Freewarepalm.com has a new project in its list that turns one of the hard buttons into a power button. This could be useful as I heard that the T5/TX power button wouldn’t be very stable.
http://www.aonasystems.com/open_source/palm_os_applications/sleep/
I was given the opportunity to put a great piece of software, Central, to the test recently. What I found was a nifty companion to my already numerous applications installed on my Treo 600.
Central has a sleek; user-friendly interface. It actually makes using the application fun:
Features include a Do Not Disturb selection where you can choose to completely silence your Treo at set periods or on demand; a Super Alarms selection where you can set an alarm for wake-ups or important meetings and other times when it’s absolutely necessary to be reminded. This feature overrides the Do Not Disturb feature so if you happen to leave Do Not Disturb on, you will still hear the alarm. Sweet, huh?
The next feature is a killer…..in fact, that’s what it’s called. The Kill Pill feature. This is the # 1 reason I wanted to try this software out. With this feature, you can send a SMS containing your secret password to your Treo and all data will be erased and your Treo will reset. This is great for times when you lose your PDA or if you seriously think it may be stolen. Let’s face it, we carry our lives on our PDA’s. Everything from credit card #’s to passwords to names, addresses and phone numbers will be found on one’s PDA. How would you feel if one day you get back to your desk from a morning coffee break and your best friend is gone?! Worried I bet. Well with this software your worries turn into peacefulness knowing with a simple text message (via SMS), all your data (including the SD card, if you choose to opt for this) can be totally erased. I tried in twice on my Treo 600 and both times it worked flawlessly. Mint!!
Another great feature this software has is the ability to turn your phone radio back on after a reset. You can also save your battery by setting the times when the phone radio will be turned on and off. Simple but needed. Central is also fully integrated with Palm Addit Treo Edition software. Set a schedule for your Treo to automatically download the latest Reuters news and weather updates. This software also has a Quick Launch feature. Launch your favorite applications from anywhere using a customizable hot key or use the side buttons as page up/down and select buttons. Makes one handed operation easy.
Once you start using Central to manage your Treo, you will wonder how you ever lived without it! Central is budget priced at $14.95 and can be found here: http://www.bluefishwireless.com/products/Central_for_Treo.htm.
A few days ago I discovered these pictures and the saddening story of a ruined, vandalized and almost killed Palm T3 on www.nexave.de:
 
According to the owner, the Palm was lost or stolen. Two days later he got a call from a Kindergarten located in a remote part of his city: Playing kids found the remains of his T3 and gave it to one of the grown-ups. They tried to turn it on and to everyone’s surprise, the Palm powered on and revealed the name and phonenumber of the owner!
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So some retarded moron ripped off the slider, made two deep cuts into the display and even tried to break open the SD-Slot and the Palm still powered on to display the owner-information? Impressive, really impressive… (the Palm, not the dumbass who did that)
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According to InfoWorld, Skype plans to introduce a Skype Client for Symbian powered mobile phones before Christmas. There is little interesting data for a Palm OS freak in the announcement – except for one thing.
Skype seems to be busy expanding its grip onto mobile devices with its client software. Windows Mobile was the first(and easiest) big platform to target – Symbian was the number two. OK, and who comes after Symbian – yes, our beloved Palm OS.
If Skype wants to hit the mobile phone sector hard, they will need to go for the Treos eventually. Once their system works with GPRS(IMHO, the lack of WLAN is the main thing that holds Skype back), hitting the millions and millions of Palm OS powered Treos with Skype for Palm OS is a natural thing to do.
It is entirely possible that this client will cost you money(not freeware), and it could even have a very restrictive DRM system to prevent cracking. However, not doing at least some sort of client for Palm OS would be suicide on Skype’s end now that Hutchkinson 3 is starting to gang up with MSN(more on that soon). It looks as if the IM war has now become a carrier affair – but more on that another day…
Do you expect to see a Skype client for Palm OS? When?
Literally thousands of books have been written on the subject of finding advertising space for cheap/free. People have reccomended sticking bumper stickers on the back of your cars, getting yourself branded T – Shirts,… but nobody ever talked about email so far. I send out about 50 emails a day to people all over the world. My outlook database probably contains 100000 people’s email addresses – but less than 1% of them ever was informed deliberately about Tamoggemon Software. Sounds mad…but its true!
E-Mail has become a pest for some of us because we get so many of them – so why not try to a$$ out an extra buck from an activity that you have to do anyways? Adding a signature to each email that leaves your outbox is simple(when you use a GUI program, that is). Create your signature and start doing email…keeping in mind that each email you send out carries a powerful marketing message for you and your products!
Email signatures are commonly accepted if not too long(some people even have ASCII art of their company’s logo attached to each email) – so no one will be offended by your signature. Also, signatures blend into an email’s content well(if you put the best regards/tam hanna into the signature instead of the main body)…try getting 1000 users to look at your web site for free easily.
What’s your signature trick?
David Weiss works for Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit. They recently got 65 Mac Minis – and David didn’t want to throw the boxen away(seems to be a common phenomenon for Apple people…the IT department of my school also has their boxen on the shelf).
Anyways, David created a apple logo from the 65 boxen – visit it at his blog:
http://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2006/10/30000-apple-logo.html
People who read TamsPalm for quite some time know that I hate annoying alert dialogs. Anyways, Michael L Perry posted an interesting post about how iTunes has a very annoying alert dialog.
The problem with the alert dialog is that it pops up in the middle of a long process where the user usually is not close to the machine. So, it has the potential to cost the user loads and loads of time…but enough said, visit him here:
http://www.adventuresinsoftware.com/blog/?p=39
Boy oh boy, I can still remember the day when I got my first HiRes Palm(a Palm Tungsten T). The HiRes display was simply stunning for a person coming from a Palm m505…soo much more information on such a tiny thing. Adios scrolling, welcome tiny fonts and halfblind eye! DocumentsToGo always did a good job in HiRes, but I always had the impression that they ignored Lowres handhelds a bit.
To be honest, DocumentsToGo 9 sneaked itself onto my Treo 600 rather accidentally – its hotsync conduit found a PDA that ran v8 and simpy kicked v9 into the RAM instead(so much about beeing card sensitive, good I had 17meg free). Anyways, DocumentsToGo started up without problems on the Treo 600:
WordToGo
The major annoyance I always had with WotrdToGo on Lowres devices was the big default Palm OS font used for displaying data. DocumentsToGo 9 now uses its Agfa TrueType engine on Lowres Palm PDA’s too – three zoom levels for lowres folks:
I already mentioned that the Agfa engine has problems with rendering in our Documents To Go 9 review – this photo of a regular plaintext file shows how crazy the fonts actually look(greyscale pixels everywhere). I probably mentioned already that ClearType, subpixel rendering, etc are a surefire way to annoy my halfblind eye, didnt I( 
)?:
WordToGo now supports a true fullscreen mode – the extra three lines can be very helpful when it comes to reading documents:
SheetToGo
SheetToGo also supports three zoom levels(small is unusable) and a fullscreen view mode:
SlideshowToGo
SlideShowToGo works really well on Lowres screens. When you zoom in, the slides are shown really really clear:
Last but not least, here is a photo of an app with a really well-done small font. Its SrcEdit(free from here):
Overall, DocumentsToGo 9 is a great step forward for Lowres handheld users – and it is a step back, too. The flexible zoom options make viewing files easy, but the subpixel rendering spoils the fiest(for me). If you want to know more about DocumentsToGo 9, visit our full review!
In advertising, less is more most of the time. The fuller your ad gets, the more people will loath/ignore/forget it. A simple ad gets read – a long one gets forgotten fast. So much, so good. Shortening ads can be an art of its own – but there is a simple trick that can be very helpful:
People purchase products by a variety of criterions that can be segregated into two groups:factual and emotional. When a purchase decicion is made, usually one of the two groups controls and the other one ‘justifies’ – for example, I love that red Palm Treo 680…ah, and it has bigger RAM too.
An ad can be targeted on either the emotional ‘ear’ or the factual ‘ear’…targetting both usually doesn’t work out. The choice of the ear can then be made via detailled analysis of the customer.
For example, a product like Binary Clock for Palm OS will usually not be bought as a mental math trainer(factual), but rather because its cool(emotional)! Advertising the features of the product makes your graphist and ad hosts rich – but won’t have much sales impact. Advertising coolness, on the other hand, will affect sales(Luci, you were right after all).
Contrast this to a product like FileFind for Palm OS(free trials of both are available, so see for yourself if you have a Palm PDA) – nobody will buy this program because of the coolness of finding a file on the go. They buy it because of the function…so advertising UI aestethics is the wrong way here…
Overall, segregate your advertising into emotional and factual campaigns for maximum impact. Hybrids tend to be fat and not work well – reduction is the key to $€$…
Some days ago I wanted to download PlanetPenguin Racer, the successor of TuxRacer (famous Linux game with a penguin). But all sites I visited were unreachable. Now I’ve found a German blog, called ‘Horsefriend’ which has a review and a download of PlanetPenguin Racer. The download link is at the end of the article:http://horsefriend.wordpress.com/2006/10/21/planetpenguin-racer-review/
The download has – accorded to the blog – to be renamed to ppracer-0.3.1.exe.
Now you have the opportunity to talk to Benoit Hervier, the developer of KMeteo. It is a weather application in early beta stage without many features yet. You can read a review here.
I sent him a mail and we got the idea to ask you which features you’d want to see in KMeteo. So please download this program and write comments. We’re looking forward to hear something from you!
Having your mobile phone or Palm powered gadget stolen is annoying – having an idiot steal it can become funny though if you experience Engadget’s story.
A burglar was sent an “invitation” to collect a ransom…and the police was waiting there. People can be so dumb!
Frequent TamsPalm readers will still be able to recall the TamsPalm reader link feast we announced last month – anyways, due to various delays, it got delayed until now. Anyways, for all those who are new to TamsPalm; many TamsPalm readers have web sites of their own. We wanted to gather all of them in one place and categoprize them…and here they are(in no particular order):
Gadget Blogs
Dennis sent in a link to his blog called WAP review. This site looks at all kinds of mobile data stuff!
Theo Poon has his ever-interesting and always-popular blog on all kinds of gadgets. He covers a wide range of mobile stuff, but still owes us that Samsung review he promised some time ago:
Miscellaneous blogs
bgrier sent us CanuckTek. The site seems to be about all kinds of stuff technology and canada related.
Palm OS sites
Alex sent in a link to TreoBits – a web site dedicated to Treo smartphones.
FredPC and Chris sent in their canadian Palm OS web site CanuckPDA.
Macey has an excellent blog for new Palm OS users. While her articles and reviews may not always be interesting for a pro, they are very well done and include a little movie of each program!
Programming sites
Brennan has a ‘coder shack’ blog that looks at Win32 and Palm OS programming.
Jonathan Hayes sent in a link to his web site on Palm OS programming.
Michael Perry has a blog on his experiences as a programmer for mobile devices and web services.
P.s. If you are a webmaster of one of the sites in question, please add a link to this site in order to drive some traffic to your fellow comrades!
P.s.2 If you want your site included here, just post a comment! We will add you to the next edititon!
When the last Binary Clock for Palm OS ad was unveiled, the most common complaint was the lack of a well-readable font. People simply had problems reading the font Tamoggemon Software uses. Back then, I thought that this would not be a real problem…until I saw this(visit the page and look at the graphic):
http://tmenguy.free.fr/TechBlog/?p=49
OK, this isnt the Tamoggemon font – but it is still artsy and next to impossible to decypher(eek!). The blogger who created it will probably be offended by this post, will flame me, etc – just as I was a bit pissed at the people who disliked my font(and walked up to me to tell me while I was drinking coke).
IMHO, the big lesson to learn here is that you(aka the creator) can’t assess the artsyness of your font/design/whatever. You know how the ad was created and whats the idea behind it, and thus can understand it easily.
But can a person understand the ad when he doesnt know the background? Can a foreginer understand the ad?
What do you think?
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