Since it looks like new iPods won’t be available until January 2007, I started thinking about getting a Palm that would act as a PDA (currently I have a Palm m515), but could also store some songs and have wifi access to the internet. The Palm TX fits the bill pretty nicely with 128 MB of RAM and a SD card slot. I could get a 1 GB SD card for $29 which would hold 250 songs or about 20 CD’s. I still think the ideal device would be a wifi PDA with a big hard drive that could play movies on a screen larger than an iPod’s. I started putting together a timeline like I did with the iPod to get a picture of the upgrade schedule. The TX was introduced last October, so it is already kind of old. I started thinking that maybe Palm would introduce an upgraded model this October. So I still may end up waiting (not a big deal since both my iPod and Palm work fine right now). I thought briefly about a Blackberry which combines a phone and PDA, but I don’t mind carrying a phone and PDA (though the TX is larger than the m515).
Category: Palm
New Palm Program
A year or two ago I was trying to learn to write programs for the Palm. I tried this when I first got the Palm and quickly realized that the Palm was very difficult for a non-programmer to write for without spending a bunch of money on development software. But they had a free C compiler and other tools which I made almost no progress on.
Later I got a book on the Palm that had a trial version of some development software. This made things a lot easier, but the trial version didn’t let you write anything complex. Later still I downloaded another development package called CASLsoft. With one of those two programs I wrote a Vertical Curve program that I have had ever since (but I lost the source code). That’s a good program for me to write when I’m learning because it has a couple of variables and IF-THEN’s and needs input and output.
Last week I decided to make VCurve 1.0 available on Palm Gear. I already had a developer account from when I wrote MemoParser 1.0, so it was easy to do. So far 47 people have downloaded it.
Memoparser (cont.)
It’s been one year since I wrote Memoparser and I get an occasional hit on its web page and 187 have downloaded it at Palm Gear. I did a search for “memoparser” and found one guy’s blog entry that said “Memoparser 1.0 sounds interesting”. That’s pretty good, I think. The guy that wrote Palm2iPod still hasn’t come up with a new version that exports memos so I’m glad I wrote the program.
However, I have to admit that I don’t generally use the notes on the iPod since I usually carry my Palm with me.
I still think the perfect MP3 player would be a Palm with a 20 GB hard drive. And it would need some kind of open source community to keep it constantly updated and configurable, unlike the iPod.
Unfortunately, I think Palms and other non-wireless (wireful? it still has no wires) PDA’s are dinosaurs. I was at Best Buy and they had maybe 3′ of shelf space for PDA’s and accessories. I think cell phones are doing more and more but I don’t really want a cell phone. I think eventually people will make fun of me for using an antiquated wireful Palm, like it’s a slide rule or something.
Palming the Internet
A few years ago our office bought 10 Palm V’s. Over the years any number of horrible things have happened to them. Recently one was sat on breaking the screen. Another, I just found out, hasn’t been used in many months because “it doesn’t work right”. I asked to take a look at it. One problem I noticed pretty quickly was that if you do a soft reset the digitizer loses its calibration and you’ll never be able to recover without a hard reset which will open with the digitizer calibration (and wipe out everything).
So I searched on the internet and found a neat piece of (free!) software called DigiFix from www.copera.com that will reset your digitizer to your settings on a soft reset and can also be assigned to a hard key so that it is always available if something else goes wrong (similar thing could be done by assigning Welcome to a hard button, but this recovers settings automatically).
Another problem seems to be the battery won’t hold a charge. So I need a new battery but it is sealed inside the case. I don’t want to pay to do this, but if I could transfer the good battery in the Palm with the broken screen to the one with the bad battery so I go looking for that and find detailed instructions and pictures!
And just as a bonus, I find a place that will sell an original hard case for a Palm V/Vx for only $5 and a stylus that converts to a pen for $5 (plus $4 shipping.)