2007 February » TamsPalm - the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Resco Neeews! – the (p)review

Productivity, Web browsers No Responses »

Feb 202007

When Resco first released Neeews, many in the Palm OS world did not understand the motivation behind giving away such an excellent program completely free. After the Resco site-visit, I knew that a commercial version was coming…and here it is. The product hasn’t been released yet, but the TamsPalm review is right here!

Resco Neeews starts up by showing a few introductory pages. These contain basic information for novices – well done.

Resco Neeews’s user interface is similar to the Palm OS launcher:

Adding a new feed(Resco term: newspaper) works via a wizard that is easy to understand, but confusing. I outlined all the steps for you below, as you might see, one passes the same form twice(once to choose, once to edit and save). However, the Wizard appears well thought-out and did its job perfectly.

Static feeds like our TamsPalm feed work very well. You can choose if images should be downloaded or not, how many articles you want to have, the font size can be selected and links can be passed to your handheld’s web browser or sent to the clipboard. To cut a long story short – Neeews’s rendering is excellent!

Resco’s so-called dynamic feed feature allows you to get a feed from sites like Google or Flickr that is parametrized by the search terms you enter into the wizard. This page shows the settings for a Flickr feed that downloads the latest lava lamp photographs from Flickr:

Resco Neeews did a great job with the dynamic feed – the pictures look great on my Palm Tungsten E2(the ripple is due to the GIF compression in WordPress – the gradients are soft on the TE2):

Neeews’s dynamic rendering allows you to look at a feed while it’s data is still being downloaded. This is especially handy for feeds with many images… . Here is a video that shows the creation of a dynamic feed, its downloading and rendering on a Palm Tungsten E2.

This review looked at Resco Neeews 2.01 on a Palm Tungsten E2 with a HP SD card. Neeews didn’t crash in my tests, neither did it show any excessively weird behavior.

Overall, the Palm OS world just got richer by one excellent program. If you enjoy looking at RSS feeds, you will love Resco Neeews! Excellent HTML rendering makes looking at feeds comfortable, dynamic rendering makes the whole experience fast. I can’t really find out anything negative about Neeews! – congratulations!

News on Resco Neeews!

Palm News 2 Responses »

Feb 192007

Resco just sent us an exclusive beta of Resco Neeews! – the RSS reader for Palm OS. As we already stated some time ago in our on-site report series at Resco’s, Neews! will eventually become a commercial version.

The product has essentially gone golden a few minutes ago and will be released very soon(less than 3 days…delaying Daily Quote 2 to Friday). I have the feature list for you now, a little review of the golden beta will be online in a few hours:

News in v 2.01

GUI
Better Html rendering
HiRes support, incl. landscape
View modes: By Icon / By List
Four font sizes
Selectable scroll step
New Icon Manager: Currently supports icon import from Zlauncher icon sets.

New shortcuts
Space = Toggle focus Title – Article
Treo 680/700p: Green button opens context menu
‘m’ – open context menu (also green button on T700p/T680)
‘r’ – set article unread
‘b’ – open article in browser
‘v’ – toggle article favorite

Improved Newspaper wizard
– Simplified
– Direct access to premium services (see below)
– Optional sorting of articles by date
The difference is with multi-feed newspapers. Default sort order is 1.
feed, 2. date.
However, the user may request sorting by date only. (Mixing articles from different feeds.)
– Modifying the order of newspaper feeds

Web connectivity
– Offline mode: Prevents unwanted auto-download. (Eg. images, when the last update was interrupted.)
– Disconnect command
– ‘Disconnect on Exit’ option (General Options)
– Support for https protocol (Probably works on newer devices only; eg. T5 might fail.)

Asynchroneous update
Here is what can you do while the newspaper update is in progress:
– Start reading updated newspaper immediately after the text of the first feed was downloaded.
(The download continues on background.)
– Read other newspapers.
– Start update of another newspaper. (The updates are queued.)

Background update
– Improved Error Log
– Display dimming
– Global option to switch off background updates (General Options)
– Auto-connect dialogs are dismissed after 30 secs if possible.
(Heuristical procedure mostly – if not always -
successful. The purpose is to prevent phone blocking by unsuccessful connection attempt.)

External Tools
Selectable viewer: Resco Viewer, Acid Image, SplashPhoto, GRX Selectable player: AeroPlayer, Kinoma, mmPlayer, mOcean, PocketTunes, TCPMP
Plus built-in audio-player (available on newest Palm models) Web browser is not selectable. Following browser are supported in the order of preference:
1. Blazer 3.0/4.0
2. NetFront
3. Novarra WebPro
4. PalmSource Web Browser/NetFront 2.0

Memory requirements
ArticleDB applies compression on larger articles, which brings savings around 25%.
(More on blogs with larger articles.)
User has control over the setup of the ArticleDB. In an extreme case – if the user does not need features such as Favorites, Send… (i.e. the user works primarily with generated newspapers) – it is possible to run with very low memory consumption.

Premium Services
Support for so-called ‘dynamic feeds’:
– Google News
– Windows Live Search (former MSN search)
– Newsvine
– Reddit
– Technorati
– del.icio.us
– Flickr
Bloglines account synchronization (more exactly: feed list synchronization) Improved feed search

Other changes
– Article read status added
– Image Cache dialog enables to control card space reserved to images.
– Improved rss support
– New command: SMS article
– New command: Export article to memo

This looks like a great new Palm OS program – what do you think?

In Search of Stupidity review

Book reviews No Responses »

Feb 182007

A second edition has recently been released – it is not a hard cover anymore. The second edition adds a chapter on proprietary/opensource technologies and a chapter on avoiding stupid mistakes!

I found out about In Search of Stupidity because it was mentioned in The Best of Software Writing. The title made me think about my lack of marketing know-how, and I thus ordered the book. It made a very interesting read – but did it help my marketing skills?

In Search of Stupidity is subdivided into chapters. Each chapter looks at one company that fuxated – and starts off with a very funny comic:

The companies covered range from IBM to Ashton-Tate, Netscape, the dotcom bubble and Microsoft get mentioned, too. Each of the chapters looks at how the company fuxated itself – what went wrong, why it went wrong, and most importantly why this was a bad idea even back then.

The mistakes covered range from development idiocies, releases of lite products and other product mistakes over to marketing and positioning ‘hooplas’. Marx has said that history repeats itself…and why not save yourself a few mistakes(you will make enough of them, trust me)!

Merril R. Chapman made a good job writing a clear and readable text. The book contains next to no technical jargon and is very funny – this reads like literature rather than a classic dry book.

Overall, history tends to repeat itself. Reading this book helps you avoid many common mistakes – if you run a software house and want a funny read, get this by all means. The price of 17$ at Amazon’s is worth it(there also is a very interesting bundle with Joel on Software)!

OnBoardC 2.6 beta available

Miscellaneous, Palm News No Responses »

Feb 182007

This just came in from Boz, the maintainer of the OnBoardC compiler for Palm OS:

Hi all,
I finally got around to merging my multiseg changes back into
the main branch. I think they’re all done and ready to use, so I’d
really appreciate if people could try it out. But “caveat emptor”, and
please make sure you backup your device before trying it, this is still
a beta release.

I’d appreciate it if people could test out that everything behaves as
expected, and that all your old projects still compile and run without
any problems. If you’re feeling adventurous and have some more time
available, i’d also appreciate people trying out the new functionality.
There’s a howto file included in the release.

The release, v2.6.0 can be found on the sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55794

Thanks,

Boz

I have performed a few tests on a DailyQuote for Palm OS build generated by the new compiler on a Palm Tungsten E2 and can’t report anything strange happening(yes, I will release version 2 to the public soon, folks – promised). However, the project is single-segmented and thus won’t be affected significantly by this update.

Getting a download currently is a bit difficult, as quite a few of the SourceForge mirrors didn’t offer the file yet. However, the Seattle Proxy has the file available as of now…

Please keep us all posted on how your tests proceed!

A very strange StrPrintF crash

Miscellaneous, Simulator 5 Responses »

Feb 172007

StrPrintF is a derivative of the classic printf – Palm OS programmers who never programmed console applications(like me, I come from the VB side of the river) have little experience with this call. For them, this bit of code looks perfectly ok:
//Prefs.highscores[i].secs is a UInt32 StrPrintF(textparams[6].text,"%2d:%2d %s %s", prefs.highscores[5].secs%60, prefs.highscores[5].secs-60*(prefs.highscores[5].secs%60), prefs.highscores[5].difficulty, prefs.highscores[5].name);

However, when the app containing this code is run on the Palm OS Simulator, a very strange thing happens. The Palm OS Simulator crashes…on OS level. Windows gives a message about how the Simulator attempted to access memory around 0×000000043 or so(very low memory area) – cool. A Palm OS app that crashes Windows 2000 =).

The problem is the type of the secs field. When you specify a %d, StrPrintF expects a regular int, not a Int32. So, it reads only half of the data into memory, leaving the other half on the stack. When the two %d’s have been processed(one UInt32 taken off the stack, one to go), the %s’ses fetch their pointers off the stack, thereby getting the second UInt32. This then leads to a beautiful crash as experienced above…

This could be handy to keep in mind for another time I use StrPrintF….maybe it can help you all, too!

Hardening Windows(second Edition) review

Book reviews No Responses »

Feb 172007

Most Palm OS developers nowadays use a NT-blend of Windows as development platform thanks to the not-so-bad PODS. Windows is considered a very unsafe operating system by most, leaving paranoid developers in worry about their machines.

John Hassell’s book aims to provide everyone who wants to harden his box with practical things that can be applied to the machine immediately. Let’s see how it stacks up!

Hardening Windows starts off with a chapter on general security. What is security, what concerns are there, what can you do to improve security and so on.

After that, the book looks at securing classic Windows NT(4) machines. Some of the advice given is very practical, for example closing ports on the NT port filter. Other stuff is rather straightforward(install an Anti-virus program). My NT4 server(running CVS to keep my Palm OS source code safe) did get quite a bit safer though!

The chapters on Windows 2000 and XP are of mixed value. Some things are interesting even for single workstations, other things are only useful for ‘bigger’ environments with multiple users in an Active Directory. The chapter on Windows 2003 Server looks at the new secure configuration wizard – no 2003 server here, so no benefit.

Afterwards, Hardening Windows looks at deploying patches with a SUS server and at deploying/enforcing enterprise security(aka security in multi-user system).

You also find three chapters on IIS, Exchange and security log auditing.

Hardening Windows is well-written, it however requires quite a bit of previous knowledge of Windows operating systems in some sections. I am not sure if I could apply all the hints – but I could probably apply 75% to 80%.

Overall, if you have a network with a lot of computers used by people who are not exactly computer-literate, buy this book immediately and by all means. If you, however, have only a small network with a few PC’s and a single router, you will not profit very much from this 27$ book.

Palm Treo 600 affected by Find vulnerability

Palm News 7 Responses »

Feb 162007

I have just performed testing and discovered that the Palm Treo 600 is affected by the recently-discovered Find vulnerability.

My Treo 600 runs the firmware version Treo600-1.13-AWS. I will soon install dkirker’s inofficial fix – meanwhile, all I can say is take special care to keep your Treo in your pocket all the time!

Arcade Reality – camera-controlled gaming comes to the Palm OS

Palm News No Responses »

Feb 162007

The Siemens SX1 was my favorite phone overall – lets leave the excellent VGA camera aside for now and focus on one little-noticed feature of it called Mozzies. Mozzies was a game that allowed you to hunt for bees flying around – the camera was used for movement.

Toysoft now released Arcade Reality for Palm Treo 650, 680 and 700p(no support for Palm Zire or Treo 600) – a game that takes the control system pioneered by Mozzies and adds stunning 3d graphics, music and multiple game modes.

A video showing the game in action is available from Toysoft’s ESD, ClickGamer – the game can also be purchased there:
http://www.clickgamer.com/moreinfo.htm?pid=7916

The Carnival of the Capitalists

Carnival of the Palm OS 3 Responses »

Feb 122007

The Carnival of the Capitalists is one of the longest-running blog carnivals on the web. It covers all kinds of business-related topics and usually gets at least 50 entries sent in – recently, hosts were allowed to filter. I took the freedom to make this edition of the carnival relevant to Micro ISV’s in the Palm OS business – if you didn’t get included this week, next week’s host will probably like your post better!

I took the freedom to divide the posts into categories for easier locating – this has served us well for the Carnivals we hosted before – never change a working system!

Employees
David Maister looks at what managers do wrong most of the time.

Slow Leadership takes a look at why communication fails.

Small Business Trends brings in an article looking at what people who get employed at small companies tend to miss the most.

Travis A. Sinquefield brings us an interesting article comparing Task Motivation and Goal Setting – an interesting read for all employee motivation freaks.

Finance
Tyner Blain brings a few guidelines for calculating ROI efficiently.

Wayne Hurlbert looks at the benefits of good customer care.

IT and somewhat related stuff
Our old friend Pawel Brodzinski(have him on my Plucker list for half a year now) brings along a post with his top reasons on why subcontracting fails.

Marketing
fivecentnickel brings us an interesting post on expiring miles in frequent-flyer programs. This one could be interesting for everyone who does coupon marketing…

GreatFX brings a cool article on business cards. Their site seems to have loads more of design information – could be a worthwhile blog to follow!

James S Logan writes about the insignificance of “business age” – something to keep in mind when purchasing a product(but not when advertising yourself – ever heard of psychological effects at purchase time:)).

Miscellaneous
Andrea Dickson takes a look at what’s behind all the Pennystock spam.

BusinessPundits takes a look at how entrepreneurship can be used for flirting(!!!).

If weird suits your taste, Personal Finance Advice’s Conversation with a burglar could be useful in finding the next hiding spot…

BigPictureSmallOffice seems to contain a load of interesting content, although their carnival post is not too interesting.

Self improvement
freemoneyfinance compiles a list called “The best Financial Advice ever“.

Krishna De writes up a list of things to help you complete a (business) book – interesting for all ‘wannabe’ writers.

Wally Bock took a look at promotions and analyzed the ones people consider the most stressful.

Overall, hosting a blog carnival always is a risky thing(you could get all-crap easily). However, I am satisfied with this issue(it contains many interesting blogs to add to Plucker) – what do you think?

Palm on Windows Vista compatibility for Palm OS handhelds

Palm News 8 Responses »

Feb 122007

Palm has finally managed to post a web site on Windows Vista compatibility:
http://www.palm.com/us/support/windowsvista/index.html

As of now, Palm Desktop is said to synchronize the PIM data under Windows Vista. However:

Palm Quick Install (the desktop application that allows you to move files like .prc and .pdb to your Palm device) and Palm� LifeDrive� mobile manager software are not currently Vista compatible. Please check back for updates.

So, if I understand this correctly, installing PRC files to Palm handhelds or PDA’s at Hotsync is not possible under Windows Vista.

Dmitry Grinberg interview

Interviews 8 Responses »

Feb 122007

Dmitry Grinberg is the enigma and legend of the Palm OS business. His (genious) applications get rave reviews by some, while they absolutely fail for others. He has mastered the art of word-of-mouth-marketing and PR; his eccentric communication style makes his emails unique(I can identify them 5m away from the terminal).

Dmitry gladly agreed to take one of the oh-so-famous 10q interviews for TamsPalm(thank you) – so here we go:

Please tell us more about yourself and your products
Dmitry Grinberg.
Palm Os developer for a few years now.
Software at palmpowerups.com is mine

what else is there?

Which Palm devices do you currently use, and why
TX2 – it has everything i need
It is small, it has amazing battery life (dynaclock helps), wifi is nice and netfront looks amazing in 640×640 resolution (not a typo…more on that later)

Do you think that a strong Treo 680 will help the Palm software ecosystem
tremendously…this is a treo done right.

What do you think about Palm’s developer resources
Some of the SDK examples had a few bugs, but you cannot really expect completely bug free anything in software today, so I am not too critical of them. One must understand that among millions of lines of code an error is bound to creep in somewhere.

You have taken a very interesting stand on Palm OS software piracy – do you think that pirates help or harm the developer community as whole?
Both. They harm the community if they force developers to waste time creating protection instead of coding. Trust me, If i knew there were no pirates i’d output software 2x faster as i’d not need to spend time to protection techniques. But they also help as their communities are vast and are a great marketing ground.

You have recently been accused of posting a keygen algorithm for Kinoma to a board(1src thread with screenshots). Are you willing to comment on this?
I think I already made it clear that the only reason I hack the os so well is because before I developed software i reverse engineered it. It is just something I did. Anyways whenever I did, I always emailed developers about how it was done and how to make it harder to do.

Furthermore I own all the software I use. I am rather tired of these questions however, so criticize me all you want, but the point is: i’d never hack the os half as good as i do if i hadn’t had the practice i did in the past. Now i’d appreciate no more questions on the topic as it tends to always get annoying fast.

Judge me as a programmer, not as a person.

What do you see as the future of the Palm OS/Garnet OS economy as whole?
Garnet? dead. PalmOS, not so much

Some of your preannounced titles(sdhc driver,..) are much anticipated. Would you maybe give us a bit of insight into whats coming up and when to expect it?
many things are still works in progress that barely work, or some not yet even that. I have very little time this semester (90 hours or classwork per week is what it is nowadays).

My top priorities are: bluepill 1.2, statusbar customizer, HrAssist(640×640 on a 320×320 screen) sdhc, wifi, and then a few other cool things.

What’s your favourite form of advertising?
word of mouth. free and powerful.

Anything you would like to add?
do not let palmos die. it lives as long as we do not give up on it

tejpWriter 3.50 beta 4

Palm News 2 Responses »

Feb 112007

This just came in from Peter Thorstenson, the developer of tejpWriter. tejpWriter is an excellent text editor for Palm OS PDA’s and smartphones, we reviewed good ol’ version 3 on TamsPalm a few months ago. Also, the PalmInfoCenter published a howto on using tejpWriter!

The 3.50 is a combined feature and maintanace release. The new features are:

� Enhanced Tapboard
� Tap/Thumbboard skins
� Thumbboard MiniDisplay
� Improved Viewer fontselection
� MiniDisplay paragraph position
� 4 new fonts.
� XUndo of the last “Replace all”

The Tap/Thumbboard is fully redesigned with several improvements. For example, it now clicks on pen down instead of on pen up which is standard Palm behavior. This makes it easier to know when a key acctually has been pressed. It is also more sensitive which makes it work better on my crappy T5 digitizer, which makes me very happy! Apart from many bugfixes, I have made a lot of improvements on the memory handling as an effort to make tejpWriter work better on the TX. I hope it has helped a little at least.

Download the latest beta here.

The Brando 55-in-1 card reader review

Memory 3 Responses »

Feb 082007

This time we will review what Brando send us: the 55-in-1 card reader.

The card reader is a small, white box with the size 85 x 58 x 12 mm (and a weight of 40 g). The included USB cable has a length of about 60 cm. Because of all those relative small sizes, I think it is a good card reader for users of mobile computers (laptops, UMPCs,..)

Everyone should notice it – the card reader supports many different kinds of cards. There is a list of compatible cards on the product page. The only card type which is not supported is SmartMedia. I know one person which has a very old Olympus digital camera – that’s the only device I know which uses this cards. This and other manufacturers which had used SmartMedia cards now often use xD cards, the successor of SmartMedia cards. And xD cards are supported.

The support of newer card types should be much more important: CompactFlash, SD cards and Memory Sticks are standard. But the support of SDHC cards should be mentioned. SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) cards have sizes of 4 GB and more (4 and 8 GB cards are available) and are supported by many new PDAs (Treo 680), digital cameras and other multimedia devices; for older devices there may be a firmware upgrade for the slot driver.

It should also be mentioned that you can insert Micro SD, Mini SD, T-Flash and M2 cards directly – it needs no adapter like most other card readers.

The card reader is a regular USB 2.0 device and so can be easily connected to the most computers. It acts as a USB mass storage device which is supported by the most operating systems, including Windows 2000, ME, XP and Mac OS (officially supported by Brando), Windows CE, Linux and others. I tried it at both an older Windows XP USB 1.1 computer and a Mandriva 2007 laptop and couldn’t find any problems.

I can confirm the compatibility of the following cards. None of the cards I own made any problems:

16 MB SD, Canon
256 MB SD, SanDisk
128 MB Memory Stick, Iodata
1024 MB SD, Panasonic (Highspeed)
128 MB Compact Flash, Lexar Media

Because of USB 2.0, data transfers are very fast. I wrote some files and copied many pictures from a SD card. The speed should only depend on the cards you use. I could even insert three cards at one time, and it worked well. An LED shows when a card is inserted / accessed:

In my opinion, every Palm user who owns an SD card should have a card reader. Although many new computers contain a card reader, there are few ones that read so many different card types and even SDHC cards. This card reader is useful for anyone who has a PDA, digital camera, MP3 player or other device which uses flash cards, because you can insert (almost?) all card types – I think Smart Media support is not too important. You can’t do much wrong if you buy this card reader – it is in the Brando Shop for $ 28.00.

Battery symbol in statusbar on T3/T5/LifeDrive/TX

Palm News, Software News 4 Responses »

Feb 072007

Alexander Pruss has released an application which allows you to have a battery symbol (instead of the exclamation mark) in the status bar on Palm devices (T3/T5/LifeDrive/TX). Though it is still in development it is still relatively stable. The whole 1SRC thread can be
found here: http://www.1src.com/forums/showthread.php?t=123160
You can download the software here: http://www.1src.com/freeware/fileinfo.php?id=1650 (for those without an 1SRC account I’ll upload the files here [actually: v.1.0] – it *should* be the most recent version. If not, please leave a comment)
On my Palm TX the app redesigns the status bar like that:

it also updates the symbol when plugged into cradle:

A great app for those who always want to know the battery status of their palm.

Ah, I forgot to mention: it’s free!

Older Entries Newer Entries

TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Resco Neeews! – the (p)review

News on Resco Neeews!

In Search of Stupidity review

OnBoardC 2.6 beta available

A very strange StrPrintF crash

Hardening Windows(second Edition) review

Palm Treo 600 affected by Find vulnerability

Arcade Reality – camera-controlled gaming comes to the Palm OS

The Carnival of the Capitalists

Palm on Windows Vista compatibility for Palm OS handhelds

Dmitry Grinberg interview

tejpWriter 3.50 beta 4

The Brando 55-in-1 card reader review

Battery symbol in statusbar on T3/T5/LifeDrive/TX

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