.FLYINGHEAD REAL USERS
.TITLE Great add-on software for your PalmPilot
.OTHER
.SUMMARY What’s the best software for your PalmPilot? Of course, everyone has their own opinion. In this fun article, Contributing Editor Bob Freud shares his top picks for great add-ons.
.AUTHOR Bob Freud
It seems to me that PalmPilot users are divided into two camps: those who use the thing right out of the box, as is, and those who scour the Net almost daily in search of the latest killer PalmPilot apps. Even if you did no more than use the built-in applications that come with 3Com’s PalmPilot, you would still have an incredibly useful tool, far cooler and more utilitarian than any of the present crop of WinCE (remember that is pronounced "wince") PalmPilot wannabes.
Yet the number of commercial, freeware and shareware programs for the PalmPilot has passed the 700 program mark, so there is quite a range of third-party software to choose from. In this article, I’ll suggest which programs you simply have to have and also point out a couple of great ones that you might have missed.
A couple of baseline criteria have influenced my selection. The primary factor is that I have included no software, no matter how cool, which regularly causes my PalmPilot to crash and burn. Yes, Virginia, there are programs out there in eternal betaland which once installed cause me to either quickly reach for last month’s article by Chris Brown on how to recover from PalmPilot data disasters or to reach for a paperclip and perform the dreaded hard reset ("Recovering lost PalmPilot data").
I’ve written it before and I’ll write it again: back up your PalmPilot. Even the best intended software writers may occasionally release something which is, shall we say, a couple of releases shy of being ready to being installed on my worst enemy’s machine, much less mine. Translation: PalmPilot software often has an incredibly short development time; the developer has no way of knowing precisely what’s on your beloved PalmPilot. New programs (even non-beta versions) sometimes render PalmPilots ready for a hard reset. You therefore ought to HotSync regularly and backup stuff that you can’t afford to lose! End of sermon.
As you read this article, you will notice that there’s only one game on this list. I will admit it. I am game-impaired. Aside from Solitaire on Windows and Zork on any platform, I’m not a games guy. What are your top ten must-have games? Why not post them on the PowerBoard discussion group? If you want to do that, just click on the link at the end of this article and talk about games to your heart’s content.
.H1 The programs you gotta have
There are just some programs I can’t live without. Some are free and the others are inexpensive.
.H2 Aportis Doc
Aportis Doc (formerly Doc) is a document reader for the PalmPilot. Rick Bram, who actually has a day job, created this masterpiece. With it, you can read documents far longer than those that the built-in Memo Pad application will allow you to use. Gone for me are the days of carrying around a paperback in case I get trapped someplace without a book. Now , as shown in Figure A, Aportis Doc lets me always have something interesting to read. There are many documents already formatted for Aportis Doc format. A great source for these is the Lending Library at http://www.macduff.net/. Aportis Doc enthusiasts have also created a web ring at http://www.pilotlibrary.org/webring.html that lists an additional 20 sites with texts you can read in Aportis Doc. And the PilotNewspaperDaily at http://mullara.met.unimelb.edu.au:8080/cgi-bin/pilotnews.cgi will let you create a newspaper customized to your individual reading preferences. They can even email it to you on a daily basis.
.H1 Want to create your own text files formatted for Aportis Doc?
Then you will need the appropriate Windows or Mac flavor of the MakeDoc utility.You can get this program on the Aportis Com site at http://www.aportis.com/resources/makedocutilities.html.
.FIG A Aportis Doc let’s me carry an entire novel around on my PalmPilot and still have room.
.H2 LaunchPad
This program will probably make its way onto almost everybody’s PalmPilot eventually. I resisted it for quite a while. I thought that the folks at 3Com had done a wonderful job of enabling me to access my programs in user-friendly way. But once I saw how easily LaunchPad would let me organize my PalmPilot menu screen into several screens with groups of related applications, I was hooked. When you start using LaunchPad you begin with applications, games, and utility windows, as shown in Figure B, and you can add your more categories. This program turned a good a good user interface into a great user interface. And it is available in Dutch and Hungarian!
.FIG B Here’s my PalmPilot organized with LaunchPad.
.H2 Image Viewer
This program allows you to carry bitmapped images (or as the non-computer world calls them, pictures) on your PalmPilot. This is remarkably handy for carrying around maps, pictures of your loved ones and or any of the growing collection of ImageViewer format files available. For a particulary enlightening and well-written review [if he does say so himself! –DG] of this program see my article ("Displaying pictures on your PalmPilot") in the February issue of PalmPower. For more information on this program which allows you to carry bitmapped images (pictures on your PalmPilot).
.H2 DinkyPad
No matter how good you get at Graffiti, the handwriting input system the PalmPilot implements brilliantly, you will still want to be able to jot down a quick note and a drawing from time to time. You will need a drawing program in your PalmPilot arsenal. In fact, it is surprising that this particular piece of software was not built into the operating system. The choice between DinkyPad and TealPaint for a drawing program is a difficult one to make. There are good reasons for having both, but if I could only load one I would choose DinkyPad. TealPaint has the more sophisticated set of drawing tools and a wonderful screen capture utility, (see "Capturing PalmPilot screenshots" in the PalmPower February 1998 issue), but DinkyPad has one important feature I frequently use: a space at the bottom of a drawing to transcribe into Graffiti whatever garbled message or phone number I have written. Yes, TealPaint does have a spot in its menu for adding notes, but DinkyPad lets me do this without switching back and forth between screens. And besides, Doc and DinkyPad were the first two add on applications I installed in my early days of PalmPiloteering (early Fall 1997), so I have a certain nostalgia for it. If you are going to need the ability to do screen captures of PalmPilot applications for writing or training however, the screen capture utility of TealPaint is a wonderfully easy solution.
.H2 HackMaster
I’ll admit it. I was skeptical about this one to, since it patches the PalmPilot operating system in ways that its creators had not intended. Mac users will be familiar with extension manager, which allows the user to choose which extensions to the operating system you choose to install, and in which order you wish to install them. HackMaster does essentially this, and it has never caused a problem on my machine, but it has helped me locate problems. More importantly, there are many cool programs, known as "hacks" which extended the functionality of the PalmPilot operating system which require HackMaster to run. We owe Edward Keyes, the author of HackMaster, big time for this one. Thanks, Ed!
Favorite "hacks" of mine include the following:
.H3 AppHack
AppHack lets you redefine which programs the four hardware buttons will launch. With two button sequences you can choose from up to 24 different programs to launch, but this seems like overkill to me. [I love it and use it all the time. –DG]
.H3 BatteryHack
BatteryHack provides you with a digital display of how much battery power you have left.
.H3 CorrectHack
CorrectHack, allows you to set up a list of abbreviations to automatically change. For those of us who write "teh" but mean "the" this can be a great timesaver. Think of these as being automatically inserted shortcuts. (For more on shortcuts, (see "Maximize your Graffiti with shortcuts" in the January issue of PalmPower).
.H3 MenuHack
You need this one. With MenuHack installed you can activate an applications menu by tapping on the title bar, instead of having to use the silkscreened menu button. Using this made menus seem much more intuitive to me.
.H3 SelectHack
SelectHack enabled me to select a word by double tapping on it and a paragraph by triple tapping.
.H1 Non-essential but cool software
So now you know what I can’t live without. In the next few sections, I’ll tell you about some not-quite-essential goodies.
.H1 Memo2Web
I love this program (although as people who know me will contest, I love anything that will convert something else into Web format). Memo2Web is a Windows 95 and 3.1 program which will take your collection of Memo Pad files and turns them into a web page. You have freedom to choose which Memo Pad categories you want to include, as shown in Figure C.
If you want to get creative, you can add your own HTML code or specify a picture for a background. Doug Case, the creator of Memo2Web, has also written Book2Web, a program which will turn your address book into an HTML file.
.FIGPAIR C I’m going to create a web page using my Business and Applications PalmPilot Memo Pad categories.
.H2 Doktor Badura
I couldn’t believe this one when I first saw it. Doktor Badura, shown in Figures D and E, is an adventure game with very cool animation. It also has a real live soundtrack! Although only the introduction and tutorial are available right now, this one definitely extends the limits of the PalmPilot. If you have ever played Zork, this is Zork with animation on your PalmPilot!
.FIG D Animated games on the PalmPilot: is this cool or what?
.FIG E Your PalmPilot is your castle!
On a comparative note, check out what Hong Kong Piloteers consider to be the ten essential PalmPilot programs to have at Peter Yiu’s 10 Most Widely Used Pilot Softwares for Hong Kong Piloteers (http://www.iohk.com/UserPages/pyiu/pilot/top10.htm). Please note that Hong Kong Piloteers have had the good taste and keen eye to list PalmPower as one of their 10 Most Interesting PalmPilot Sites (http://www.iohk.com/UserPages/pyiu/pilot/sites.htm). Another site I’ve only recently discovered is EuroCool. This site keeps a list of the programs that have most recently been downloaded.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product Availability
Aportis Doc is available at http://www.aportis.com
DinkyPad is available at http://www.daggerware.com/dinkypad.htm
HackMaster is available at http://www.daggerware.com/hackmstr.htm
LaunchPad is available at http://www.nwlink.com/~emilyk/LaunchPad/
TealPaint is available at http://www.tealpoint.com/
Doktor Badura is available at http://www.castrop-rauxel.netsurf.de/homepages/daniel.springwald/doktor_e.html
Memo2Web is available at http://www.interactive.net/~dccase/pilot/pilot.htm
HackMaster is available at http://www.daggerware.com/mischack.htm
AppHack is available at http://www.daggerware.com/apphack.htm
BatteryControl is available at http://www.dovcom.com/
CorrectHack is available at http://www.dovcom.com/
MenuHack is available at http://www.daggerware.com/mischack.htm
SelectHack is available at http://www.mindspring.com/~jetton/pilot/index.html
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
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