.KEYWORD mypalm
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE A look at the MyPalm portal
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY With the MyPalm portal, Palm is closing the loop between Internet-based calendar services and personal information devices. In his first article on the MyPalm portal, Ray Rischpater begins to take a look at a typical session, describing each of the major parts of the MyPalm portal in detail.
.AUTHOR Ray Rischpater
With Palm’s acquisition of AnyDay over a year ago in May of 2000, Palm began their efforts to close the loop between Internet-based calendar services and personal information devices. The result, the MyPalm portal at http://my.palm.com, is an Internet portal with services that will help many of you get more from your Palm OS handhelds using the Internet.
.H1 Introducing the MyPalm portal
The MyPalm portal lets you sign up for a free Web account to manage an online calendar, to do list, and contact list. The portal itself includes several additional features, such as the ability to include other members into groups that share calendars, an RSVP feature that lets you track invitees to a meeting or other event, and the ability to publish calendars to password-protected or open Web sites outside of the MyPalm user base for others on the Web to see. You can enter the information for the calendar, to do list, and contact list on the Web site, or on your Palm OS handheld; a HotSync conduit lets you synchronize between the MyPalm portal and your Palm OS handheld. Let’s take a look at a typical session and each of the major parts of the MyPalm portal in detail.
.H1 Logging in
Before using MyPalm, you must first log in. Logging in is easy; you simply navigate to either http://www.palm.net or http://my.palm.com, pictured in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A Here’s the MyPalm portal login.
From here, you can sign up for a new account, log in to your existing account, or access your Palm.net account to manage your Palm VII wireless account. Of course, you don’t need a Palm VII to use the MyPalm portal. As you log on, you can select either a standard connection, or a secure SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) connection, giving you additional confidence that the information you’re exchanging with the MyPalm portal is safe while in transit.
The first time you use MyPalm, you must register and complete a quick questionnaire to personalize the service; as a licensee of TRUSTe (at http://www.truste.org), Palm was able to make the form less onerous than many I’ve seen. Once you register, you can just use the login name you pick and simply log on.
It’s hard to find fault with a process as simple as logging on, but one thing bothers me about MyPalm’s login procedure. It seems awkward for you to select the portal or the wireless service with a checkbox. It reminds me of a crusty old espresso machine we had at a startup I worked at ten years ago; one of us brought it in from our garage before we could afford any better. When the original switch failed, one of us ran out to Radio Shack and bought a big toggle switch and stuck it on the front, rather than spending the hundred bucks for a new espresso machine.
While you can access the MyPalm calendar service wirelessly with your Palm VII, there’s little else you can do between the two. In fact, you need two separate accounts to do anything with the MyPalm service, (such as accessing your calendar), leaving me with the distinct impression that MyPalm and the older Palm.net service are still two different services.
.H1 Calendar
On the topic of calendars, Figure B shows a representative day view of my calendar.
.FIGPAIR B Here’s the MyPalm portal Calendar Day view.
As a freelance author between projects, I’m blessed with an emptier calendar than most. My To Do list this summer, however, is quite intimidating! Other views, such as the month view, shown in Figure C, are similar.
.FIGPAIR C Here’s the MyPalm portal Calendar Month view.
Views such as these look very much like those on the Palm handheld, only they take advantage of the much greater space a desktop screen affords. In fact, the MyPalm calendar actually supports several different types of calendar items, including all-day appointments (shown with a sun and moon icon), reminders (shown with a bell icon), to do items (shown with a check mark icon), birthdays (shown with a birthday present icon), and anniversaries (shown with a calendar icon).
Clicking on an event-or, for that matter, choosing to add an event-brings up the Edit Event form showing all of an event’s details, as you see in Figure D.
.FIGPAIR D Here’s the MyPalm portal Edit Event form.
For a user fresh from the Palm Date Book application, this form is downright overwhelming. However, the portal’s help is quite good, and once you use it once or twice, it all makes sense.
The top third-Title, Location, Date, and so forth-is much as you’d expect. I’ll discuss the Calendars item in the next section in detail, but suffice it to say here, you can share your event in multiple calendars, such as your own calendar, a group calendar for your family, or a group calendar for your office. The middle third of the form lets you manage other meeting attendees that are members of the MyPalm portal. With this, you can not only track who is attending the appointment, but also look for free time on other people’s calendars if you need to schedule a group meeting. From this part of the form, you can also set meeting reminders, including both reminders within the MyPalm portal and external reminders via email. In the final section of the form, you can set event repetition, just as you can on the Palm handheld.
In using the calendar for over a month, I could find only one true bug. Some repeating appointments (those such as "repeat on the third Wednesday of every month") can’t be assigned directly on the portal, and when they’re synchronized from a Palm OS handheld, they display very oddly on the calendar. Interestingly, as long as you ignore how they’re displayed on your calendar, they continue to display fine on the Palm OS device. Of course, it’s somewhat disconcerting to see some of your regular meetings show up at seemingly random times across your schedule.
Other than that, the calendar appears to work well, but the grouping of items within the event edit and entry form still seems bizarre even after a month of steady use. To me, keeping the basic Palm OS event fields, including Repeat Appointment fields with the basic Event information, at the top of the form would be far more useful.
.H1 Contacts
The Contacts section of the MyPalm portal lists the contacts you enter from your Palm handheld or Web browser. This is a simple no-frills listing by name or email address, as you can see in Figure E.
.FIGPAIR E Here’s my MyPalm contact list.
It’s easy to view, edit, or add a contact. In fact, it’s just like doing it on the Palm handheld. Simply click the contact, and you can see the contact information as shown in Figure F.
.FIGPAIR F Viewing or changing a contact is easy.
Most of these buttons are pretty self-explanatory, but the Map button is keen. By clicking on it, you can see a map of the address for a specific contact.
You can also download a contact from the MyPalm portal as a vCard, the Internet’s standard for contact information exchange. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding upload feature, which would be very useful, given that many email tools let you include vCards as part of your outgoing email signature.
Besides the obvious use for the contacts database (letting you look up a phone number in that unusual case you have access to the Web but not your Palm OS handheld), this contacts database provides an important function: it’s the glue that holds the rest of the portal together. When you schedule an appointment that includes others, invite others to join a group, create an RSVP, or do anything that uses an electronic mail address, you can pick email addresses from your contact database. This, in fact, is the true value of having your contacts on-line at all–integration with the remainder of the service.
.H1 Events
In an interesting twist of on-line calendaring, MyPalm lets you add true events such as sporting events and holidays to your on-line calendar to synchronize with your Palm handheld. Under the Events tab on the toolbar, you’ll find movie schedules, art and entertainment schedules, trade shows, television broadcast schedules, sport schedules, and holidays that you can select and merge with your MyPalm calendar, as you can see in Figure G.
.FIGPAIR G Here’s the MyPalm Events screen.
Of course, once in your MyPalm calendar, you can synchronize these events with your handheld, bringing the information anywhere.
Palm’s done a good job setting up the interface with the portal itself. You simply choose a category and subcategory and add items to your calendar. Once they’re on your calendar, they appear as regular events.
This is a cool idea I’ve wanted to have in a working product of some kind for a long time, and one of the key reasons why I was excited to try out the MyPalm portal in the first place. Oddly, it hasn’t sat as well with me as I thought it would have. I’m not sure if it’s because my interests have changed over the years, or if it’s simply that the idea sounds niftier than it actually is. What I’m slowly learning as I add and remove events from my calendar is that, by and large, these events are either material I know well enough to begin with because it’s something I was already following (say, major holidays, key trade shows, or upcoming art exhibits), or it’s not something I want in my calendar anyway.
Despite my personal disillusionment, I see a lot of potential for this feature, both for Palm in terms of revenue (featured events generating advertising revenue and the like) and for adding additional events, including additional music such as rock concerts, band tours, and other kinds of events. There’s a lot more time-based information that could be slid into this category. Conceptually, it’s quite useful.
.H1 Preferences
Next, Palm includes a small preferences screen. You can change your password, the default view for the calendar, and a few other basic preferences. By and large, MyPalm’s default settings are simple enough that I’ve never changed anything, and frankly, I’d suggest they stick in a change password button and do away with the notion of preferences altogether. To me, it suggests something exciting where I can go in and really tweak around with colors and layouts and backgrounds and such (as you can on other portals), and it’s rather anticlimactic to see four small forms, each with a couple of pull-down menus and checkboxes.
.H1 More to come
In my next article about the MyPalm portal, I’ll go into synchronization, sharing amongst groups, the RSVP function, and the Calendar Publish feature. I’ll also discuss using the MyPalm portal on the road. Stay tuned.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on the MyPalm portal, visit http://my.palm.com.
For more information about Palm computers, visit http://www.palm.com.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ee6f762
