Track package from your old Macintosh?!

[Themk]

Hello everyone!

How would you guys like a program that allows you to track your USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc. letter/package from your classic Macintosh? It would use MacTCP to communicate, and I am hoping it will run on System 6.0.8 (and newer), making it usable also on 68000-based compacts. It will be targeting the 680x0 platform (sorry PPC folks; but it will probably run under the built-in emulator).

I'm curious what the interest for this might be. I've been thinking about making it for myself, but was wondering if anyone would be interested, or want to help with development.

Thanks,

TheMK

 

[Johnnya101]

That would be pretty cool...

If you need some practice for coding, sounds like and excellent project! I'd use it!

I can test if you need anyone?

 

[Themk]

Heh, we will see if I can remember enough to cough up a proof of concept GUI that does nothing! It's been too long since I last used MPW.

 

[agent_js03]

Programming the web side of this sounds like it would be a living hell.

Unless you plan to have some kind of middleman in-between.

My guess is you would be using some kind of API from major shipping sites (UPS, USPS, etc.) or otherwise a web scraper. This would be nearly impossible to do directly from your mac, as system 6 would certainly not support modern SSL (if it supports SSL at all) and also most APIs return data in the form of JSON, for which I am certain there is no parser in the macintosh libraries from that era.

You would have to have a middle box (perhaps a raspberry pi) set up between the two and write a python server script (or maybe a php page on your middle box) to do all the heavy lifting, then translate the data into something your mac and the program running on it could understand, and send that back to your client program. At this point, it is easier just to write a "web interface" instead of a GUI application in C, that will save you the trouble of writing/learning a web post api. I am currently doing this for google maps; I have a php page that interfaces with google maps api and then feeds back a "digestable" google maps page I wrote myself which can be accessed from netscape 4.0 on my 68k mac, and I can do all my google maps and directions search directly from there, all there is on that page is get/post, no javascript pretty much, so any old browser can  handle it. You can do the same thing with this shipping project. Or maybe I can when I get the time. This can be one more thing on my long list of retroized pages in my legacy web project.

 

[agent_js03]

I should mention, pretty much any time you access the internet from an older machine, you should have something modern in the middle anyways; a proxy server, an stunnel proxy, etc. For SSL, you pretty much need stunnel since modern ssl doesn't work with old browsers. But even the TCP/IP stack is so ancient on older machines that it is generally a pretty significant security risk to your network if you are directly connecting your browser to the outside world. So if you are accessing modern pages at all (which is usually unbearable on older browsers due to html5 and modern css, etc.) then you need to do it through a proxy server. Even here, there may be vulnerabilities.