TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

A WristPDA user recently wanted to buy Binary Clock for Palm OS for his hotsync-nameless WristPDA - but MobiHand didn’t let him complete the purchase, demanding that he would enter a valid ID.

After a quick chat with David, I got the following fix suggestion(hey, its Mobihand - they DO care about your problems!):

Switch your registration method from “HTTP Post” to “HTTP Post - No ID Required”. Then the HotSync message will not appear in the cart, unless there is another product that requires it

Do you sell to users who don’t have a hotsync ID?

The Palm Treo 680 is out for quite some time…and the first reviews have already popped up. CNET has a decent writeup on the Palm Treo 680 here:

http://reviews.cnet.com/Palm_Treo_680_Cingular/4505-6452_7-32156094.html?tag=nl.e404

To cut a long story short, the Treo 680 scores 7.0 out of ten, thus beeing on-par with its GSM predecessor aka Treo 650. However, the Treo 700p beats it by 0.7 - and the legendary Palm Treo 600 scored 8.0 out of ten… .

CNETs main problems with the Treo 680 seem to be the small keys, the VGA camera and the lack of wi-fi. Overall, however, they are positive about the machine…

Do you have a Palm Treo 680? What do you think?

Have you ever found a program which does not run on your device because of not enough dynamic memory heap? Such programs are emulators or PDF viewers (like PalmPDF). When you run them, they could cause crashes or run in a ‘limited’ mode just because there is not enough heap storage. Dmitry Grinberg (www.palmpoweups.com) wrote a program called ‘UDMH’ which allows you to increase the size of the heap artificially. When you first run UDMH you simply see a checkbox for enabling/disabling UDMH and two buttons - ‘Config’ and ‘Info’.

When you press ‘Config’ you can add or remove applications for which UDMH uses a special configuration (e.g. whether UDMH is disabled for the app or not) because by default UDMH is enabled for all apps and assigns the heap automatically. When you want to add a program to UDMH�s custom settings list you just press ‘Add’ - a screen with a list of all installed application appears.

Once you have selected your program, a setting window appears. Here you can decide whether
- UDMH is enabled for the application
- UDMH cleans memory up (use this setting when the program doesn�t do it automatically)
- UDMH skips quit (this option is recommended when the program opens several other programs in background - like Documets To Go. In this case the settings are not only used for the main app also for the other DTG-parts (like SlideShowToGo) so that there is no need for configuring them separately. Use it for apps launched from card per shortcut, too. Otherwise it won�t work either because UDMH applies the memory only for the shortcut and drops it when starting the real program)
- a field for the amount of dynamic heap you want to assign - leave it blank or fill in ‘0′ and UDMH will make this setting automatically

The same screen comes up when you want to modify UDMH settings for a program
So, what are the advantages? For example you can run PalmPDF in color mode instead of gray or even black-white mode. Emulators like LJP become more stable, you can play DOOM or HEXEN ports on your palm. So many applications which need a lot of dynamic memory are now able to run on your Palm. For newer Palm PDAs like the Tungsten E2, T5 or TX UDMH is recommended. These devices have got a very little dynamic heap so that they come earlier to their limit than older Palms like the Tungsten T3 which has got a multiple heap than the e.g. T5.
On the Info-screen you can check how much heap you currently have � when UDMH is enabled or disabled.

A 7-day trial version of the program is available at www.palmpowerups.com. Though UDMH changes the whole system relatively much it is very stable.

Just in case you ever wish to know when your Palm branded Palm PDA was built, TamsPalm has the solution for you. The serial number of each PDA contains the exact date of manufacturing.

The algorithm behind the serial number generation is shown in this BrightHand thread:
http://forum.brighthand.com/showthread.php?t=21626

A 1src user created a nice little app that displays the manufacturing date - it can be downloaded here:
http://www.1src.com/forums/showthread.php?t=120103

When was your PDA built?

The Palm OS’s display system had to undergo three mayor overhauls in the last few years - dynamic UI(long time ago), HiRes+ and 5way navigation. The path to dynamic UI was very, very buggy afaik, HiRes+ worked well and 5way nav is, umm, more like dynamic UI to me.

Anyways, I had a nice modal form that reacted to WinDisplayChangedEvents. That form was popped up via FrmPopupForm(the only such form in the entire app…all others worked fine =) ). The resizing didn’t quite work out on Chris Schrinner’s TX:

There seems to be some kind of quirk with PalmOne engineers having placed a cache into their 5way nav system that stores whats behind the blue ring. Now, when the form gets resized, this cache somehow screws up and distorts/obfuscates the proximity of the poor control that happened to be selected.

Fixing the problem is rather simple - remove the focus, do the movement and then restore focus. Here is how I did it(no special headers needed btw):

UInt32 buffer;
Err err;
err = FtrGet(sysFtrCreator, sysFtrNumFiveWayNavVersion, &buffer);
if (err == errNone)
{
// One-handed navigation is supported
buffer=FrmGetFocus(pForm);
FrmSetFocus(pForm,noFocus);
FrmNavRemoveFocusRing (pForm);
}

if(err==errNone && buffer!=noFocus)
{
FrmSetFocus(pForm,buffer);
}
FrmDrawForm(pForm);


P.s. I know that this code doesn’t detect the Treo 600 as 5way capable. But since the Treo 600 has no HiRes+ screen, I don’t really care as it will never see this code anyways….

While betatesting one of the various programs that pass by my hands, I stumbled across this truly unique gem of madness:

Clicking on Font pops up the font selection dialog(there’s FontBucket behind that btw - TamsPalm’s tutorials really do work):

So far so good - but figuring this out took me(as a longterm user) ages - in fact, I filed a bug report because of the three points after font. I simply didn’t realize that we were dealing with a command button here - the design/interaction pattern was broken.

Today’s hint is simple - when you need a command button(one that toggles an action), use just that. Don’t abuse any of the other system-provided widgets…your users will love you for it!

TamsPalm is the number one resource for tejpWriter betas for quite some time - SrcEdit, the competing project didn’t come around to providing us with betas yet.

However, getting a current SrcEdit beta is very simple. Do the following:

• Connect to irc.freenode.net with an IRC client
• Type /Join #srcedit
• Type !get EMAILADRESS

The SrcEditBot will then confirm the dispatching of your beta.

While the emails didn’t make it through to my gmx account, gmail had no problems. What about telling us if it worked out for yoiu?

After Dmitry Grinberg wrote that he is developing an own FAT32 driver, I sent him a mail, and here is his reply with some details:

no joke. if i do get around to finishing it, you should be able to
access any size sd cards on all os5 devices. (except the new sdhc
format as then i’d need to rewrite the slot driver)

I’m looking forward to use 2 / 4 GB cards in my Tungsten C, and many Palm users think so, too. The LifeDrive, TX, Treo 700p and probably 680 are the only Palms with installed FAT32 driver. The original Palm FAT32 driver can be copied to the most PalmOS 5 devices, nevertheless it made many problems and neither Tungsten T3 nor Tungsten C supported bigger cards.

Quite a few TamsPalm readers have Sony digital cameras. According to International Business Times, Sony has CCD problems once again. They manifest themselves by:

The liquid crystal display screens of eight camera models might not display images correctly, images could be distorted or cameras might not take photos at all, Sony Corp. said in a statement.

Affected are eight Cyber-shot models sold between September 2003 and January 2005 in Japan and in a similar period globally, according to Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa.

Sony has not published a list of the affected models yet though - if you have such a list, please post it!

Peter Thorstenson just sent in this:

I just wanted to let you know that I’ve released tejpWriter version 3.41.
It can be found here: http://twriter.atspace.com

===============================
What’s new in version 3.41?

This is a pure bug fix release with even more improved memory handling. I didn’t keep any record on what or how many bug were fixed, but they were many and important. So all 3.40 users: you should upgrade to version 3.41!
Finally I’m happy that tW 3.41 runs on Palm Treo 700p.
===============================

Enjoy!

When I found this book at Wiley’s web site, I wondered about how it got its name. Mr. Whipple was a very unpopular TV ad person, so that mystery was cleared - but what about the rest of the book?

Luke Sullivan’s book starts off by looking at the history of the ad(beginning in the 1950ies). He then shows how the market changes and ads became more and more ‘interesting’ over time.

The next three chapters look at the creative process behind the creation of a print ad. The advice given herein is very useful, the campaign examples(all real-world) give an extra creativity boost!

After that, Hey Whipple Squeeze This moves on to looking at radio and TV spots. These chapters weren’t as interesting as the first three were, but reading them still paid out.

The second part of the book focuses at work and life in the ad business. For a Micro-Isv, these chapters are not really important - but they make great reading material because of the good ad examples contained within.

Luke Sullivan made a great job keeping the text simple and amusing. The black-and-white renderings of popular campaigns show the ideas in action…great! However, my Parker 45 had major problems with the paper…blotting everywhere.

Overall, if you want to get into doing (banner) ads, this book makes a great read. It may not be straight on topic all of the time, but overall, I feel like a better ad designer now that I read it! The price of less than 20$ at Amazon’s is more than justified:

Speed Dial - the capability to assign short number codes to phone numbers - has been a common feature in dumbphones for many years. Users of Palms Treo smartphones had to miss out on this feature up to now. LionScribe sent its recently-released SpeedDial into the TamsPalm review arena - will we have a winner?

After installation, SpeedDial shows the following overview screen:

Clicking on the Configure button next to Speed Dial pops up a form full of bubbles. Each bubble represents a contact:

Clicking on a bubble opens it for editing. I assigned my own number to #1 for the duration of this review:

Dialing 1 gets trapped by SpeedDial - and the call gets set up correctly:

The program contains a “dial the last four numbers” module, too. However, I never liked that dialing style and thus didn’t test it any further.

This review is based on SpeedDial version 1.12 and was done on a Palm Treo 600. The manufacturer claims Treo 650 and 700p compatibility on the SpeedDial web site. The program needs about 50k of RAM - it cannot work from a memory card.

Overall, SpeedDial does what it should - and it does it unspectacularily. No instabilities, no screwups, no junk, just Speed Dialing - if you need Speed Dial for your Palm OS Treo, this the way to go.

As you may already have noted, I want an M70 badly(really badly, that is). Expansys.de already had a price quote on its web site(229,95€) but still no shipment date:

http://www.expansys.de/p.aspx?i=141492&tab=price

Anyone knows how I can get such a box to Austria fast?

You may already know our shoutbox in the right sidebar. Because of heavy spam attacks, we had to enable post moderation.

Now one my new authors had the idea to insert a very easy spam protection: before you send your message, you will have to check a checkbox. Otherwise the message will be deleted. I disabled post moderation and now we’ll see if this is the solution or the spammers already know the trick. In this case, we would need a captcha.

So please send us shoutbox messages to see if everything works correctly!

UPDATE: The spammers seem not to be as stupid as we think - at least they know how to check a checkbox . Now we have a simple captcha image containing the word ”human”. So please test it and write something!