TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

DocumentsToGo is a popular application suite used by many people, but some, like myself, doesn’t use it at all. So, one day when I got fed up by looking at the only icon I never tapped on, I decided to see if I could remove it from my Tungsten T5.

I opened the Delete window, selected Documents, tapped on Delete, and yes the icon was gone. Great, I thought, so I opened the Info window to see how much RAM I had freed up. To my astonishment, I found out that I had freed up almost nothing.

Then I saw the names of several DocumentsToGo apps. I knew what that meant: The people who made DocumentsToGo never thought anyone would want to delete their app. But that was a mistake. I was now, more than ever, decided to wipe out every little piece of the garbage they had spread in my T5’s RAM. I was going to delete the individual DTG applications one by one. But each one of them had a creator ID of its own, making it impossible to decide whether I should delete it or not. At this point I said some really ugly words. I now understood that the people who made DocumentsToGo didn’t want anyone to delete their app at all. They had done everything they could to stop me, except for one tiny detail: The version number.

Yes, the version number in the Info window displays v 7.005 on all DTG apps in my T5. Luckily, this way of writing the version number is quite unique, but just to be sure: check so that no other app uses the same version number before deleting the DTG apps!

So, there it is. Just identify all the DTG applications using the version number as ID tag, and then delete them one by one. I gained close to 5mb, but that was in my T5. Other models may have the DTG apps in flash memory or even ROM, and then they can’t be deleted. If I one day would miss that icon I never tap on, I just have to make a hard reset on my T5, and all the DTG applications are back in the RAM again.

Is that what is called garbage recycling?

Dear Readers,
TamsPalm has just grown-or, in good old c:


tamspalm.authors++;


Please give a warm welcome to Peter Thorstenson, our new contributor! Peter owns a Tungsten T and a Tungsten T5, and you may already know him as the developer of tejpWriter, my favourite Palm OS VFS enabled text editor! Peter will be writing about all kinds of stuff-better stay tuned!

P.s. He’s new-so please, please, dont flame him! Constructive criticism is ok, but please, no flames ala I’ll burn your house down…

Using Tam Hanna’s app “MakeMeClie” you can get the FlashPlayer of Sony Clie working. You have to get files of a Sony and to copy it from a card using ZLauncher, it is very unstable and it doesn’t work on the most Palms - including mine.

Now I found a download at dmitrygr’s site palmpowerups.com called Flash Player Installer. You can download it here: Flash Player

It is a self-extracting app which installs all needed files. It seems to be patched as it works on my PalmTungstenC.

What do you think?

SiED was a very popular text editor for Palm OS handhelds(stay tuned for our tejpWriter review, coming soon) a few months ago-and then, suddenly, its developer Ben Roe decided to stop development. However, the following post just appeared on his blog:

OK, the current nightly build is good enough for release as a beta. This is actually beta 5, by my counting. I would be particularly interested in feedback on how this works on HiRes+ devices: it seems to work fine in the simulator, anyway.

Known bugs: International keyboard is all broken (character encoding issue), opening and closing the grafitti with a split screen can cause the split to jump around and you can’t record macros with alt-key characters on the Treo.

http://benroe.com/si_blog/?p=96

So, it may look as if development may go on soon!

Thanks to all readers who sent this in!

Palm OS handhelds have a vgery common problem-when they “ship”, they are almost empty. A m505 could do a load of cool things..but only if you had the CD that accompanied it. Same thing valid for Tungsten T and buddies. While this is great for the customers, it hinders Palm’s sales, as people in a “store display” usually dont have access to the CD’s apps:

Bundled apps on CD are worthless apps
Don’t pull a TT with ALP, please

So, we covered the problem a few months ago. and now, the big dudes from CNET confirm our coverage, as Tom Krazit writes about how the Palm OS is missing the multimedia boat.

One of his core points of complain is that a Palm OS handheld cannot run Java applets natively when taken out of the box. Users need to install Websphere from IBM(free download), but, um, ok, it isnt in the ROM, so it isnt there.

And indeed, a customer who tries out a Treo 650 at a stand will not see the program, as the unit in the stand will probably be hardresetted once a week or so-without any possibility for a restore!

Overall, Palm, please do us all a favor, and burn a Java VM into the ROM area of the upcoming Treo 700p. It would be too kind, thank you!

We already wrote about updates on TamsPalm a few months ago-in case you can’t remember our coverage, here are two links to an user’s experience about software updates:

Update wisely and be loved-Part 1
Update wisely and be loved-Part 2

Updates-a User talks about his experiences Part 1
Updates-a User talks about his experiences Part 2

Anyways, Binary Clock-the Binary Clock for Palm OS currently gets updated to version 2.0(registered users celebrate, free upgrades coming your way) to include a few new features(silent alarm, fullscreen without statusbar)…and it looks like a painless bit of work for me. A bit of coding is involved, yes, but no major burn action. Why? Isn’t updating an existing code base considered one of the worst jobs? Yes, it is-but it was easy for me for a few reasons:

Binary Clock is ‘designed’
BinaryClock was designed(at night, because I was bored), not gung-ho coded. Countless minutes and cents worth of parker ink were spent on algorithms and the arrangement of the program. So, the parts fit together logically, and the file and function names explain pretty well what happens where.

Binary Clock is “modular”
BinaryClock consists of hundreds-yes, hundreds-of little functions, each doing one tiny task and fitting on a A4 sheet or two. So, whenever an update is necceccary, all you need to do is modify the little function that does the task that you wish to modify. For example, to add silent alarm functionality, all I had to do was edit the sound playing routine. The smallness of the routines makes their structure easy to understand-and thus, it becomes easy to edit them!

Binary Clock is “clean”
When BinaryClock was programmed, my C skills were very low. I had barely left Guido Krüger’s excellent Programming in C book behind me, and began flying solo. In addition, I wanted to demonstrate some graphic techniques for the now defunct german beam magazine, so the code was really as clean as I possibly could have made it. And since I was programming in OnBoardC, constructs had to be simple to fit onto the Palm’s screen.

Tune in soon for a few things that make updating difficult! Or, even better, what about telling us about how your own code base ranks on the maintainability scale?

P.s. Binary Clock is a really great desk clock-you may feel like trying it out for free here!

Sometimes, you have to contact a software vendor and ask him to add a feature to a program for you. Statistics show that most customer’s emails dont have the ideal effect, as they annoy the vendor and get ignored most of the time.

Anyways, here are three developer’s experience s on feature reuest enmails. Read them before requesting the next feature, and you will probably have an easier life!

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/useless_absurd_must_need_appalled_just_infuriating_essential_etc.php
http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=3291
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Article/How-Not-To-Request-A-Feature-2004-12-03-20-00

Recently, fake reports surfaced about how F-Secure recently announced that it had found a Series 60 virus that sent out SMS for cash AND distributed itself via bluetooth! However, this rumor is false-while there are virii that can do both things, none combined the two so far!
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-042006.html#00000865

F-Secure really has a pretty good look on mobile virii, they now reported that the count of virii has increased to 200 over the last half year. The growth chart looks really interesting, I wonder if they included the four nonexistant PalmOS virii to the list’s data source!
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-042006.html#00000864

Last but not least, Greg Daub from McAfee made a really interesting interview where he said that mobile phone operators will not act until the first virus manages a large-scale attack. The virii that are out there currently are only “proofs of concept” in his oppinion, dealing little to no(but they are in the wild, so …) damage to users.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2154875/major-mobile-virus-attack

Overall, this closes the coverage of mobile pests for now. The show will go on, so bets are accepted. How do you think that this will end?

The japanese company NEC recently faced an entirely new kind of piracy from china. Ok, products get copied every now and then, but this was sth entirely new.

In fact, the pirates created their own “NEC”, developing their own products(stuff that NEC didnt even have) on their own in more than 50 plants and selling them in big scale. Ridiculously, the products were of very high quality(according to NEC). The company has fake executives with fake business cards, ….

Overall, it looks as if this is an entirely new thing. This time, pirates don’t attack products, they now attack companies!

http://techdirt.com/articles/20060427/0940246.shtml

Please tell us a bit more about your company(products, history)

In business since 1997, DDH Software began developing software for Palm based PDAs/handhelds starting with the first language translator application ‘Translate’. The HanDBase relational database application has become the leading database manager on several platforms including Palm OS, Windows Mobile for Pocket PC, Windows Mobile for Smartphone and Symbian OS S60 (formerly Series 60). With HanDBase, users can create their own application with custom forms and fields and delivers a robust way to enter, store, filter, print, and export information on their PDA. Powerful desktop conduits enable synchronization with popular applications like Microsoft Access, Excel, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and more.

Mobile TS is a Palm OS only application for connecting to/controlling desktop computers running Remote Desktop or Terminal Services. It enables the user to see and control their PCs screen right from their wireless Palm OS device such as a Treo 650.

DDH Software also provides custom applications for companies looking for functionality beyond what their HanDBase and other applications can offer them.

Do you think that a development shack supporting only the Palm OS API has chances to survive?

For a short while, yes. If a small company/developer comes up with a unique and intriguing idea, they still have a chance of doing well in the marketplace. But over time that successful idea will be copied and refined by other bigger development houses and offered for free or cheaper, thereby making longevity a huge challenge for the small startup.

Do you feel that the Palm software market has changed?

Most definitely- from the early stage where there were less than a few dozen applications for months at a time, and the growth was in the 1000’s of percentage points to now where there are tens of thousands of developers and applications and the growth has been stagnant or declining.

Q4: What do you think about the Treo 700w? Will the ‘traditional’ Palm cut it against HTC, etc?

Yes, because what the Pocket PC devices and OS’ were missing along was a common sense, user friendly and thoughtful design and experience.
Palm OS was given more credit than it deserved, as it was really the interface and thoughtfulness of design that made the experience wonderful.

Do you think that Garnet will still be around next year?

Yes, unfortunately! But with very few new devices coming on the market.

Why did Cobalt fail in your opinion?

It was too big a change in the OS in one increment. Very few applications or Operating Systems can survive that huge of an upgrade.
It’s biting off more than most companies can chew.

Q7: What do you see as Garnet’s successor on the market?

Pocket PC- I believe Palm will see enough success to continue releasing new devices on the Pocket PC OS to make the majority of their new devices deliver on that platform.

Eventually Access Linux Platform will come to market and Palm will have to decide whether to migrate their devices to support it at all, or just stick with Garnet and Pocket PC for the short term, and possibly Pocket PC for the long term.

Do you think that palm’s developer support is good enough?

Most definitely not. Since PalmSource was bought out, there is a huge disconnect between development. Much of the changes in the last few years have been done mostly at Palm, Inc (eg, NVFS). They do not have a developer support system in place to truly support the developers like PalmSource did. There are confirmed and known bugs in devices shipping right now that no one is doing anything about and is hurting enterprise sales of these devices signficantly.

What do you think about ESD’s, can you recommend a specific one?

Everyone knows Handango and PalmGear/PocketGear. It seems that there are benefits to working with both companies.

What kinds of marketing can you recommend?

Working with a good PR company, such as Talon PR!

Do you wish to say anything else?

Developers wishing to get started in a marketplace may do well to piggyback on the success of other products. For example, HanDBase supports a plugin architecture whereby developers can expand the functionality of HanDBase. Then you have a built-in potential userbase of over 150,000 users and can receive coooperative marketing from DDH Software to get you started. Please contact me if you are interested or visit: http://www.ddhsoftware.com/developers

Dear readers,

as many mobile browsers don’t support IFRAMES (our shoutbox uses that) we now have a solution for mobile users:

You should find a link called “mobile version” at the shoutbox. It shows all posts. To post a comment, you just have to fill the form on the main page.

If you have problems, please let us know!

When it comes to PDA accessories, quality is the characteristic that gets my attention the most. It is always nice to have a product that you know will reward you for your investment.

The Inka Pen is a product designed with this standard of quality in mind. You know it’s a well made product when they offer you a lifetime warranty with it.

The Inka Pen starts with an stainless steel barrel or titanium depending on which model you buy. That said, you know this product will be well protected from any abuse that might occur. If you pull the bottom of it, an O-ring will release a small pen. The O-ring helps keep out water if it was being used in rainy conditions. The manufacturer states that this pen can be used in any condition due to its pressurized ink cartridge.

The design of the pen begins to impress when you screw off the bottom of the pen. A yellow delrin stylus appears. Delrin is an excellent material for a PDA stylus due to its natural lubricity and durability. I have tested this product for over a month now and love how easily this material glides on the surface of a PDA. The stylus does take some time to get to which is the only downside of the design.

Yes, it can even become a full sized pen. It isn’t very much fun writing when it is only half length, but when you put it all together, it assembles a very attractive, sleek pen.

The Inka pen is an excellent choice for someone who has room on their keychain or loves the outdoors. It will withstand any and all of the elements you throw at it…as long as you stay between -30 to 300F degrees. So stay off the surface of the sun, and you’ll love the quality of this pen!

Pong is a classic game. Its first incarnations ran on storage-scopes connected to analog computers; and Atari’s TV version was the first popular PC game. But let’s ignore history for now-IrPong needs to be reviewed!

After startup, IrPong presents you the following screen. The bluetooth button is displayed only if you power up the bluetooth interface before starting the game!

Single-player mode is rather unimpressive, the game behaves like BreakOut and gets incredibly hard very fast(the Prison makes a good free PalmOS breakout clone):

Once two handhelds are connected via infrared or bluetooth, the fun starts. Each of the players takes one paddle, and needs to kick the ball off the field at his opponent’s side:

The bar at the top right is the ‘firepower’ indicator. Once full, you can launch a bullet at your opponent. Hit his panel, and he’s gone. Hit a brick, and its gone.

The obstacles available on some of the boards(use prefs for selection) add an extra bit of fun to the game; however, they sometimes fail to disappear on the ‘client’.

You control IrPong with the Up and application keys, the 5way doesn’t work. We tested IrPong on a Tungsten T3, IIIc, OS4 V and a Tungsten E2, the game worked well on all of them.

This review covered version 2.2, we uploaded it on tamoggemon.com for archival purposes. In addition, the web site of the programmer is here.

Overall, IrPong is a good multiplayer game. It is free, just 40KB big and well tested. The disappearing bugs can get annoying sometimes, but the game is playable nevertheless. Pong is an evergreen that everybody loves…all we can say is have fun.

We all love ebooks! Expecially if they are legal and accessible easily on the internet(for Plucker or Web Pro, your taste decides).

This list contains over 340 free ebooks covering all kinds of topics ranging from assembly language to algorithms and from C to Javascript:

http://www.techtoolblog.com/archives/195-free-online-programming-books

And BTW, dont forget this C tutorial:
http://tamspalm.tamoggemon.com/2005/11/09/an-excellent-c-book-for-free/

Anything to add?