Documentation : Browsing the web

Browsing

LunaSuite offers unparalleled browsing capabilities on your Newton. The browser shows webpages as faithfully as possible. Several advanced capabilities of modern browsers like tables, frames and jpegs are supported. LunaSuite is highly integrated into you Newton, this means that that you can view and exchange information throughout your Newton, for example add an URL location to Names, or put images you gather from the web in your documents.

Trying the multitude of Internet webservers you will find that LunaSuite is a very fast and powerful browser. An amazing range of websites look and feel like the do when viewed with modern desktop browsers.

Browsing on your Newton puts a great strain on all available resources. Newtons have limited scratch memory for a browser to work with and limited storage space to download pages and images onto. Every bit of heapspace and storage space that you can provide will be gratefully used.

LunaRanger offers you the most familiar way to browse the Internet. It offers you a buttonbar to reach other utilities like the Bookmarks and URL launcher application. The retrieved pages and objects are then shown in the viewing area of LunaRanger.

The button will let the LunaRanger occupy the entire screen by covering up the Buttonbarhe button will switch back to normal size. Please note that some functions or applications will not function correctly without the buttonbar, like Undo for instance. LunaRanger will remember this setting upon exiting and open in the same size the next time it is launched.

The button minimizes LunaRanger. This hides the LunaRanger while it remains active. You can unhide it by tapping on the star icon at the top of the screen.

If you tap on the URL launcher will pop up. This is an highly configurable editor, especially suited for editing URLs on your Newton. The buttons are fully configurable, so you add shortcuts as you like. The labelpicker contains your last fully completed urls for even quicker browsing.

LunaSuite comes with a Bookmarks application, tap on the button to open it. This is holds information that can be reached through Universal Resource Locators (URL). This can be more than the Web alone, e.g. ftp adresses and mailbox locations. You can organize URLs in a bookmark, and file the Bookmarks in folders.

If you have a HTML page displayed, you can access a powerfull menu of choices by holding your pen down on the page. This is is a context sensitive menu which lets you manipulate the location of the item you tapped on, or the link you are point at. Tap on several objects to find out what you do with them

In general browsing will put a great strain on your Newton, because of the limited resources it can offer. Let this however not restrain you to go boldly where no Newton has browsed before. Your Newton will need all the memory you can give it. This can be accomplished by de-installing all other software, but is ofcourse not an acceptable solution. An alternative is to freeze packages with one of the multiple utilities available for this purpose.

Also there are several utilities that will show you how much heap and system memory you have left, but these parameters are probably best left for Newton experts to tinker with.

LunaSuite also offers you the possibility to write and preview html on your Newton. If you begin a note in the notepad with text/html, the rest of the notepad will be interpreted as if it was html. If you tap you will see a new option: View using LunaSuite.

InetHTTP

To browse the web, the protocol used on the Internet is the HyperText Transfer Protocol, HTTP. It is a widely used protocol, which lets you retrieve information located on the world-wide Internet. The HTTP module lets you retrieve any information you like, typically HTML pages and GIF/JPEG images. These will be be interpreted and shown as close to your desktop experience as possible. Due to limitations of memory, screensize and general Newton OS features however there exist differences with the desktop browsers you might be used to. (Sound of major understatement)

To add HTTP settings to your LunaSuite setup, you can use the LunaSuite Setup package for most uses, see the Configuring section on the use of the Setup package. To set up all the details, you can follow the numbered instructions in this section.

HTTP settings need to be added to both Ownercards and Worksite cards. The very good reasons for this are explained in the section Configuration, were you also can read how to work with Owner and Worksite cards.

Configuring an Owner card

InetHTTP does not have configuration to be added to a Owner card at this moment. However, a placeholder for future configuration info is added. Your Owner Card will now have a item, InetHTTP.

Configuring a Worksite card

LunaSuite allows you to dial in to several different dial-in providers via the Worksite card mechanism. For each location you can setup a Worksite card and define your preferred settings.

1 Tap an appropriate Worksite or make a new one

2 Tap Add

3 Tap InetHTTP

If you can't add InetHTTP info, you already have InetHTTP info on your card, tap Show and choose All Info to see the settings. To alter these, just tap on the appropriate line.

You can add proxy settings to your worksite card. The settings will be used by LunaSuite to fetch all http requests. They will be send to the proxy server that will go and retrieve the request for you. This allows greater speed and efficiency. Ask you service provider for the correct hostname and port number.

Control over retrieving HTTP requests

You can have more control over retrieving HTTP requests by using the HTTP preferences that are accessible via the Info button in the Inbox.

By changing these settings you are able to let the LunaSuite always use the default Owner and Worksite instead of asking for them when browsing. This is very convenient since otherwise you will be asked for every item that is transported, typically a webpage and several images on it.

You can choose not to see what is going on, by disabling the status dialogs. They will be available by tapping on the star at the top of your screen, which is were active background programs go.