.FLYINGHEAD SOUPING UP YOUR PALMPILOT
.TITLE Third party applications and your PalmPilot
.AUTHOR Calvin O. Parker
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT pp199802cover2.gif
.SUMMARY Soup up your PalmPilot. One of the most useful capabilities of your PalmPilot is it’s ability to run additional software. There are hundreds of programs you can download and try. This important article shows you how to install, organize, and backup your add-on software.
Ok, you’ve got your brand new PalmPilot and you’ve done your homework. You know that there are add-on applications (quite a few, actually) and you’d like to install a few of them on your machine. Looking through the supplied manual, you see that Chapter 11 even talks about Installing Applications. But, what if you want to install more than one application at a time? And, once the application is installed, then what? If the application has some sort of data, is that data backed up? Hopefully, when you’re done reading this article the answer to these questions and more will be clear to you.
.H1 Installing applications
The INSTAPP application that comes with each PalmPilot appears to install PalmPilot applications. However, it only allows you to install one application at a time, right? What if you have a handful of applications that you’d like to install? Let’s take a look at several ways to do this.
INSTAPP doesn’t actually install the application onto your PalmPilot. The HotSync process does the actual installation, with INSTAPP (called InstallApp on the Macintosh) simply setting things up. When you "install" an application using INSTAPP, two things happen:
.BEGIN_STEPS
.STEP A flag is set that tells the HotSync process there are applications to install.
.STEP The application is copied to a directory where the HotSync process will look when it realizes it should be installing applications.
.END_STEPS
Actually, if the HotSync process realizes its supposed to install applications, it will install ALL applications that reside in this directory. What does this mean? Well, if you’ve run INSTAPP once, you can then copy any and all applications to that directory, without having to actually run the INSTAPP program for each one! This could either be done manually, or via the "Send To" Menu (for those using Windows 95).
Of course, a better way to install multiple applications at once is to use one of the many applications that have been written that allow you to do this. I could probably write an entire article listing these and comparing them (and in a future article I probably will). For a list of these applications and brief descriptions, see the Installing Applications question of my FAQ (http://www.pilotfaq.com/tip_03.htm.) For the extremely curious, I use Mark Pierce’s PInstall, a Windows 95 application that allows you to double-click on a .prc or .pdb file to install it. Using PInstall in conjunction with the "Send To" allows installation of multiple applications with ease.
.PAGE
.H1 Organizing applications
Well, now that you’ve got your PalmPilot memory maxed out with all those nifty third-party applications, the built-in Applications Picker is probably starting to get a little unwieldy! Here’s a quick tip: write a letter in the graffiti area and you will jump to the first application that starts with this letter! Sorry, OS 1.x users, this is a feature added in OS 2.x. Of course, this tip doesn’t help you if you’ve got 15 applications that all start with the letter "S", or if you’d like to somehow group applications in some manner. That’s where a third-party applications launcher comes in.
While there are several application launching applications available, most folks use either PAL or LaunchPad (or one of their variations). Both of these applications give you the ability to organize your applications into categories or groups. Each supports viewing by "category" (although implemented quite differently) and both allow you the option of making itself the default application launcher (launches when you press the Application silk-screen button). Figure A shows a side by side comparison of PAL and LaunchPad.
.FIG A PAL and LaunchPad give different "views" on your PalmPilot applications.
QuickLaunch, which is included in the QuickPac suite from Landware is actually just a "souped-up" version of PAL which adds tab support. In this same vein, Launch ‘Em, which is included in the Hi-5 suite from Synergy Solutions is identical to LaunchPad. Finally, the author of AppMan took the source code for LaunchPad and added a "trashcan" icon, which allows you to delete applications without going through the Memory app.
.H1 PAL vs. Launchpad
Let’s look at the basic differences between PAL and LaunchPad.
PAL allows you to define up to 15 categories to "group" your applications in, allowing you to quickly switch from one group to the next by a drop-down list. It also gives you the ability to display your applications as text or icons, and even allows you to change the name displayed in PAL for each application, as shown in Figure B. QuickLaunch adds the ability to display tabs (similar to LaunchPad), that are basically the categories you’ve defined.
.FIG B PAL lets you see more information on each application, as well as re-name what they will appear as in PAL.
LaunchPad (and Launch ‘Em/AppMan) uses a tab-based interface to display the applications on your PalmPilot. Since it quickly rescans your PalmPilot each time it is invoked, this application doesn’t allow you to change the names that are displayed for each application. The tabs and applications in LaunchPad are easily re-organized by dragging and dropping each tab or application from its current location to where you’d like it displayed. As shown in Figure C, tabs in LaunchPad can also be quickly added, renamed, and deleted using menu commands. Although LaunchPad doesn’t offer the ability to display only text application names, you are given the ability to display between two and five columns per page (three is optimal).
.FIG C LaunchPad and AppMan allow easy menu access to the tab organization
functions.
.H1 Application data…is it safe?
Before you spend hours getting your data into that freshly installed application, I’ll bet you’re wondering how the PalmPilot handles backing up data for it. Well, you can rest easy, the HotSync process has provisions to back up your data for you, even if it isn’t contained within one of the built-in applications.
Before I get into specifics about the HotSync process, let me briefly explain what’s going on behind the scenes. Every application on the PalmPilot stores its data in its own "database". Each database on the PalmPilot has a flag that determines whether or not that database will be backed up by the HotSync process. This flag is commonly referred to as the "backup bit." The backup bit is set by the application in question, and most applications will turn it "on" when they perceive that their data has been changed. Interestingly enough, even applications have backup bits; they just aren’t normally set (more on this later).
Files are placed in a subdirectory of your PILOT directory (this is also where your Pilot Desktop program resides). In Windows, if you’ve installed your PILOT directory at the root level, the PILOT directory would be at C:\\PILOT. On the Macintosh, the same folder is called Pilot Desktop 1.0.
Within the PILOT directory (or the Pilot Desktop 1.0 directory) is a directory/folder that looks like a contracted version of your last name and first initial. For example, if your user name is David Gewirtz, the folder is GewirtD and if it’s Denise Amrich, the folder is AmrichD. This is the "user" folder. For simplicity, in this article, we’ll call it "username", so whenever you see a sequence like C:\\PILOT\\USERNAME\\BACKUP, you’ll know to substitute your user folder. So, for example, on Denise’ machine, it would be C:\\PILOT\\AMRICHD\\BACKUP.
When the HotSync process is initiated (normally by pressing the button on the cradle), all of the databases that have their backup bit set will be backed up to the desktop computer, during the backup portion of the process. Most of these will be created as .pdb files and will reside in the X:\\pilot\\username\\backup directory ("drivename:Pilot Desktop 1.0:username:backup" on Macintosh). Each time the HotSync process is run, these files are updated for all databases that have their backup bit set. Earlier versions of HotSync had a few problems and would only backup databases once and/or limited the number of databases backed up. The latest version of HotSync has corrected these problems.
.H1 Errors and resets
Many of the applications that you’ll be installing on your PalmPilot will be applications that haven’t been tested with every combination of hardware and (especially) software that is available for the PalmPilot. Because of this, someone that installs a considerable amount of applications on their PalmPilot is bound to have problems here and there.
Most of these problems will be in the form of errors, which normally manifest themselves as windows with a single box that says something like "Fatal Error" and "MemMgr.c, Line: 834, Invalid handle." These errors normally give you a single button to press to reset the machine. Depending on the severity of the error, this button sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. If you find that this button doesn’t reset your PalmPilot, thenyou’ll have to press the reset button on the back of the PalmPilot. On a rare oc casion, even this reset won’t work, and you’ll have to perform what is called a "hard reset" of your PalmPilot, which will reset the PalmPilot to an "empty" state. As you’ll soon see, this doesn’t mean you’ll lose any of your data, as the PalmPilot routinely backs data up and will restore it on the first HotSync after a hard reset.
For more information on resetting your PalmPilot, refer to my FAQ page about Resetting the PalmPilot, located at http://www.pilotfaq.com/gen_07.htm.
.H1 Backing up and restoring data
The good thing about the way that the HotSync process works is that every time you run a HotSync, you’re backing up all of the data, based on each database’s backup bit setting, on the PalmPilot. What does this mean? Well, if you do have to perform a hard reset or send your PalmPilot away for repairs, restoring that data is easy. Just put the PalmPilot in the cradle and press the HotSync button! The only problem with this is that although the HotSync process backs up the data for third-party applications, it doesn’t back up the applications themselves. So, in the event of a full restore, you’ll have to re-install any applications you’ve installed. To help with this, the HotSync process does install any and all applications and databases found in the X:\\pilot\\username\\backup directory ("drivename:Pilot Desktop 1.0:username:backup" on Macintosh). Using this knowledge, you should see that if you place all of your applications in this directory, they would be restored at the same time that their data is.
.H1 Deleting applications
To delete third-party application from your PalmPilot, go to the Memory application, and tap the "Delete Apps" button. From this screen, shown in Figure D, select the application you’d like to delete and press the "Delete
