TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

This is definitely not funny for people in Cambodia, but we outstanders can have a good laugh nevertheless.

The prime minister Hun Sen prohibited the use of 3g phones in the country. And nope, he doesnt have any medical reason to do so, and he isn’t afraid of spying either. He received a complaint from his wife about how one can look at porn on 3g mobile phones.

All that I can say here is LOL. What’s the difference between porn on a PC screen and a 3g phone…

This image gave me a start when I first saw it. My buddy Peter wantd to play a PC game with a gamepad, so he took the gamepad of his XBOX 360, connected it to his PC, installed a driver and had fun:

Up to now, getting a controller working with a PC was extremely difficult. The german elektor magazine once managed to wire a Nintendo 64 controller up for usage on a PC; but had no chance in the end. The circuit was complex, the driver bad, and nobody really used the thingy.

This move from Microsoft’s IMHO is a sign how serious the company takes its XBOX 360 system, and how high they rate the need for its success. The XBOX 360 is a bit more expensive than the Nintendo Wii(more on Nintendo another day, pls remind me, anyone)-but this move by Microsoft “equalizes” the prices a bit.

Good PC gamepads cost 50$ or so last time I checked, and from what I feel the XBOX 360’s controller is excellent. Now, a gamer who purchases an XBOX 360, automatically gets a gamepad for his PC as well. And should the XBOX ever die, the controller’s can be recycled or sold to fellow PC gamers. This adds in a load of “future safety”, and this is something that many people love!

Overall, when offering stuff to customers, try to make it as compatible as possible. You may loose a bit of sales at first, but the universal compatibility will make your product more popular. The Handera 330 was extremely popular due to its Palm III style connector, which alowed recycling of peripherals that Palm themselfes had declared dead(m500).

What do you think?

Technorati tags:
Compatibility
Console wars
XBOX 360

Welcome back to te third part of the TamsPalm FontBucket tutorial. Today, we will get our hands dirty by modifying a drawing routine to use FontBucket! In case you missed the last parts, part 2 is right here.

The regular Palm OS font API is simple-each font is assigned a 8bit ID, and you assign the font to a control that uses it from now on(after a redraw). FontBucket can’t modify that concept, but it dynamically fills the 255 font slots with the fonts needed sort or like a color palette enabled app did on a Palm IIIc.

FontBucket itself identifies fonts with a 32 bit ‘creator id’. This ID stays constant while the font lives on the device-so, you can store the font ID like this:

FmFontID font;


The font ID should be initalized to the Palm OS default font when the prefs structure is created with the following code snippet:

FmGetFMFontID(&fontbucket, stdFont, &prefs->text.font);


Now, when you want to use a font, you need to ‘enable’ it. Enabling it ‘decompresses’ the font and assigns it a 8bit id:

FontID font, oldfont;
FmUseFont (&fontbucket, prefs.text.font, &font);
oldfont=FntSetFont(font);
if(prefs.text.drawmode==plain)

FntSetFont(oldfont);
FmFreeFont(&fontbucket, font);//You can omit this


This ID can then be used like a regular Palm OS font ID. More information on the Palm OS font system is available here.

Tune in soon for details on font selection, font names and compatiblity.

Technorati tags:
Fonts
Palm
Palm OS

Technorati introduced loads of new features for their ping service over the last few months. However, some blogs still aren’t indexed properly, which annoys the responsible web masters.

Personaly, I think that this is one of the most common ‘mistakes’ that companies make. Once a customer has paid(and has received his unlock code so that he can’t ask for a refund), he becomes a person of second class. His requests are still recieved, but have a lower priority than requests that bring in new customers. In Austria, there is a common saying:

Don’t pay until you get your stuff-else, the staff gets slow and cheeky

Indeed, this is a reasonable approach(at first glance). But what happens if you see customer’s initial purchases not as one-time events but rather as the start of a good relation? AstraWare does exactly that, and is very successful with this approach(interview with AstraWare here).

Fixing bugs ASAP eliminates negative PR(like Technorati gets right now) and makes existing customers happy. And happy existing customers can be reached with promotions easily…

What do you think?

Technorati tags:
Bug
Bug fixing
Customer satisfaction
Technorati

Most of you will still recall Enron Corporation; a company that went bancrupt(beeing one of the biggest bancrupcies ever, and the managers were sued very recently). Anyways, according to F-Secure, the entire email database containing all company emails was released to the public back in 2003.

The funny thing is that a service now decided to use these emails as samples for a big human-test. Users get to look at individual emails and get to clasify them as spam or ham. The funny thing, according to F-Secure, is hidfden like a needle in a haystack: office flirtation, class reunion planning and much more.

To cut a long story short: dont ever rely on your company’s email account for privacy. For those, who’s secrets are beeing shared: tough luck, Jack =). And for all others..have a good laugh!

News, links here:
http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-052006.html#00000888

Technorati tags:
Email
Enron
Privacy

Many readers asked for a ‘benchmark’ of the WristPDA’s screen. Here are comparison shots against a Palm V with various screen contrast levels:

The Palm V’s background is way more greenish, but the blacks also appear much more saturated. The WristPDA’s black looks ‘brown’ in comparison.

Here is a photo with backlights on. Please keep in mind that the photo was made with an SX1, so the screen brightness levels arent exactly on par. The Palm V is definitely darker than the WristPDA though!

Overall, it is hard to assess the WristPDA’s screen. The screen isn’t really bad, but it isn’t stunning either. If you have loads of bright light close to you, working with it is no real problem. If it is very dark, the backlight is pretty good as well. But if light is half-strong(the classic monochrome screen

buster), you’ll have problems reading small text(especially with a screen protector on).
What’s your mileage?

Technorati tags:
Fossil
Palm OS
Palm
WristPDA

TamsPalm covered T-Mobile’s infrared ‘kiosks’ quite some time ago. For all those who couldn’t remember the thingies, the units beamed out text links that allowed people to download ringtones.

T-Mobile Austria recently launched a new bonus program called Flamingo-and accompanies it with another load of ringtones. Distribution happens with the ‘kiosks’ once again-here are two photos of the machines:

As usual, we also have a 3gp video of the kiosk in action. BTW; the performance hasn’t improved from our last test. Neither our T3 nor our Siemens SX1 could pick up the text link!

Technorati tags:
Ringtones
T-Mobile
Content distribution

This is just a quick ping to inform you all that Alexander Gratz is on a vacation this week. He will not be able to respond to reader enquiries. His mail box will not be read, and his skype account will not be used either.

I, Tam Hanna, will be his stand in for the week. Please feel free to contact me at Tamog AT gmx DOT at with anything urgent, I also have skype access(tamhanna)!

Recenbtly, rumor spread about how a “Da Vinci” virus attacked mobile phones and caused huge damages. This is very realistic nowadays, but neverhteless, this particular rumor is false, according to F-Secure:

We don’t have a single infection report and we have no sample of such malware. However, we will keep you updated as soon as we have more information.

via http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/archive-052006.html#00000886

While bugfixing the doc compress functions in tejpWriter, I got a big surprise. By substituting a pure C function, memfind2, with two Palm OS API functions: MemMove and StrStr, I not only saved code, but also made the doc compression run 14 times faster! Well, I knew it would run a lot faster but 14 times was more than I had expected, specially since the substituted code only is a part of the whole compression routine. Compressing a file which before took 14 minutes on my T5 now takes only 1 minute.

I substituted this function call:

pHit = memfind2(pPrevHit, pTestHead, pTestTail – pTestHead);

unsigned char *memfind2(unsigned char *t, unsigned char *m, Int16 m_len)
{
unsigned char c0, c1, c2, c3;

if (m_len == 1) {
c0 = m[0];
while (true) {
if (t[0] ==c0) {
return t;
}
t++;
}
} else if (m_len == 2) {
c0 = m[0];
c1 = m[1];
while (true) {
if (t[0] == c0 && t[1] == c1) {
return t;
}
t++;
}
} else if (m_len == 3) {
c0 = m[0];
c1 = m[1];
c2 = m[2];
while (true) {
if (t[0] == c0 && t[1] == c1 && t[2] == c2) {
return t;
}
t++;
}
} else if (m_len == 4) {
c0 = m[0];
c1 = m[1];
c2 = m[2];
c3 = m[3];
while (true) {
if (t[0] == c0 && t[1] == c1 && t[2] == c2 && t[3] == c3) {
return t;
}
t++;
}
} else {
c0 = m[0];
c1 = m[1];
c2 = m[2];
c3 = m[3];
while (true) {
if (t[0] == c0 && t[1] == c1 && t[2] == c2 && t[3] == c3) {
if (MemCmp(t, m, m_len) == 0) {
return t;
}
}
t++;
}
}
return 0;
}

with these functions from the Palm OS API:

MemMove(Buffer, pTestHead, pTestTail – pTestHead);
Buffer[pTestTail - pTestHead]=0;
pHit = StrStr(pPrevHit, Buffer);

Tam already wrote a great piece about this here, but used a tech jargon which could be comparable with ARM code, while I prefer an older an simpler language more in line with the old 68k assembler code. As the amateur I am, I ran Tam’s ARM code in my emulator to see if I could understand it, and this is what came out:

When you compile C-language for Palm you normally get old Motorola 68k assembler code. But newer Palm CPUs doesn’t speak that language—they speak ARM. This means the old 68k assembler code has to run in an emulator to transfer its instructions to ARM code which the CPU needs. And as you know, emulators are sloooow.
But the Palm OS API calls you make from your old 68k assembler code talks ARM straight with the CPU! So, if you want fast apps and can choose, use Palm OS API functions instead of pure C—language functions.

I am currently on the look for a good Parker ballpoint pen-I want to fit it with a PDA Nib sand use it as a final, good looking and ergonomic replacement for all the styli I carry around. When looking around ebay, I stumbled upon this:

A-ha. This buddy shouldn’t wonder about how he doesnt sell enough IMHO. Who on earth would look for ballpan cartrigs if he really wants ballpen ones.

Please don’t get me wrong; I am by no means a spelling nazi. However, headlines and keyword fields MUST IMHO be free of spelling mistakes-if thery aren’t; you will loose Page Rank and visitors. But spelling the as teh in the middle of an article…that IMHO doesnt hurt anyone!

What do you think?

Outlook is an integral part of the life of a Palm OS user nowadays; in fact, I cannot imagine having to use my Palm with Palm Desktop any longer(you should add in that I have a Microsoft Office Specialist in Outlook 2002). Anyways, as far as buzz has come from the Microsoft camp so far, Outlook 2007 is said to be mostly untouched from the UI redesign.

And indeed, Bernie Eng just managed to undig a few screenshots of Outlook 2007, and put them online here:

http://www.ebernie.net/blog/2006/05/26/outlook-2007-screens/

As far as I can see, most of Outlook is still in the good ole’ style. However, Word still is integrated as email editor-so you get in contact with ‘tabs’ whenever writing an email….

Will you update?

This is a public service announcement for all our readers. Alexander Gratz and I(Tam Hanna) recently were mirrored by a female impostor(using the name gratzschwalbach, among others) on Skype, pretending to be us and talking crap. Anyways, should you want to talk to us, our official Skype names are:

Alexander Gratz: alexandergratz
Tam Hanna: tamhanna

Anyone else is an impostor and should be ignored!

PcWorld compiled a nice list of tech that really sucks hard. Unsurprisingly, SoftRAM is number 3, and Windows ME is on the list, too! Get it there:

http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,125772,pg,2,00.asp