TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

Finally, the TamsPalm team managed to relaunch PalmWiki, our Palm OS information database. A Wiki enables every visitor to edit pages, so the whole Palm community can help creating this database.

About two years ago, when TamsPalm moved to another server, the Wiki database and all backups were lost. Luckily, Google’s Cache and Archive.org had some of the old pages still availible. But as this sites only have HTML code which needs to be converted to MediaWiki code, the import of old data needs some time. But some pages (main page, software, hardware, …) are already present and the Wiki is ready to be used again.

The new URL is:

http://palmwiki.tamoggemon.com/en

This is just a quick hit to any members of the ACCESS Palm-Dev-Forum subscribed by email.
My inbox has been hit with 500 “new” messages from the palm-dev forum dating back to September 2000.

I suggest that all users who subscribe via email and have a limited inbox* temporarily unsubscribe from email IMMEDIATLY until this issue can be sorted out.

I will do my best to let you know when this issue is fixed (ie, my inbox is done being flooded)

*If you want over six gigabytes of storage, filters and loads of useful crap, get a gmail account ! My GMail is currently automatically archiving the “new” palm-dev forum posts.

As some of you may know, mobile game producer PDAMill stopped developing and supporting their Palm OS games early last year and took them off the market. Recently though, they posted this on their website:

Several years ago, we developed many of our great titles for the Palm OS platform. However, in February of 2007 the decision to stop development for the Palm platform was made and our products were then discontinued.

Until now, all of these titles were only available to customers who had purchased the games in the past. Due to an incredibly high demand, we have now released all of our past Palm titles for FREE!

Catch the details and download the games for Free here on PDAMills website.

Thanks to Magellan at Brighthand for the tip.

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?

Austrian wireless carriers have battled one another for a long time; causing steep price droops and rock-bottom-cheap plans. Unfortunately, as a side effect, shop clerks get less and less skilled. Readers recently reported me loads of horor stories about T-Mobile Austria…time to print them out.

Availability whac-a-mole
T-Mobile Austria offers special contracts to members of the press - these are clearly advertised on the web.

However, shop folk knew about 20% of the available options - wonderful… . A request to talk with the supervisor was ignored.

Contract whac-a-mole

The friendly guy above has sold yours truly bread and groceries for like 5 years now. In fact, his uptime is actually higher than mine - nevertheless, he experienced a lovely game of whac-a-mole at T-Mobile’s.

When porting his age-old tele.ring contract to T-Mobile(same mother company), the company requested 5 different credit checks. And no, they didn’t request them on block - but rather piece-per-piece. So…he ran to the shop five times…in vain.

Additionally, three clerks independently told him wrong information about included free minutes - they claimed 1000 free minutes for each competitor network, but the plan offers only 1000 for all of them combined.

Data whac-a-mole
Essentially a copy of what was written above, except that it happened a year ago. Shop guy told me I had 500MB free…but I had only 250. Cool!

Service outage? I don’t care!
While T-Mobile usually is reliable, outages truly strike you hard. I once had a GPRS outage at 2400 night and called a hotline. The conversation was approx. like this:

Me: You have an outage
CC rep: Call tomorrow
Me: Mate, listen up - this is a SERVICE OUTAGE!
CC rep: I don’t care

*click*

In the end, low rates benefit everyone - but they should IMHO not be financed on the expense of customer care. The examples above could have caused gigantic issues to the affected folks…something that definitely should not happen…ever…

What’s your personal carrier peeves?

P.S. I forwarded this post to T-Mobile’s press department - let’s see what they say in response!

In my opinion, one of the biggest hassles in the computer world is all of the different file formats for everything. Something we always have to consider when taking files with us from our computer on our mobile device is “does my mobile device support this format”? As it goes, mobile devices usually don’t support nearly the amount of formats our desktop computers do, so to accomplish compatibility, we often have to do file conversions. Depending on the original format and your target format, conversion can be as easy as re-saving something off or much more complicated. And sometimes our computers can’t even convert the files without the help of third party software, that yes, you must install. Fortunately there are other options. A while back I found an online file converter at Zamzar.com that I’ve been extremely pleased with. It supports a wide variety of formats, including the ever elusive flv one (Yes, you can convert YouTUBE videos), and works quite nicely. Although you do have to input your Email address so they can email you the link to your converted document when it is finished, I’ve never had any problems with SPAM or such. For me, Zamzar has been a valuable tool in combating format incompatibilities, and I highly recommend it.

Tell us what you think!

Today I’m pleased to announce that I am able to release Version 1 of my OpenMoko Theme Project based on the look of the Open Source OpenMoko Project. As some of you may know by reading this post here at TamsPalm or by following my threads at both 1src and Brighthand, I’ve been working on this project for over three months. There may well be bugs/glitches, as this is my first project of this magnitude, but I can assure you all the skins/themes are working perfectly on my Palm TX. Included in this package are skins for:

• AppIcon
• AppShelf
• IconPlus
• MySkin/Kbd
• PalmRevolt
• PictureLogin

This theme is 100% free to use, distribute and modify. Looking back this was a huge project which entailed a great deal of work, but in the end was a labor of love. If you enjoy using this theme package and wish to make a small donation to offset its development costs, please refer to the ReadMe! document contained within the ZIP archive for more information. You can download the package either at 1src’s Freeware Section or via this direct link!

Thank you.

__________________

Best Regards,

Brent Chiodo

I’ve been a long time user of TeikeiDA, FreePadDA’s sister application, but recently I downloaded FreePadDA in the hope it would be better than TeikeiDA. When I first starting using Teikei, I used it mostly for Web Logins in Blazer and unimportant passwords, but more recently I started using it for Web Development. I could keep it preprogrammed with common HTML tags, then just invoke them into the doc I’m creating/editing. Here is a screenshot of my Teikei memo entry (if you want to find how to input different commands in Teikei or FreePad, there are many tutorials available online).

I soon found the number of categories (or columns) to few, and really wondered why the developer didn’t extend the form all the way to the left of the screen.

I was pleasantly surprised to see FreePad utilize the whole screen, and thus add two more columns. I was also intrigued by the new interface, where instead of tapping on the screen to paste that text into the underlying text field, you can tap on multiple entries, and it’ll paste it into its own text field, then you have to manually paste it in. This can save launching the DA more than you have to, because you can combine two or more entries before you have to exit i.e. if I want to center align something in an HTML document I can use the <div align=center>This is center aligned</div> tag by first clicking the Div command then the align tag without exiting FreePadDA. But the problem with FreePad, is the interface is not set up for for this kind of use.

With long tag names, the end of the names are cut off and this is very undesirable , there are buttons you don’t need, and a vertical layout is much harder to use than a horizontal one. So to accommodate my seemingly rare use, I totally redesigned the UI to look like this.

It was maybe a one hour job (I did it in between watching football on Sunday night ), and it has allowed me to web develop much faster than I could otherwise.

What do you think?

As we mentioned here, the TamsPalm team is going to be taking on the task of reviewing most of the popular launchers available. This is Part I, where we take a test drive with Propel.

Propel by Iambic, is an alternate launcher for Applications, Memos, Documents, Files and Contacts on your handheld device. After you download and run the installer, you can choose wether to use Standard or Professional version. (This review focuses on the Professional Version).

Clicking the “Yes, let’s go!” button will launch Propel, where it will refresh your data. Unfortunately my device crashed during this process. Upon reboot, Propel says it has crashed, and the problem was with my Memos database, and to check it to make sure there are no problems.

I checked my Memos, and everything seemed to be fine. I even deleted many of the Memos I really didn’t need, hoping that I might delete the one(s) that caused the problem, but that did not fix anything. This was very frustrating, not being able to even get Propel to launch, but we did like that it at least specified where the problem was, instead of just crashing without any error logging (although, we wished it wouldn’t of crashed at all!).

Finally I was able to have a crash-less refresh, so I was able to actually use Propel (I changed the Application that handles Memos from Memo Pad to PsMemo, and that seemed to solve the problem, but I have no idea why)

Launching Applications was a little harder than I would’ve liked, as Propel uses a nonstandard scroll bar, but maybe it was something I just need to get used to. The real killer feature for Treo users is the ability to launch applications by pressing the letter of the app you want to launch. Propel will then show you a list of apps that start with that letter, where you can either navigate to what you want to open with the five-way, or further specify your search by typing in more letters.

Although technically you can also do this by using the on-screen keyboard with your 320×480 Palm PDA, it certainly is not as easy because the keyboard is not always on-screen.

Propel has a bunch of different views that can be used to launch anything from Music to Memos to Contacts, and this worked well.

(Blacked out by me)

Propel has many different options, and this seems sort of overwhelming when you first start using it.

One option that doesn’t seem to be available, is adjusting the font size on a area by area basis, i.e. I personally like the font for the Applications quite small, but everything else larger. When I set the font small, it makes the top tabs really small and hard to press.

Another thing we disliked, was the way to select Application tabs. If you have more categories than one screen width can “fit”, then the only way to get to these other categories is to press the little arrow buttons to the left or right side of the tabs.

The problem is that the arrows change the categories one by one, so I had to press that button about six times to get to my last category. Maybe instead of this, there can be a drop down menu or have the tab area support icons so you don’t overflow one screen, but whatever it is, this needs a little work. Propel also has a nifty little feature called Favorites that allows you to specify Favorites for stuff you access often. For example, you can select some Applications as Favorites and also some Memos, and when you select Favorite Mode everything else will be filtered out, except what you have preselected.

Pros

• Ability to not only launch Applications, but most types of other data too.
• Favorites feature
• Type to search (esp. for Smartphone users)

Cons

• Instability
• Hard-to-use tabbed interface
• Overcomplicated
• Font Size only adjustable on a whole view basis
• Statusbar cannot be taken off-screen in Propel (I know some people like to do this)
• No double column list view to maximize space

In Conclusion

The idea and attempted functionality of Propel is great, make it a “one stop shop” for most of your data on your device, if you will, but the implementation is a little weak. This software attempts to do a lot of things, and some things it does well (like the Favorites), but it really needs a serious overhaul to do them all right. If you’d like to try out Propel, and see if it fits your needs, a free trial can be downloaded here. Unfortunately a TamsPalm Shop discount was not possible for this review, as we normally do, but Propel Professional Edition can still be purchased at full retail price here.

One of the most popular replacement software items people get for their Palm OS device, is a replacement launcher. But the real problem is which one do you get? I mean, there are so many options, each one offering different functionality, different features, ect., it is often hard to choose. This is why we are going to be reviewing some of the more popular launchers, giving you our opinions, and just try to make finding the launcher to fit your needs easier. The first launcher we will be reviewing is Propel - so stay tuned!

Foreward — This is just a guide containing a few hardware mods I’ve seen done over time. I’ve talked with the folks who’ve originally done these mods for more info than their original posts, so hopefully I don’t cause too much chaos

This one focuses on the modifications that can be done to the official Palm hardcase available for the T|X, T|E, T|E2 and the T|T5.

—

– The Magnet Mod –

My quest for the perfect hard case started in May. I was dissatisfied with the state of my T|X’s hard case, and was looking for an alternative. My main problem was that the chintzy little clasp that held the case shut had snapped loose and would not keep my T|X safe. After a bit of discussion, we decided that replacing the clasp with magnets was a viable alternative.

The first step is to drill out the holes. Since I never really figured I’d be doing this sort of post 7 months later, I have no “in progress” shots, sorry :-).

Make sure you choose magnets before you drill the holes so that you don’t end up with a big gaping hole in your case. The best thing I have learned is that if you make the hole a tad bit smaller than your magnets, then slowly file it out with anything fairly sharp (Hell, a small flat-head screwdriver works) you will have a nice snug fit that will never require reglueing.

After you drill the holes (I did four, two on each half of the case) you can drop the magnets in. The best ting to do is use a pair of tweasers and coat the magnet with gorilla glue then you simply wedge the magnets in the holes and you are done!

– Anti Rattle Mod–

“So, uh, Ryan, why do you have pieces of dish towels glued to your case?”

Good question! (I’m sorry, I know that’s bad ) The case is designed just kludgingly enough so that there is a very smaller, probably less than 1mm gap between the T|X and the case lid, just enough to have it rattle around and scuff up the front of the the T|X. Jays333 originally gave me the idea to do this in the above 1src thread, however I didn’t have any of that foam lying around, so I simply cut up a dish towel.

Jays333 did a nice job on his however:

This effectively cancels out any rattling that may occur, keeping your T|X unscathed for years to come.

– Headphone Mod –

So, what else can be done to our T|X cases? Well, I have done a few other things to the case in the time I’ve owned it. When I performed the Magnet Mod I also decided to cut away a hole for the headphones so that the case would latch shut when I was listening to music, rather than mashing up my headphone jack.

The first step is to mark where you want to get the cuts. You can plug in the headphones and put the device in the case so that the headphones are where the cuts will be (at which point, you know where the cuts need to be, or you can wing it with a sharpie cap, like Chris Tengi did.

—

That’s all of the mods I could come up with in regards to the Palm Hardcase. Next time we will take a look at alternatives to the Palm Cradle: the design, construction and customisation of our own Cradle kit!

Also, if you try any of these mods please note that I cannot be held responsible if your case is permanently damaged! Perform these mods at your own risk! 

A while back Dmitry Grinberg released a small application that would hard reset your device for you, without using the hard buttons. This was released because quite a few devices have/had faulty power buttons that prevent a user from hard resetting their device.

Well, while fooling with my third bricked T|X (Yep, it bricked already) I found that by holding all four power buttons in the right way, you can actually preform a hard reset without using the power button!

The steps are more-or-less as follows:

1. hold all four hard buttons (home, calendar, tasks and web)
2. When the black progress bar on the first screen reaches 100% it should stay until you let go of the buttons.
3. Let go of the buttons and the split second the device switches to the grey palm powered screen reapply the buttons.
4. wait a few seconds and release the buttons. With any luck you will be shown the “Are you sure you wish to erase all data screen.”
5. Press up to complete the hard reset.

Watch a video showing the procedure.

Did this work for you?

Just to clear things up folks, the steps are to be done as it is resetting! ~Ryan

PalmOne Files is an application that debuted on the Tungsten T5 and has been included since then on the Lifedrive and newer Treos. One of the most useful features was the Open File menu option it created in Blazer seen here.

Selecting “Open File” will allow you to browse to the local file you want to open.

Now when we delete PalmOne Files 2.0 from the Lifedrive, and install version 2.1 from the newest Palm smartphone - the Centro - this menu option mysteriously disappears on my TX.

Palm, what happened to it?

If you are like me, then you are spelling impaired, but are there any solutions for this problem on a Palm device? Most of you probably know Documents To Go Premium Edition has a spell checker, but how about something else that is easily accessible in all applications? I use a little-known, not in active development spell checker called Spell5. It is totally Free, and works great. But no, it does not automatically underline every misspelled word like on your desktop, but it does work with the Clipboard in kind of a cool way. It automatically Copies/Pastes to and from the Clipboard (and the Cutpaste5 Clipboard if you have that installed) when you start Spell5, and when you exit it. So to check the spelling of of a word or block of text you would have to do something like this:

Copy to the Clipboard whatever you want to spell check.

Exit your currently running application and launch Spell5. Spell5 will then automatically paste the text from the Clipboard into its text field.

Where you can then hit the “Check” button to check the spelling. It will then check the spelling by showing the misspelled word with a list of correct choices (much like when you right-click a misspelled word in Windows).

Where you can either Replace/Skip/Learn/Cancel the current operation. Once you exit Spell5, it will copy the contents of its text field (the one that you just corrected the spelling of) back to the Clipboard, where you can then paste the correctly spelled text to wherever you need. You may be asking, that I stated a spell checker that was “easily accessible from all applications”, and this didn’t fit those guidelines. Well I myself use a great Shareware Application from Alex Pruss called OnTop that will allow you to launch Applications on top of others, instead of having to exit the currently running program. This works beautifully in conjunction with Spell5 to make spell checking text very easy, but this does not mean you have to have OnTop to use Spell5, it just makes it more convenient.

What do you think?