Handheld Tech
Sunday, 13. August 2006, 22:14:19
This afternoon, I participated in our church's blood drive. While I was giving blood, I was reading a book on my trusty ol' Palm Tungsten C. The person giving blood next to me noticed what I was doing and started asking me questions as he was a Palm Tungsten X user. That began a 45 minute conversation about handheld computing and how to use PalmOS-based handhelds effectively. I guess I've kind of forgotten how much of a geek I've been over the last 10 years or so when it comes to handheld computing. I still peruse several sites pretty much daily just seeing what's new out there. However, the thing that I was reminded of most vibrantly, is how much I've tweaked and personalized my TC. The gentleman, Dan, that I was speaking with seemed to be rather new to the platform, so I had a good time mind-dumping helpful applications and tricks to help the his PDA experience be more effective & efficient. So, here are a few of the suggestions that I came up with:
Helpful Websites
- Check out www.freewarepalm.com for tens of thousands of freeware applications and utilities. There's a lot of really great freeware out there for the PalmOS.
- www.memoware.com has thousands upon thousands of free, downloadable books and resources for reading on pda's. I've read Pilgrim's Progress, A.W. Tozer's Knowledge of the Holy, several works of Jonathan Edwards, John Owen and others. It's really a great resource.
- www.the-gadgeteer.com - This is a great review site for things technical. There's a link on the left side for "PalmOS related" links. It's a good launchpad to reviews of software, handheld units and other Palm-focused websites.
- www.palminfocenter.com - good for news on the Handheld happenings. The discussion boards can be rather abrasive, unfortunately. There's a small population of very opinionated posters that love to slam one another. All the trash-talking aside, there's some good geek news smattering the site.
Helpful Software (all freeware unless otherwise noted)
- PowerGuard Lite - This app schedules & runs back ups your handheld files to a directory on your SD card. The advantage of this is that if I'm ever away from my PC and my Palm crashes (it does happen once in a great while), I can restore from my card and I never lose more than a single day's worth of updated data. Mine backs up every day at 5:15pm, which is usually while I'm driving home. Since I've been running this, I almost never sync my handheld to my PC anymore.
- Launcher III (free) or Launcher X (shareware) - Launcher X is the latest iteration of the venerable Launcher III. I'm cheap, so I still use the free one. It's a nice tab-based launcher that allows for dragging/dropping applications to different tabs for categorization as well as to little widgets for beaming or deletion and other stuff. Nicely written app.
- Noah Pro - a free 133,000 dictionary. Words are majuscule . . . and cool.
- TCPMP - The Core Pocket Media Player - great for watching movies our listening to mp3's on your handheld. To covert a DVD movie, use http://www.fairusewizard.com/. Here's a great tutorial on the process. Another really nice thing about this player is that it remembers where you left off, so that the next time it's launched, you can pick up from where your last session ended. I watch the movie "The Incredibles" and I also listen to messages from John Piper, Ravi Zacharias and others using this app. Very nice & stable.
- Songbook (Shareware) - I play guitar and this is a great program for carrying my music library with me. It is a pocket chordpro format interpreter and has a desktop app that helps with drag/dropping text files to your pda.
- PalmVNC - it's nice to be able to connect to our home PC on our sunroom balcony and turn the iTunes volume down while I'm downstairs. It's also kind of fun to play tricks on my kids while they're using the PC.
- BatteryGraph - nice for historical analysis of battery performance. Yes, my name is Clym and I'm a geek.
- ZBoxZ - this is great to use for unzipping files I've downloaded to my SD card from my handheld browser. So, I can download new apps from freewarepalm.com and install them without the use of a PC. Kind of cryptic user interface, but nice once you figure it out.
- OperaMini - this is what introduced me to the whole Opera community in the first place. Very nice java-based browser. It still is persnickety and can freeze with fair, but unfortunate regularity. I'm sure it's a combination of the Opera Java code and the IBM Websphere Java environment for the PalmOS platform. Still, even with that downside, it still offers the best one-handed navigation and browsing experience, IMHO.
- NoAlarms - nice, quick & easy way to suppress any alarms when I'm going into a setting that I don't want interruptions in. I use it every time I go into our church service and in some other important meetings.
- DateBk5 - Relatively expensive shareware, but amazingly robust and flexible calendar application. I most often use the icon-ized month view, detailed weekly view and the nice user interface for entering appointments. Best of all, it uses the built in Datebook/Calendar databases, so it's compatible with the Palm Desktop and other PC-side software. It has more features than I would ever use.
Hope this helps!
C.
WIDGETIZE
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