TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Tamoggemon Software proudly presents the Icemat Siberia In:Ear Daily Quote quote database competition. In this competition, you can win one of two Icemat Siberia In:Ear headsets. These headsets deliver truly excellent sound quality and are very portable - I use my very own one with my Treo 600 for quite some time now(review coming soon)!

Anyways, what do you need to do to enter? Basically, everyone is allowed in who sends a Daily Quote quote database to Tamog@gmx.at until the 20th of November. What the quote database contains is not relevant as long as it is legal, decent, sensible and contains at least 50 quotes!

You don’t need to buy Daily Quote to participate in this giveaway btw - a free 14day trial is available from here.

Dear Readers,
this is just a quick ping to tell you that Tamoggemon Daily Quote for Palm OS was released!

More information and a cool giveaway will be online in about an hour!

In Austria, the market for CD-R’s is more than just saturated…there are by far more CD’s than there is demand. Marketing in this area is difficult - enthusiasts already have their babies, and occasional customers buy whats closest to them…or so I thought until I saw this in a retail store(had to use Treo for photography, using the digital camera would have ended with me being booted out of the only electronics store in Vomp):

A CD-R suitable ONLY for audio? Don’t ask me how that should work…aren’t all CR-R’s suitable for everything? Anyways, this CD costed about five times as much as a single stock CD-R and was packed up much more fancy than its regular competitors.

Anyways, the core idea here seems to be to exclude a sector of users in order to make the product more attractive for another. Sort of like saying: hey folks, this thing is unusable for business, but the best for gaming. Kudos to the guy who had the idea!

According to PalmInfoCenter, Cingular wil get an exclusivity for the Treo 680 in the states when it ships on the 6th of November. The pricing will be like this:

* $424.99, no commitment
* $349.99, 1 yr. commitment
* $249.99, 1 yr. with UNL data plan ($100 rebate)
* $274.99, 2 year commitment
* BEST price: $174.99 with UNL data plan ($100 rebate)

IMHO, I am not sure about this price. An unlocked M70 can be had for 259$ when I last checked at expansys’s. The Motorola Q is much cheaper too…

Will you buy a Treo 680?

We had a similar article online a few months ago…reposted by (popular) demand - you know who you are, my friend

Sometimes, specific features/functions need to be disabled or enabled depending on the hardware type the program runs on. For example, a Treo 600 needs some specific keyboard workaround in a popular text editor that no other Palm PDA needs….the list is endless.

Identifying a handheld/smartphone works by reading a few specific features and comparing them to defined values - Alvin Mok has an excellent web site on the topic:
http://homepage.mac.com/alvinmok/palm/codenames.html

Marketing is a huge part of a Micro ISV’s life. Literally thousands of books are available on the topic - finding the right one can be challenging. Marketing for Dummies tries to be a cover-all book - let’s see how it fares!

Marketing for Dummies is - like all other books in the for Dummies series - subdivided into multiple sections. Each of the sections can be read alone if you feel like it, but reading the book from front to back is probably the best idea.

The first parts of the book look at the role of marketing in a business and also at the creative process. You get informed about what marketing can and can’t do for a business, and also get insight into successfully running creative sessions with yourself and your friends/graphists/whatevers!

The third part of the book looks at classic advertising: TV, newspapers/press, radio, brochures and outdoor stuff like signs. While many of the ideas presented herein are not applicable for a micro ISV, they still contain good information that’s worth having - after all, PR can get you into many of these areas for free!

The fourth part looks at non-classic forms of advertising and marketing like e-marketing, direct marketing, PR and face to face marketing. The fifth part looks at stuff like pricing, branding, service and distribution.

The text is written very clearly and generally well done. All jargon is explained right away, and the comics add a bit of fun to the experience. But since this is a for Dummies book, there is nothing new to say here…excellent text, as always.

Overall, if you can afford just one book on publicity, make it Marketing for Dummies. While it definitely doesn’t cover every nook and cranny of the topics presented, reading it gives you enough knowhow to market your software products. Extra knowledge can then be obtained from other books(reviews coming soon) as revenue comes in. The Amazon price of 14.99$ is more than acceptable for this must-have of a book. One can consider this the unofficial sequel to the famous MicroISV book….

Palm OS text editor freaks will love this weekend! Yesterday we had a preview version of tejpWriter - and now, SrcEdit gets a bit of TamsPalm mindshare, too.

John Wilund sent me a beta on the 26th of October that is said to fix the following:

A BUG has been fixed: messsing with the positioning of text when you select inserting spaces instead of tabulators, after indent cursor is shown on the right place, but new chars are entered on wrong (cursor is shown on the end of new spaces, entered text will show after one space). Thanks to Sleep_Walker who reported this BUG!

The program can be downloaded at:
http://srcedit.brainsware.org/download.htm

Please tell us what you think!

You might have read our first review about Universe, the new Palm OS browser. Although this browser is already very usable and better than some other browsers of Palm, PalmSource etc., there are still some bugs and many ideas the developer wants to build into his app. Many of them are in a not-public beta tester forum, but some of them are on wapuniverse.com. Just have a look at this list:

• advanced 5-way scrolling (based off of the Nokia S60 Browser)
• Removing the 3 tab limit JavaScript support (using Apple’s JavaScriptCore)
• gzip Compression for a faster browsing experience
• Opening and saving files to the local file system

• porting the whole WebKit (based on the great KHTML rendering engine). Not a port of Firefox / Gecko at all, but still a very good engine which is used in Konqueror (Linux browser)
• support for CSS, tables, frames
• small fonts availible in the browser, the URL field, the source viewer and in forms
• moving and marking using the stylus
• downloading files to card, choosing directory and name
• plugin compatibility + plugin SDK (!)
• using faster and better image decoders
• optimizing for Sony Clie devices (JogDial, HiRes+)
• HTTPS support
• saving the current state when exiting (pages / tabs) so that you can continue surfing on the same pages when you start again
• full customizable user agent, disabling/enabling mobile profile
• uninstaller which also removes everything Universe created
• support for non-latin character encodings
• setting Universe as the system’s default browser

There are some ideas, but the imho most important one is plugin compatibility. Using plugins, you can almost do everything with an app, and additionaly they keep your system clean and the program’s size down, because you just install those plugins you need. So if there are enough plugin developers, Universe might even become much better. There are, for example, plugins for Firefox that are IRC clients, download managers, FTP clients, weather apps and much more.

What do you think? Do you have feature requests I could post into the forums?

I managed to set up my Treo 600 to go online via m-router yesterday - only to find out that Blazer refuses to surf the web if wireless mode isn’t on.

Amusingly,after enabling wireless mode on the Treo, Blazer surfed the web happily over the USB connection…don’t ask me what they were thinking at Handspring’s when implementing this particular Treo 600 feature though!

tejpWriter has always beem my favourite plain-text editor for the Palm OS - many TamsPalm articles were written in it(review of version 3.0). Peter Thorstenson now sent me a new beta of version 3.40 which is scheduled to be released on the 6th of November.

Improvements in this version include:

============================
The 3.40 release is featuring strong encryption of text files and a true HTML 4.01 export of tW Formatted documents. Apart from this, it’s a button release. All Editor buttons are now working and three of the Viewer buttons.
Many bug fixes and an improved memory handling aiming to make it less likely to crash.

New in v3.40:
• HTML 4.01 export of tW Formatted text
• Built-in VFS file manager functions
• AES 256/128 bit CBC encryption
• Automatic import of MS Word documents
• Enhanced font and color selection
• A new mono spaced font
• Analog progress indicator
• Powerful Word Lookup functions
• Viewer Back and Forward navigator
• Viewer TOC button
• tWF, updated text format
• Memo import/export by launching daMemoPad
• AciiPopDA launcher
=============================

In addition, the backspace bug I have encountered on my Treo 600 is said to be fixed, too!

You can download tejpWriter 3.40 here.

Please tell me what you think! Bugs, etc can be posted as comments here - Peter Thorstenson reads TamsPalm and will find them for sure!

Beeing in a vacation house can be a very satisfying experience - especially if you take a 5 minute break from your work and install Firefox 2.0 on the machine there(that you never really use, thus no risk).

The installation was a simple and fast process - it took about 30 seconds on the AMD Athlon 2300+ CPU. After that, the browser immediately started up - and left me wondering about WTF this was:

Firefox 2.0 looks totally different from 1.0 - in fact, it is so different that it confused me quite a bit on the first glance. Also, the tab close buttons were rearranged - this reduces mouse movement from 1.x(it always had the tab closer in the top right), but also required me to rethink my ways:

The important lesson learned here is that improving UI can(and will) confuse users. so, try to get your UI right the first time and make small step upgrades - and please,. please, please don’t force a look-and-feel upgrade onto your users!

I recently had to get some stuff from the local pharmacy. In Austria, you need a paper from a doctor in order to get the stuff - and the guy needed a copy of the paper for insurance reasons. So, I went there and asked the clerk for a copy of the paper - EEK, SQUEAK, why do you need this? After 15 minutes of explaining that I needed the goddamn copy and will not give her the reason why as I don’t know it myself, the clerk finaly moved its hide and produced the copy, leaving me in an extremely annoyed state.

The problem that we have had here is simple - this clerk has too much power/empowerment. Seth Godin reported about his experiences at McDonalds, where the clerk essentially has no power to say no the the clerk - the company obviously looses a bit of cash in the form of free milk shakes for Seth and his folks , but wins big by avoiding negative blog articles like this one and keeps its customers happy overall.

Some clerks can really empathize with the customer(one guy there can, he’s the reason why I didn’t change pharmacy yet in fact) - but many clerks cannot and leave the client annoyed. So, what do you think about teaching your clerks the following rule:
Do as you are told as long as its no problem for the company, and dont think about it!

Please tell me what you think!

WAPUniverse is now Universe - that means it isn’t only a WAP browser anymore. The most recent version 3.0 is in beta stage yet and supports standard HTML pages. We had a a look at the new browser.

The first line contains the tabs and an RSS indicator, in the second line there are the navigation buttons (back, forward, stop, reload, favorites) and the URL input field. The rest of the screen is availible for pages - that means much space for web pages which is often blocked by big items in other browsers, especially on HiRes devices like my Tungsten C.

Although there are two rendering modes (small and wide), all results are very optimized for the small screen. Tables aren’t rendered and frames seem not to be supported, too. The rendering speed of the browser is rather slow. On the other hand, it already has some nice ideas. For example you can tap and hold the stylus on a picture to download it. The most HTML elements, including forms are supported very good. I even could post a message into a forum.

Of course there are the well-known tools a good browser needs: the history shows a list of the recent sites you’ve visited, bookmarks is a list of your favorites sites, the source viewer shows the plain text of the .htm page (including tags etc.). The connection manager allows you to create multiple connections.

Below some screenshots:

I think this is a good start for a browser. The developer wants to port a JavaScript engine, and, after that, the famous HTML engine KHTML which would make this app to perhaps the most powerful browser for Palm OS platform. But now you can already work well with this. I’ll send some bug reports to the developer now. Additionaly, I’ll work with it the next days (instead of NetFront) to discover further problems.

The Palm Z22 was the ‘end of an era’ - it ended the lifetime of monochrome PDAs in the consumer section. However, the rugged/data logging sector still has good use for monochrome screens - and the Aceeca Meazura comes from this corner of the Palm OS woods.

After a week of negotiations, Acceca agreed to send me a loaner of their Meazura - and I received a RDA1000 aka Meazura within a week. I had to pay 40€ of customs fees and will eventually have to return the unit as it is not RoHS compatible. Acceca’s support and press departments are very responsive - Palm really should learn from them.

The machine shipped in two boxes - one contained the machine itself, the other the so-called HDK(hardware development kit):

My Meazura’s box contained the following items:

USB cable, Serial cable, some kind of bag and a Power supply(plugs into one of the two aforementioned cables):

Short quick introduction, content list, software CD and licence contract:

My Meazura shipped fully charged and ready to use - tune in soon for some action!