.KEYWORD teal
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE It’s Teal-lightful: TealPoint products reviewed
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY The top dog in last month’s Editors Choice Awards, at least in terms of the number of products awarded awards (say that three times fast!), was TealPoint Software. TealPoint won three awards for TealPaint, TealScript, and TealMeal. Since the small shareware company offers a wide variety of cool tools, we asked our very cool contributing editor, Claire Pieterek, to look at all of TealPoint’s products. In this useful review, Claire examines each of TealPoint’s products and recommends ways you can get the most out of your Palm device.
.AUTHOR Claire Pieterek
TealPoint Software offers a number of highly customizable, useful products to enhance any Palm device user’s productivity. I decided, instead of looking at them one-by-one, to take them all on at once. It’s quite a collection. I found all of the TealPoint products to be stable, easy to use, and clearly documented. The TealPoint products can be divided into two primary categories, applications and hacks. Figure A shows the icons for the various TealPoint applications.
.FIG A These are some of the players in TealPoint’s winning lineup.
One bonus: All of the documentation is available in Doc format, so you can load it and read it on your Palm when you need it.
.H1 Handy Hacks: TealMagnify, TealEcho, TealGlance
TealMagnify, TealEcho, and TealGlance, shown in Figure B, are a trio of handy hacks, all of which require Edward Keyes’ HackMaster to run. (For more information about HackMaster, see Calvin Parker’s article in the April 1998 issue of PalmPower.)
.FIG B The HackMaster control panel, displaying TealPoint’s three handy hacks (and a bunch of my other favorites).
TealMagnify, shown in Figure C, is a boon to Palm users with bifocals or impaired vision. It magnifies a movable window that overlays the screen, or displays the entire screen larger-than-life, toggled simply by the Mode button. Although TealMagnify is invoked by tapping the Find button, it does not impair use of either the built-in Find function or FindHack. You can either double-tap the silk screen Find button, or use the Find button provided on the TealMagnify display.
.FIG C Here’s the TealMagnify screen with the "larger-than-life" display. Tap the Mode button to toggle the two views.
Ever wonder why you’re having problems with certain Graffiti characters? Use TealEcho to display your Graffiti strokes on-screen and find out how your Palm is interpreting that problem character. I found TealEcho a little distracting at first, but quickly got accustomed to seeing the trails. Even for the short time I’ve been using it, TealEcho has helped me use Graffiti with more precision and fewer errors.
For a quick overview of your daily agenda every time you power on your Palm, try TealGlance. TealGlance shows your DateBook and/or To Do List items in a highly customizable format. You can see some of the customization options in Figure D. TealGlance is especially useful for those of us who juggle full personal and professional lives. No more excuses for missing a meeting or forgetting a form!
.FIG D This is the TealGlance configuration panel.
.H1 Useful Utilities: TealInfo, TealLock, TealScript
TealInfo, TealLock, and TealScript are a powerful threesome of useful utilities.
TealInfo, shown in Figure E, is a general-purpose database for that information you know you need, but you’re not sure where to put it or how to keep it. Databases in the TealInfo world are known as "folios". TealPoint offers a Folio page with various types of information ranging from HTML tags to guitar codes to medical lab test reference values. Although folio creation is somewhat more involved than adding info to other TealPoint products, the flexibility and power TealInfo offers make it well worth taking the time to learn.
.FIG E Here’s a handy TealInfo folio with metric to English/English to metric conversion tables.
TealLock, shown in Figure F, provides security that’s better than the application built into PalmOS. For one thing, TealLock can be configured to hide the actual characters you enter when your password is requested. There are also a number of handy ways to increase the likelihood that you’ll protect your Palm, including shortcut-and time-based activation.
.FIG F Here’s the TealLock settings screen.
TealScript lets you modify Graffiti to work your way. See Scott Johnson’s in-depth review of TealScript in the September 1998 issue of PalmPower for further details. Basically, TealScript lets you create your own alternative strokes. It’s somewhat like Jot (which I’ve tried and didn’t find as useful, although other readers swear by it) but in my opinion much better, because it’s trainable to recognize your handwriting. I’m not sure I have the patience to train any device to recognize my terrible handwriting, though! I can always read what I’ve written in Graffiti, and I certainly can’t say that about my handwriting. TealScript won a PalmPower Editors Choice Cool Tools Award for 1998.
.H1 Fun Gadgets: Teal Meal
TealMeal, shown in Figure G, is the answer to that age-old question, "What’s for lunch?" Easily customizable, TealMeal can help you pick a restaurant whether you’re in your hometown or on a business trip. TealPoint offers restaurant databases for the San Francisco Bay Area and other major destinations including Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, London, and Singapore. Still more restaurant databases can be downloaded from Palmtastik.
If your town–like mine–isn’t listed, it’s really easy to create a database. I cut and pasted most of the local free weekly’s restaurant listings into a word processor, edited them to conform to the TealMeal database format, then ran the TXT2MEAL utility. Although my data needs a little tweaking, the basic process for creating and maintaining restaurant databases is easy and well-explained by the documentation. TealPaint won a PalmPower Editors Choice Fun Gadgets Award for 1998.
.FIG G My favorite TealMeal screen, listing most of the Japanese restaurants in Denver.
.H1 Cool Tools: TealDoc, TealPaint
Most of us know TealPaint for its capability of taking screenshots of apps on your Palm so they can be included in articles, documentation, and the like. In fact, I used TealPaint for all of the screenshots accompanying this article. TealPaint is probably the most full-featured Palm device-based graphics software currently available. TealPaint includes multiple line and shape tools, fill patterns, image compression and rotation, and even basic animation. Since I’m drawing-impaired, about the only thing I can think of that I need and TealPaint does not currently offer is a library of smart shapes similar to Visio. This addition would be one more reason not to carry my laptop. TealPaint won a PalmPower Editors Choice Cool Tools Award for 1998.
Every Doc reader has its partisans — there are those who are long-time Palm users maintain that the original is best, those who like another for its ability to rotate the screen, those who prefer freeware, and so forth. TealDoc, shown in Figure H, is a solid product that offers an HTML-like ability to embed bookmarks and graphics within each document. This would be an ideal application for catalogs and other large, illustrated documents we mobile professionals need and don’t want to carry.
.FIG H This is the TealDoc manual, displayed using TealDoc.
All-in-all, the TealPoint products are great add-ons to your Palm device.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Visit the TealPoint web site at http://www.tealpoint.com.
HackMaster can be found at http://www.daggerware.com.
FindHack is located at http://w3.teaser.fr/~fpillet/pilot/index.html.
Find Palmtastik at http://www.palmtastik.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6c9ee
