TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Dear Readers,
the Tamoggemon Team wishes you all the best for 2007! Please feel free to use the following discounts at your liking(valid at MobiHand, until the 3rd/1/2007):

Binary Clock
Binary Clock - the number one Binary Clock for Palm OS. It supports FontBucket for TrueType font display and can also be used as WristPDA watchface!

Use the discount code BINARY2007 to get 3$ off the retail price of 7.49$ at MobiHand’s!

Daily Quote
Daily Quote - the number one daily quote program for Palm OS. Start your day with an interesting quote! Version 2 of this program has already been made available to registered customers, adding Hires+ support and increasing reliability.

Use the discount code DAILYQUOTE2007 to get 3$ off the retail price of 7.49$ at MobiHand’s - the update will hit your inbox immediately after purchase!

FileFind
FileFind - the best file finder for Palm OS. If there is a file on your memory card, FileFind will find it! Here, registered customers have too received an update already(adding HiRes+ support, among others).

Use the discount code FILEFIND2007 to get 3$ off the retail price of 7.49$ at MobiHand’s - the update will hit your inbox immediately after purchase!

Background image by da_mere. Licensed under Creative Commons:Attribution. Thank you for making this image available!

Just in case you are still sitting around with an email account at HotMail’s or a similar service-TamsPalm now has a nice alternative for you: GMAIL.

In case you didnt hear about this yet, GMAIL is a service from google that offers you the following features:

• Almost 3 GB of email storage
• 10 MB max email size
• POP3/SMTP access compatible e.g. with SnapperMail for Palm OS handhelds
• Usable web interface that lets you create HTML mails
• Automatic spam filtering that works well
• Free

This sounds good, doesnt it? The only problem is so far that you need an invite to get an account. I have 50 left! Just email me at Tamog AT gmx DOT at(no link here, AT=@, DOT=., omit the whitespaces) in order to get a few!

This is a post at the developer forums of Universe, the new browser for Palm OS:

Ok, so I have come up with a couple of lists as to what the final release should include.

Planned for the 3.0 release:
*Sony Hires+ and Jog Dial support
*Prompt user about downloading files before download starts
*Clean up 5Way on the Bookmark and Connection Settings
editing forms, add to history form
*Cleanup lores throbber
*Add a url popup menu (with options such as
“Open link in new tab”, “Copy URL”, …)
*HTTPS (the library built into the PalmOS is ugly,
I may look into MatrixSSL after launch)
*HTML Table support (a big must)
*Native GIF lib
*Fix image resizing
*Add local file support
*Fullscreen mode
*Fix disconnect menu item
*Delete private cookies when switching out of Private Browsing
(also, add an option to save private browsing state when exiting
the browser)

These things may get into the 3.0 release:
*Plugin support (pretty high up as this will be basis of media streaming, etc)
*Background tab downloading (also high priority)
*Add a download slip (will show kb downloaded, kb left, speed, etc)
*Add Unicode support (using a Unicode library)
*Add gzip HTTP compression
*Add find text

I have some other things on my private list that are not as high up in priority.

I determined this list based on priority and ease of implementation.

I look forward to a Q1 2007 launch (unfortunatly this is far beyond my project release dates ).

-Donald

At the moment, Universe also supports several features, including

• tabs (up to three)
• downloading files
• images
• streaming media (using Kinoma 4)
• bookmarks, history
• RSS reader

Many of us went into the Palm OS area to protect themselves from the big corporate ‘tribal squabbles’ - but these squabbles eventually catch each and everyone of us. At school/university/foo, a group of people finds itself at the mercy of one or more instructors/some other kind of eeker squeeks - and here we have politics yet again.

Christopher Duncan is a consultant who teaches about beeing a programmer in a corporate world - his book is a collection of various topics a programmer needs. Lets see how it stacks up!

The career programmer starts off by looking at why programmers find themselves in political arenas thinking that they don’t need to fight while getting punched straight into the hide. You get a quick explanation on why suits are suits - most micro ISV’s probably already know this, but its still interesting to read!

The second part of the book deals with all kinds of interesting tidbits on how to create products while under time pressure. The chapters shown here are useful for everyone - you learn a few tricks for negotiating for design time, getting a test team and other problems and issues.

The third part looks at what you can do to have a safe and comfortable job - stay in a company, become a freelancer, a micro ISV or go into an entirely different area of the market.

The career programmer is very well-written, reading it is great fun. Paper quality is decent, my Parker 45X had no blotting problems whatsoever.

Overall, if you ever find yourself duking it out with a jerk who is more powerful than you are, you will want to have this book on your shelf and its contents in your mind. In squabbles, it usually boils down to who knows more/the better tricks of combat - the Career Programmer will definitely add a lot of ammunition to your equipment!

The last versions of Pocket Tunes were mainly designed for using them as MP3 player for static files from an external media. Ok, they were able to stream but now it is much better implemented.

The new version adds a lot of streaming features: It gives you easy access to a wide variety of internet radio stations directly from your palm or you can use your own playlists. You can access the list of available stations via the menu.

When you launch it the first time Pocket Tunes will establish an internet connection and download the whole database to your device, the size is about 35 kb. Next it will present you the list � divided into several categories like Country, Comedy etc.

Clicking on one of the entries opens a list with the available radio stations. In this window you can redefine the stations order, you can select them for playing and you can send the entries via Bluetooth etc to other devices.

But what when some radio stations change their stream URLs? Then you can edit the entry or you can try to update the list. This can be done from the menu.

Once you have selected your station and you pressed �Play� Pocket Tunes returns to the main screen in which it displays the whole stations which are listed in the category from which you have chosen your station. It also shows you the actually played song.

Adding your own stations to the list is very easy. Simply choose the category in which it should appear (perhaps you want to create your own category, that�s possible, too). Then simply choose �Add� from the menu and you can enter a name and the URL to the stream.

But if you are having a playlist and you do not want do type the URL manually you can simply copy the *.pls file to your SD card. Then go to the menu from which you can select your audio files from card. When you tap on �All� Pocket Tunes starts to search your device for supported files. Now you can access your copied playlists via �Playlists�, there they should appear.

Perhaps you have noticed the point �Internet Radio�. Selecting this item takes you to an other view of the internet radio stations category overview. From here you can select your stations, too.

Pocket Tunes is able to handle Mp3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC streams. I have tried PTunes4 with a Palm TX and a blue2net Bluetooth Access Point. In further versions I sometimes had dropouts when listening to web radio then Pocket Tunes had do buffer again. Now this has completely changed. Re-buffering nearly didn’t come up during my test. So it got much more enjoyable.
Using Pocket Tunes in combination with a mobile phone for streaming requires a data flatrate because traffic can get very high.

Golem.de writes about a GPS receiver for the SDIO slot which has also an mini SD card reader. The receiver has a SiRF III chipset and supports the NMEA 0183 protocol. The card reader works with mini SD cards up to 2 GB. Windows CE and Palm OS (> 4.0) are supported.

There is no release date or price information yet.

One of the hottest topics in IT management is the age-old question of measuring the productivity of employees - aka which Palm OS developer creates the most value for a Palm OS development house.

Do you want to measure by lines of code? You get loads of comments on separate lines! You want to measure by number of features? Your guys start implementing/fighting about teeny weeny features, ignoring the big ones.

According to Reuters, Germany now has a huge problem with pregnant mothers attempting to delay the arrival of their babies as to cash more:
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyid=2006-12-27T125227Z_01_L26351070_RTRUKOC_0_US-GERMANY-BABIES.xml

Hey, if measurements affect pregnant mothers, they will definitely affect your programmers!

Now that PalmSource/Access seems to have abandoned the DevCon conferences completely, Palm OS developers currently do not have a “big” conference for ganging up.

Anyways, the folks over at HackNDev(the Palm OS Linux place, for all those who are new) plan a Hack&Dev Summit 2007. Lets quote them:

Hack&Dev Summit 2007
Submitted by marex on 19 December, 2006 - 23:01. Linux4Palm

Hi, I’m thinking about making a Hack&Dev developer conference. My plan is making it in Prague [Czech Republic] somewhere in January / February 2007. What do you think about it? You can write your opinion and comments under this article.

This will be updated with new infos, so we’ll see what’ll get from this.

I think that that’s a great idea and may attend it myself - visit their site and chime in!
Hack&Dev 2007 Summit Announcement

Dear Wiki readers,
after a long and hard negotiation with our former web host, I have now received confirmation that we have no chance of recovering the original wiki data.

Now, the question is:
Should we kick our former web hosts ass?

I am not sure if it pays out - after all, kicking such a company’s hide takes a lot of work. Work time, which I cannot invest into churning out more reviews for you.

Since the TamsPalm team is here to serve you, you have the choice! Please tell us what you feel like!

Readers of PalmnInfoCenter have reported success in accessing 8GB SDHC cards with both a Palm Treo 680 and - after a bit of rom nicking - a Treo 700p. SDHC is the future memory card format, the first 8GB SDHC cards are already hitting the market.

Get the full scoop on SDHC and Palm Treos here:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9158/treo-680-compatible-with-8gb-sdhc-cards/

During the develpoment of TCPMP the author published several codecs/plugins but not all of them were available at the same time in a collection. I tried to get every available plugin and at least I hope I got it. Now, here it is. I hope I could help the ones who tried to play a file but couldn’t because of missing codecs.
If you have a codec which is not included you can post it and email it to us.
Get the pack here.

Edit: we had to remove the AAC plugin because of licence reasons.
Anyways, you can get the plugin here.

Many TamsPalm readers use tejpWriter as their text editor of choice - -and indeed, tejpWriter 3.0 scored really really well in the TamsPalm review!

tejpWriter maintainer Peter Thorstenson now informed me that tejpWriter 3.42 has just been released. He states that this is an important update that fixes a variety of VFS related bugs - so updating is a very good idea:

—————–
The 3.42 is an another maintanace release. It takes care of a few important issues with the VFS part. Please, upgrade!
—————–

I have left version 3.4x behind and now I’m working on putting in new features.

Please visit the tejpWriter web site for further information!

John Wilund just sent me a beta of SrcEdit(the Palm OS source editor, mainly beeing used for OnBoardC) that is said to greatly improve the speed of SrcEdit’s Function Bookmark tool.

For all those of you who don’t know what Function Bookmark does, it essentially shows you a list of all functions in a file and lets you jump to the start of the one you need - saving you the scrolling effort.

John hadn’t yet committed the code to SVN, thus it can’t be downloaded with !get ATM.

Download the beta!

ZZTechs released LaunchAnywhere literally days ago - and TamsPalm had a review out almost immediately.

Anyways, skin artist BuRnN just announced that he has created the first ever Launch Anywhere skin, and released it to the public on 1src:
http://www.1src.com/forums/showthread.php?t=121303

Just felt like letting you all know…not that I wold ever download a theme myself(my Palms are still set to Original colors).