 Darren Irvine takes a look at a slightly unusual method of person-to-person communication across the Internet. |
 When you first click on the AmiSlate item you can choose in which screen mode to run to program and how many colours to use. |
E-mail can be an extremely useful tool, and most people who use the Internet regularly would be lost without it. Sometimes, however, it's necessary to do your communication in real time, enabling things that might take a whole round of E-mails bouncing back and forth to be sorted out in a single session.
Perhaps the ultimate system for real time communications across the Net is CuSeeMe - the video conferencing system. Unfortunately, no complete implementation for the Amiga exists as yet.
So, what are the alternatives? Well, you could always use Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and set up your own private mode channel. This has the disadvantage that you have to pre-arrange with the other party when the conference will take place - something that is easier to arrange than to stick to. Additionally, when using IRC you are stuck to using text only as your communications medium.
No - ideally we need a tool which can inform the user at the other end that you want to communicate with them and that can be used to exchange a range of different types of information. Systems such as AmiTalk offer some improvement over IRC in terms of person-to-person chatting - one person can "call the other one up" without having to arrange a time to talk. However, you are still restricted to using just text.
This is where AmiSlate comes in. AmiSlate is a "Whiteboard" system. In effect, what this means is that you can use AmiSlate to contact any other AmiSlate-running Internet user and the program generates a shared "Whiteboard" - a reasonable competent "paint" style window to you and me. When you select a colour and draw a line, or drag out a box, then exactly the same pattern that forms on your screen forms at the other end.
 If someone wants to start an AmiSlate session with you, and you are currently linked to the Internet, a requester will appear like this. |
 An example of my stunning artistic talent - a talent shared in this case with the remote AmiSlate user. |
Installing AmiSlate is a pretty simple affair. The archive itself can be found (as always) on any of the Aminet mirror sites and you should extract the archive into a new directory immediately below AMITCP:.
AmiSlate comes with its own install script, although you can install it manually if you prefer. Doing this gives you more of a feel for how it interacts with your AmiTCP set-up, if this sort of technical stuff amuses you. To install manually, add a line similar to the following to your "inetd.conf" file in the directory AMITCP:DB
AmiSlate stream tcp nowait root AmiTCP:AmiSlate/AmiSlate
This is the line which enables AmiSlate to pick up incoming connection requests. In the file "services" in the same directory add the following line, identifying the TCP port number used by AmiSlate.
AmiSlate 2955/tcp
Finally, add a couple of ASSIGN commands to your "S:user-startup" file similar to these:
assign SlateRexx: AmiTCP:AmiSlate/SlateRexx assign SlateScripts: AmiTCP:AmiSlate/SlateScripts
In addition to allowing you to communicate using the paint tools, AmiSlate enables you to directly load in IFF graphics files which are then sent across the Net to the other user. It also has a text communication bar at the bottom of the window for you die-hard keyboard fans.
One of the most impressive features of AmiSlate is its excellent ARexx support. It comes with a range of ARexx scripts, allowing you and the remote user to play a series of games in real time across the Internet, from Chess and Tic Tac Toe, to a version of the game Qix.
The documentation supplied with AmiSlate is very good, and there is a complete guide to writing your own communications applications in ARexx.
Although at first site AmiSlate may appear to be a bit of a gimmick, it can be extremely useful if you regularly exchange ideas with other Amiga users which are best expressed using some sort of graphics.
