TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Apparently, the two main open source text editors for Palm OS(tejpWriter and SrcEdit) are tied together by a strange link - whenever one of them gets onto TamsPalm, the other one quickly follows suit. Anyways, John Wilund just sent me this:

A new SrcEdit beta is out!

Additions and fixes are:

* sped up the Typedef Completion and removed a few BUGs
* fixed a multitude of Undo BUGs
* fixed update BUGs regarding Comments Highlighting
* Fixed a Color distortion BUG (on Screens with 16 bit color depth)

Please test it!

The beta can be downloaded here:
http://tamoggemon.com/blog/contents/2007/March/thasrcedit/SrcEdit.prc

As always, leave comments here or in the SrcEdit IRC channel!

Dear Readers,
I am proud to inform you all that TamsPalm now has a software store of its own!

The TamsPalm shop is powered by MobiHand and can be accessed via the button in the top bar or the link below:
http://www.mobihand.com/tamspalm/homeSoftware.asp

We are proud to celebrate this opening with the TamsPalm Shop discount codes below - they are valid for a week; but only at the TamsPalm shop:

50% off DailyQuote
Get Tamoggemon DailyQuote, the one and only quote solution for Palm OS - use the code DAILYTAMSPALM

50% off FileFind
FileFind lets you find files on your memory card easily - use the code FINDITONTAMSPALM

30% off Resco Explorer
Resco Explorer, the award-winning file manager for Palm OS, can be yours 30% off the list price with the code Explorer_TamHanna

30% off Resco PhotoViewer
Resco Photo Viewer, the best(IMHO) picture viewer for Palm OS can be purchased 30% off list price with the discount code Viewer_TamHanna

This is just the beginning - stay tuned for many more cool discounts that make buying software fun!

Smaato has released an update of its well-known RSS news reader Smaato News. The new version which has both a better sync engine and support for pictures is ready for download on Freewarepalm.com:

http://freewarepalm.com/communication/smaatonews.shtml

All pictures are copyright of the Leopold Museum 2007 and their creators. We had to constrain the resolution to VGA and add the texts due to a restrictive contract pressed upon us by the museum administration. We apologize for any inconveniences! - the TamsPalm team

The Leopold Museum in Vienna(shown below) is not the place where one would expect to see any kind of technical innovation worth of a TamsPalm article - but their exhibition titled 24 Stunden im Leben von Wien(24 hours in the life of Vienna) is worth it. The reason for this is simple - all the pictures shown were made with a stock(according to the museum) BlackBerry Pearl smartphone:

The exhibition is in two rooms of the top floor. The rest of the museum showed interesting artworks…but hey, this is TamsPalm and not TamsArt. Each room had a showcase with some kind of BlackBerry in the middle. The firs room had a ‘family tree’, the second room’s showcase contained a BlackBerry Pearl with Swarovsky crystals:

The pictures were about 70×50 cm big, with one or two of them being even bigger. All of them looked good from a distance of about one meter - here are a few sample pictures(the Museum forces us to put that text bar over them, sorry):

Here is a closeup of a picture that looked like it was made on a very close range. The strawberries look very natural and accurate from about one meter away - if you come close, you can see the slight ‘fuzzyness’ shown below:

Night pictures turned out surprisingly noise-free and looked pretty good:

Chromatic aberrations were not visible either:

Pictures shot at daylight contained surprising amounts of detail:

Overall, the pictures shown in the exhibiton were of exceptional quality for a cameraphone - since the exhibition was sponsored by BlackBerry, it’s very probable that the machines used to create these pictures were not exactly stock ones(software and/or CCD upgraded). The images probably also were modified on a workstation. But nevertheless, this exhibition clearly demonstrates what today’s(next-gen) camera phones are capable of capturing when paired with a good postprocessor…interesting viewing for every technology freak!

itworld.com has an interesting article outlining the changes in Symbian OS version 9.5. To cut a long story short, the manufacturer claims that this is an OS that actually speeds up things and reduces memory consumption, while adding new features like TV and database support.

Get the full scoop here:
http://wireless.itworld.com/4267/070326symbian/page_1.html

First of all, a big thank you goes out to all the people who purchased Tamoggemon Software applications and read TamsPalm! Without you all, this review would not be here. But enough talk for now - let’s hit it!

I ordered the grey Palm Treo 680 at Bluehand’s(a German retailer). The unit cost 369 Euros with shipping - and the web shop dropped my first order. After calling Bluehand the next day, the order was completed and the Treo 680 was delivered in 6 days. Bluehand shipped the Treo in a unsuspicious-looking parcel(at first glance, I thought I just received some books):

Opening the box showed the Treo 680 box “suspended” in the middle of the box by two air balloons - innovative packaging:

Here are a few pictures of the Treo 680 shipping box:

Opening the box immediately shows you an invitation to call Palm Germany for free once to get started using the Treo:

Below this, you find the usual bunch of Palmy stuff - a screen protector, the license agreement for the Palm OS and the warranty paper. This time, the manuals seem o.k.(very short compared to the Palm III’s manuals, but on par with my HP ipaq’s rx4200) too:

The Treo ships with an USB cable, a “wall-wart” charger and a little headset as added bonus “gimmick”(my version of the ipaq didn’t include the headphones…no idea why):

So far so good. Palm ships its latest Palm OS smartphone with a decent bunch of accessories. Of course, a memory card or a spare stylus still aren’t inside and the charger is still proprietary - but hey, this is Palm(=)). But - bickering aside - congratulations on this package. Well done, Palm - it contains all a novice user needs to get started(except for the memory card)!

Garmin was a very popular Palm OS licensee – their innovative GPS-Palm OS-combos were very popular among many users. However, Garmin has now more-less withdrawn silently from the Palm OS market, leaving analysts wondering about what happened. I tracked a high Garmin guy down – and here is what he told me:

All PDA’s are discontinued

The reason for this is that Garmin plans(and has executed) a position shift away from combo navigators to standalone units and smartphone navigation software. This position shift is done because Garmin feels that the GPS market will move this way - not because of technical difficulties.

Garmins PDA based offerings sold satisfactorily well and made it into stores well too – in fact, the manager told me that the company was happy with the sales. The stability of the Palm OS was not a problem either – we were very satisfied with the stability of the Palm OS platform(sic).

The problems Garmin faced was support for third party apps – Garmin Germany alone hired 10 extra support staff to make the Palm OS and PocketPC work for the users…navigation was working all the time.

Garmin stays active in the Palm OS market with its MobileXT software and Mobile10 bluetooth GPS dongle. Last but not least, retailers are said to still have a bit of remaining stock on most of their machines…

Peter Thorstenson, the developer of tejpWriter and the TamsPalm team have always enjoyed and excellent relation; leading to TamsPalm being the exclusive provider for new tejpWriter releases for quite some time. Peter just completed a new version of his award-winning text editor for Palm OS(review here) - and we are proud to be the first Palm OS news site to present it to the general public!

———————-
Version 3.50 is a combined feature and maintenance release. The new features are:

• Configurable Tap/Thumbboard key layout with up to 39 macros.
• Enhanced Tap/Thumbboard
• Tap/Thumbboard skins
• Tumbboard MiniDisplay
• Improved Viewer font selection
• MiniDisplay paragraph position
• 4 new fonts
• XUndo of the last “Replaces all”
• Doc Refresh tool.

The Tap-Thumbboard is fully redesigned allowing the user to make his own key layout, and include up to 39 macros in it. There are many other improvements as a result of the new design, for example the “Enhanced” function, which may increase input drastically, and the key click on pen down which makes it easier to know when a key actually has been pressed. The Tap-Thumbboard is also more sensitive which makes it work better on my crappy T5 digitizer, so now I am happy! The 3.50 release also includes a doc Refresh tool, which compacts all records to maximum size, and rewrites the header record with correct values. The Refresh tool can be used to repair faulty docs.

Apart from many bug fixes, I have made a lot of improvements on the memory handling in an effort to make tejpWriter work better on the TX. I have now confirmed stable functionality on the TX with several users. If any one still has problems, please install the latest updates from Palm and look over the programs you have installed. The Universal Keyboard Driver for example is known to cause problems; Please, turn it OFF.

As always, get the latest beta here:
tejpwriter350b14.zip

Many Palm OS developers are currently evaluating a port of their applications to various other platforms(Windows Mobile or a touchscreen Symbian OS derivate). Apple users have experienced PC ports for a long time now, and Microsoft Mac BU guy David Weiss now posted an interesting bit of insight on why many developers failed porting their applications:

….We spent some serious time and money to study and really tangibly understand who these “Mac users” were….

In short, his message is “understand the target platform”. Enough said, get the full scoop here:
http://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2007/03/porting-to-mac.html

Palm recently had a conference call to its investors, where the last quarter’s results were discussed. Our friends at the PalmInfoCenter have the full scoop. We at TamsPalm’s cherry-pick out the most interesting tidbit - the chart below:

Essentially, it shows Palm’s total revenue over the last years - and the interesting thing is the division between handhelds and smartphones. The handhelds(like the Palm TX) are shown in grey, whereas the smartphones(Treo series) are shown in orange.

One can obviously see the decrease in handheld sales. Palm never ever made as little money as with handhelds as they did this time - Ed Colligan still claims that the handheld business is profitable though. This is very possible seeing that Palm’s handhelds are becoming “cheaper and cheaper” price wise, making assumptions on (developer relevant) sales number changes difficult. After all, four Palm Z22 users can be recruited for the price of a Palm LifeDrive. Colligan claims 277k units sold - if everyone of them buys one of my applications, I probably would already have had a visit from the local tax guys…

As for smartphones, this has obviously been Palm’s best quarter ever. Palm has really managed to push their Treo 750v/w into carrier’s hands - I saw loads of them at the Cebit this year. Colligan stated that 23% of revenues are now from outside the states - most of these are probably due to the Treo 750w/v(and thus irrelevant to Palm OS developers). The Treo 680 is said to score well with female buyers; 3G support was said to be planned for Palm OS.

Overall, its the usual thing at Palm’s. Little ground-breaking, little really new(as Adam Tow recently remarked) - but stable revenue flowing into the company(for now). With that, I log off for tonight- stay tuned, we have two big surprises for you soon!

Code optimization has been a classic topic among programmers - my compiler optimizes better than your compiler, my Palm OS app gets smaller than yours, and so on. Fights about this can get religious, but the gains are usually less than 10%. However, I managed to optimize one of my (soon-to-be-released)products by about 50% - without a compiler change.

The reason for this was a careful walk through of the source code. I looked at an iterative algorithm and optimized it so that less iterations were needed. This immediately reduced execution time by a _lot_ - much more than the rather small 10% a good compiler can squeeze out.

Overall, if you want to optimize your program, take a look at the code _before_ firing up that optimizing compiler. It will definitely pay out on the long run…

What do you think?

At the German Palm user meeting, many developers, hardcore freaks and web masters were present. Thus, the selection of freak boxen was pretty big - here’s a selection of everything that I found cool or weird:

Aceeca Meazura peripherals
The Aceeca Meazura supports GPS and RFID via the two modules shown below:

Both of the modules were completely operational at the PUM, although the case designs may still change a bit. Exchanging the modules is simple as usual - it was described a bit in the Meazura CF module review.

The fake iPhone
Someone “dressed” a tobacco bag up as a iPhone - confused me quite a bit at first:

The modding table
The Nexave organizers had a special “modding table” guarded by various Nexave administrators. The following devices were shown:

My see-through Palm Vii and the yellow Palm Tungsten E2

A WristPDA with a battery extension

A gold-plated, ancient Palm handheld

A Palm x420 - the prototype successor of the Palm Tungsten W. The device was fully operational, but well, touching someone else’s prototype usually is a bad idea =).

A Palm in a Lego case

The Palm Senior disposal site
Last but not least, the German enigma group Senior PUG, decided to declare a table their “gathering point”. So far so good, but the word Sammelstelle can be translated not only as gathering point, but also as waste disposal site. This made me giggle quite a bit and probably was intentional…

This is the last post on the german Palm user meeting - I hope that you enjoyed my reports!

Some of you may still recall Adam Tow - he was one of the people behind the Palm.net stuff. I originally linked up with him when I purchased his transparent Palm Vii - and still check out his blog occasionally.

Today, I found a very interesting article called Palm is Already Dead. In a nutshell, Adam Tow gives an inside view of what he thinks to be rotten at Palm’s; and also draws a few comparisons to Apple(Palm really has quite a few former Apple guys in it…).

Makes a very good read, so head over.

I have tested the Brando deluxe leather case in book-style for Palm TX and T5 for one week now. The case looks significant which is caused by the used materials: mainly leather. The case consists of three parts which are separated by the PDA: in front of the PDA you have two slots for e.g. credit cards and two slots for SD or MMC cards. Behind these slots you find another pocket for e.g. credit cards again. In addition you have the choice to use an additional flip inlay for credit cards.

The second part consists of the PDA itself.
The third part consists again of two slots for credit cards.

The case is shipped in a red box with the “BRANDO” tag. The first surprise is the size of the case. It is really handy: The PDA is only slightly smaller than the case.

The placing of the PDA into the case is easy: First you have to remove the flip cover because the track is used to hold the PDA in place.

The case can be closed by a magnet clip which holds the two sides of the case relatively strong together so that it can be filled with credit cards, SD cards etc without always opening.
The fabrication of the case seems to be of a high quality: i couldn’t find any leaks.
The only disadvantage is that one has to remove the PDA from its case when it should be placed e.g. in an external keyboard or in a docking station. But on the other hand it becomes much safer when holding the PDA in your hand: the case increases the size slightly so that it can’t be dropped that easy than without.

For customers from e.g. Germany it might be helpful to know that German identity cards won’t fit in it in a normal way - they are too big. So I used a simple paperclip to fix it in the case so that the identity card can be in the case, too.

The case costs 32 USD and can be purchased here.