infitra. And I started from scrap, reprogramming the
main library, building the
TCPIP library, and started thinking about
the user interface on top of this. I also created the name Infitra what was build
from
Internet
File
Transfer.
. And that is presize what the program should do; Transfering Files over the Internet.
This can be mail, programs, raw data etc. I started with the mailer part of the program
because I needed that the most of all.
Commercial?, Shareware?, Public Domain?
Once I had a running version of the mailer I asked some friends of me to try it. They were
that much impressed that one of them came with the idea to let users pay for the program.
At first I didn't have any problem with that as long he arranged everything. Now days I
think it makes sence to make the program freeware until the point is reached I think
it's ready. Ready means here that there will be a 1.0 version. So every version of
Infitra below the 1.0 is freeware. People don't have to pay for it. There will be no
limitations in the program except for those things that are not ready. In that way anyone
from the "small" Atari usergroup can use Infitra if he or she wants this.
Progression...
Currently the mailer is still the main part I'm working on. Since the last beta, version
0.13, major changes are made. The most important is the full MIME support. Not only
the little things, no everything. This means that a lot needed/needs to be done. Images in
email should be visible, active links to url's, multy language support etc, etc, etc. This is
done in small steps, but all of them are interacting with the message creation part of the
mailer. And that is why the last working version is currently 0.13 and the pre-beta
has 0.21. The pre-beta gets more and more routines in place, but still is not cabable
to create new messages. I estimated that at the end of 1999 a new full working beta would be
ready....Wrong, a change of work takes a lot of my time. And currently, 9/2000 still no
new working beta is ready. So please wait a bit longer.
Idea's, suggestions...
If you think that some features must be added. Or you have wonderful new idea's, feel free
to tell it to me. I write everything down and see what is possible to implement. You can
mail me your idea's directly, but you may use the
form page for that.
Speeding up Development
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If you think that current development should go faster and you are a programmer
yourself, why not help me with Infitra. I think that development can be speed up a lot if
several people are working on it. If you want you can
send me a message.
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For the non-Atari users
Infitra is only working on the Atari or Atari compatible computer. You may need to install
a Atari emulator like MagiCMac or MagiCPC to try Infitra.
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