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Yesterday, the developer team of PDAPerformance sent a mail to all beta testers of Saguaro and wrote that the development of Saguaro has been cancelled.
PDAPerformance wanted to program a new GUI for Palm OS. A first public demo of it, called “LineUp”, showed a GUI consisting of widgets with interesting visual effects.
I was scrolling through some freeware apps and came upon this gem. Have you ever wondered what was taking up all that space on your card? This app creates a graphical representation of your card which is dynamic (in that you can tap on any section and it zooms in (give it a few seconds to redraw the screen).
You can toggle between the graphical view and a files listing that shows the size of each file and the percent of the card taken up by the file.
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The toggle changes from a list graphic in the graphical view to a pie graphic in the list view. When you are in the graphical view and tap a section you zoom into that section and percentages change to be of that section only (instead of a percent of the whole card), while the section percent changes to 100%.
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For example if you change from the root directory view in the first screenshot to the root->palm view to the palm->programs view and then to the palm->programs->powerrun view, the screenshots from my card look like this:
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You can also display the freespace you have on your card by going to preferences and asking it to show free space:
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VFSUsage is a handy tool to see where the clutter is and clean up your card. It is very similar to the PC utility Sequoia, but is more versatile. You can get it from the freeware section of www.1src.com, or the direct URL is:
http://www.1src.com/freeware/fileinfo.php?id=1720
I often post screenshots to help explain what I’m talking about or to illustrate a point I’m trying to make. More than a few times people have asked me how I produced the screenshot to begin with. Either they were unsatisfied with what they were using or they didn’t know what to use at all.
I’ve found a couple of very good utilities and tried many more. The 2 I like best are HRCaptDA 1.85E (freeware) and Screenshot5 (shareware). These are the easiest to use in my opinion, and provide the best functionality. Both take full screen screenshots (including the DIA and the statusbar).
HRCaptDA 1.85E is, you guessed it, a Desk Accessory. It can be launched from within any application using a DA launcher, like DALauncher, myKbd, MultiLaunch, MetaDA, ZLauncher, McPhling or anything else that can either assign a DA to a hard key or act as a DA launcher. It has a companion app called HRCaptDM. The DM app supposedly lets you manage the images captured using the DA. Unfortunately, this app crashes my TX if I try to open more than one image with it. You must set the preferences for HRCaptDA with it, but beyond that you can forget about it. I have it setup so it saves all it’s screenshots to my card in .bmp format. This is not great since most forums and the like require either jpg or gif format. To set up storing the images on your card, in the file manager part of this – HrCaptDM – use the drop down menu in the upper right corner to select MS (Memory Stick, but this works for an SD card) instead of CLIE (which puts the file in main memory).
Then use the menu option “Saves to MS Setting…” to choose the format of the image file, ie BMP or BMP 24BIT. After you do this, images will be stored in /Palm/PROGRAMS/HrCapt on the SD card. Now you are good to go! Other than the image viewing causing crashes on my TX , it works very well. I just don’t use the DM app to do anything other than set the preferences.
You can get HRCapt from this Japanese URL, just click on the link at the top of the page – it downloads the english version:
http://www.excite.co.jp/world/english/web/(…)&wb_lp=JAEN&wb_dis=2&wb_co=excitejapan
ScreenShot5 is a shareware app from LinkeSoft. You can configure it to launch from any hard button and you can configure a delay time as well. One can also set it to auto repeat every set number of seconds , beep on taking a screenshot, take fullscreen or not (DIA and statusbar included or not). You can easily view your captures from within the app and export them to your card with a base name. You can also choose the format you wish to export in (jpg, bmp, gif), and the directory on your card to which you wish to export. For instance, if you have 3 images and use the base name “test” and export as jpg, your card will contain test.jpg, test0000.jpg, test0002.jpg. If you have already used that base name, it starts numbering from where it left off.
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Previous screen shots were all taken with Screenshot in fullscreen mode, the one on the right was
taken with the fullscreen box unchecked (Notice that it doesn’t show the DIA and statusbar):
You can get ScreenShot5 from LinkeSoft for $15 USD here:
http://linkesoft.com/screenshot/order.html
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GSPDA’s M70 is a pretty cool phone – but, unfortunately, none of the major accessory retailers stock any products for it. While a screen protector can easily be made by cutting a T3,.. one to size; finding a hard case is more difficult. However, leaving an unnamed abc texte employee alone with my case collection ended with her finding a suitable case for her master(I had it for about a year, but forgot about it):
The manufacturer of the case is a small German company known as FreaQs, the case shown in the example above is a SteQzwo for a Treo 680. The case’s color can be customized in wide ranges – the images below show one of the stock colors:
Last but not least, here are two pictures of the M70 in the case:
Even though the company currently does not have an English web site(order per email), the price of less than 40€ definitely is a worthwhile investment in keeping your M70 safe!
The code below has worked well on all handhelds I ever put my paws on – but failed miserably on the simulator:
case frmOpenEvent:
createLVL();
FrmDrawForm(pForm);
StrCopy(vars.msg1,"Action!!");
vars.msg1_framestolive=MSG_LIFETIME;
lasttic=TimGetTicks();
FrmSetFocus(pForm,FrmGetObjectIndex(pForm,FldShadow)); //allows GSPDA T9 keys to function
handled = true;
break;
The simulator gave an alert along the lines of “Invalid insertion point” – WTF?
The alert text above is a classic example for a completely unrelated error message – the reason for the alert is simple: the text field FldShadow is not high enough for the text it should contain. Just increase the height of the field – and the fatal alert is gone for good!
As of February 11th, ACCESS has taken down the old ADN located at http://access-company.com/developers. The site, which previously hosted everything from the PalmOS Developer Suite, to the knowledge base, to the creator ID database has been replaced by the new ACCESS developer network at http://accessdevnet.com.
ACCESS writes:
The newly created ACCESS Developer Network Portal is a community-driven website designed to stimulate development of mobile applications for ALP. In addition to technical tools and documentation, ADN provides new social networking features to facilitate developer community interaction via discussion forums and feedback mechanisms that include a bug tracking and feature request system.
Upon further inspection of the new site, the forums do not, as previously, link to the palm-dev-forum, which is mirrored as NNTP, email and via lyris, but they link to a new FireBoard Powered web forum. There is no mention of this on the palm-dev-forum and, hopefully, the FireBoard one will not become the primary board. There are, however, over 1400 registered users on the new forums, so there may be some data imported from the palm-dev-forum, but I cannot figure out how to log in, and, as I’ve just tested with a post to the email forum, the two are not mirrored!
More information will come as we dig it up, folks!
By good luck and ill fortune, we were recently given 5 minutes of time with a Motorola A780 “Ming” – one of the first Linux touchscreen phones ever. Mobile Linux didn’t grow much in the last years…was it the Ming’s fault?
Size-wise, the machine is very similar to Nokia’s N71:
Motorola chose a very interesting concept in order to make the phone usable without a stylus. The keys are on the outside of the flip – if the lid is closed, the phone behaves like a regular phone:
The user interface has a ‘japanese’ touch, but worked very well. The phone’s home screen has two bars that allow quick access to a few applications.
When a third-party application is fired up(I was shown Picsel Viewer), the bars remain on top(allowing instant access to important phone apps):
The device that we were given was an early engineering sample, but nevertheless seemed very stable and well-built:
In the end, the A780 is a very impressive touchscreen phone…especially given its age. Mobile Linux has been capable to power a decent phone on 2004’s hardware(aka max. 200MhZ CPU) – if Google can stay as effective, I predict that Android will have no issues…
When I first got my claws onto this tome in 2006, I was not too amused…a book about interfaces. WTF? However, recent projects made me value the beauty of this coding concept more and more…can the book stack up?
Ken Pugh’s book is divided into three parts, which each contain a few chapters. The first part is called “All about interfaces” – and the Nomen est Omen rule really holds here. After being introduced into the concept of interfaces, the book looks at the different kinds of interfaces available.
Each interface type is illustrated with ‘real-world’ examples and a pro/contra list – choosing the right one is easy with this book. Of course, a look at interface programming techniques and their benefits/drawbacks.
The second part of the book is rather short, and looks at the development process required when working with interfaces.
‘Working’ systems are presented in part 3 of the book. I never cared much for working examples, and thus just skimmed this part of the book.
Last but not least, an appendix looks at ‘document’ formats for communicating across interfaces. Custom document formats are covered along XML breeds – nothing omitted here…
As usual for O’Reilly, Ken Pugh did an excellent job. The book is easy to read even for a person who’s not a native speaker; graphics illustrate key concepts. Even though many of the code samples are in Java, I had no problems understanding them(being a C/VB man).
In the end, everyone who has a faible for books about software design should definitely give this 20$ book a chance. It provides a very detailed look at all things interface – once you have seen all that interfaces can do for you, you’ll wonder about how you managed to go without them before…
After months of tedious work, I am proud to tell you that I finally did find the “bug” that prevented AutoSync from working on Treo handhelds. Cutting a long story short – the device did not update the SysBatteryInfo status cache before broadcasting the dock/undock notification. However, a workaround has been found – and I am proud to present you the first-ever public beta with Treo support.
It can now do the following:
Please download the application from here and let us know how it went!
Last time we talked about converting files between different formats on your computer with the excellent Zamzar, but what about opening archives directly on board your device? There is nothing more frustrating, in my opinion, than not being able to open certain archives on your device. For the most common archive format – ZIP – I recommend the versatile Resco Explorer, which handles these with ease. But what if you need to open one of the less common archive formats, like RAR for example? Well until now you were out of luck; your only option was to use the MobileRAR Java Midlet that could run inside the IBM JVM which Palm no longer offers for download, and even then it was horribly unreliable. Any file over 5KB it would either spit out and not unpack at all, or it would corrupt it – not something I would want to rely on.
But once again we turn to an online source to help us out. Just the other day I came across a website called WobZip and it claims to allow you to decompress a whole host files online, including 7z, ZIP, GZIP, TAR, RAR, and CAB, just to name a few. It clearly said that it is still under development and may not be the most reliable, but it performed flawlessly in my tests. But the best part is that it can be used directly from within Blazer (you need either PalmOne Files installed or maybe TreoOfflineViewer), NetFront and most other Palm Browsers (obviously, if you were on a PC, you could just use something like 7ZIP…). I may not trust it with really important stuff, but for normal things, it has worked great.
What do you think?
ZDNet’s blog “The Mobile Gadgeteer” links to a video showing StyleTap running on Apple’s iPhone. According to the author, the experimental version already runs fast.
StyleTap makes it possible to run Palm OS applications on different other mobile platforms. At the moment, there is a version for Windows Mobile availible. Especially former Palm OS users which now have a Windows Mobile smartphone often have StyleTap so that they can use their old programs.
At present there are few native iPhone applications availible (but many thousands are availible for Palm OS or Windows Mobile), so StyleTap for the iPhone also means that users can run almost every kind of software on their iPhone.
On StyleTap’s FAQ, the developers say that they might release versions for the iPhone, Symbian OS and also forGoogle’s Android.
Thanks to Alphasmart User for the link!
Now that the AT&T Centro has been out for a few days, the first analysts based in the US have begun to post their reviews. Here’s a quick roundup:
The boys at TreoCentral’s have already completed their review of the new box(they probably had it for quite some time, but were bound by a site-wide NDA…) – in short, they claim “little to no improvement” over the Treo 680…
MobileTechReview also has a small review – nothing really impressive to see here.
Last but not least, Engadget Mobile has posted an unboxing gallery containing a few pics of the Centro’s box and what it contains.
P.S. The German Palm folks will send our box soon – it’ll be an unlocked GSM one though!
When the Asus eeePC hit the road, everybody forgot about Nicholas Negroponte’s XO laptop – everybody except for the TamsPalm team. I have been able to track one down in the MetaLab – here’s a quick first-impressions ‘review’.
First of all, here is a size comparison picture next to a Treo 680 – one can clearly see how much space was wasted on the handle:
The XO can be used as ‘tablet’ or ‘laptop’ – as it does not have a touchscreen, the tablet mode is mostly useless except for things like ebook readng:
The keyboard is of chiclet type, and has dedicated ’slider’ hard keys for things like brightness and volume. The antennas at the side of the device can be flipped up to reveal various ports:
An SD card reader is integrated into the bottom of the screen unit:
The screen of the machine is impressive – if the backlight is turned on, colors are visible. Once the ambient light is stronger than the internal light, the screen becomes monochrome:
As for the operating system of the XO – it has no similarities to any other user interface I have never seen before. It is based around two tabs:
Network tab
The network tab displays all WiFi networks that are in range. The fuller the ball, the stronger the signal!
App tab
The symbol in the middle symbolizes your machine – each icon around it is a currently-running application that can be brought forward with a click. The bar at the bottom contains all applications installed on the machine…a quick click and the app boots up(after 15secs or so):
Applications are based on a ribbon-like hub-and-spoke concept. You click the ribbons at the top, and the menu bar changes to reflect the new options:
In the end, the XO definitely is an innovative machine – literally every piece of the device contains at least one thing never seen before.So far, so good…but: the UI is cumbersome to use, and the case is simply too big. The touchpad was very unsatisfying…and the lack of business applications is the final straw that lays the camel flat. Fingers off if you want more than a toy – the eeePC definitely is more useful.
Thank you to Daniel Fuhry for letting me use the machine for a few minutes
Palm’s Centro is now officially available from AT&T – in the funky white/green scheme shown below:
The device is sold for 199$ with a two-year contract; a 100$ mail-in rebate brings the box down to 100$. Gizmondo reports that a black version will follow in a month’s time.
Further reading:
AT&T’s product page
