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Palm: The stats on smartphones
Thu, 19 Apr 2007

(While I am pretty darned sleep deprived I think I'm reading things right ;)

Being a developer for various sundry mobile platforms, I like to try and guess where things are going, and gauge where to spend my efforts, and really .. I like to see what new gadgets are out there, and fondle as many as possible. Its been a dry couple of years for us gadgetheads .. the sheer variety of toys we've seen before hasn't happened for awhile - no more Handera Inc's my dear friends. We need some shakedowns .. some rolling screens, not just GPS-in-everything. We're tough to please nowadays.

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Palm Tips: How to add ringtones to your Treo -- for free!
Tue, 07 Feb 2006

Ringtones are a huge and weird market with people willing to pay more for a 20 second craptacular rendition of a song than for the raw or mp3 version of it. With such a huge market and millions of dollars being made you can believe the telcos like to make it hard to install a ringtone without first heading to their ever-so-convenient online store. Fortunately Palm has so far not been the sort of company to throttle the function of a device in order to give them another market.. so for us, installing new ringtones is easy.

Easy as Sunday morning. Heres how...

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Palm Tips: Reseting, or, How to remove misbehaving drivers, patches, and applications
Tue, 31 Jan 2006

(I resisted the title "Drivers, patches, and applications - oh my!")

Thanks to our friend the light bulb everyone is familiar with the on/off switch; anyone whose used anything more complex is also familiar with the crash and the reset cycle. Technology should be more stable -- when is the last time you saw your VCR or microwave oven crash? -- but we all know that it has been a long time since the days when Palm OS users could make jokes about the blue-screen-of-death to Pocket PC users.

But many people do not know about the many flavours of reset; most people know about the 'soft' reset (what I call the Pinhole Reset to keep it straight) and some unfortunate folks know about the 'hard' reset, there are others though it is out of scope of this posting to talk about the debug reset and the PleaseDon'tFormatMyLifedriveHardDisk-reset, but I will mention a third very useful variation..

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Palm Tips: Backup, backup, backup!
Thu, 19 Jan 2006

Historically, Palm OS has been bullet-proof -- lasting for weeks or months on alkaline batteries, rarely (if ever) crashing, and a past hotsync always ready to rescue you. These days Palm OS is still as fast and fun to use as ever but some of the devices are a little less reliable than they were so many years ago - the introduction of newer and fancier technology has taken its toll in stability. But who would turn their back on sharp high res colour displays, NVRAM to survive battery outages, bluetooth and 802.11 wifi, fat SD cards -- the veritable kitchen sink? But data is what its all about, and we never ever want to lose it.

One of these days I'll talk about home backup and redundancy techniques as I'm researching for myself (RAID, cheap backups, offsite storage, etc), but for now lets just talk about how to survive mobile theft, crashes or smashes.

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Palm: Things That Annoy the Developers (Like Me)
Tue, 10 Jan 2006

Well, its that time of year again where things must be purged, the soul laid bare in preparation for a new year of technology silliness. (Okay, I had pleasant time at a Christmas party last night and a nice little lunch out today but I'm still in a mood to let fly the flames of war ;) While I really enjoy developing for mobile devices (and development in general) and have very much enjoyed being on the front edge of mobile technology the last half decade or so, I've become a little weary of dealing with PalmOne's (now Palm again) and PalmSource's sillyness to tell you the truth - one can only have so much time wasted through their sheer stupidity before you start to wonder - when will it end? When will they stop being idiots? Their "historical issues" (mistakes, guffaws, unfortunate changes in the timeline) are forever in the developers faces. After writing this huge rant, I realize - it is a wonder people develop for this platform at all. I've been assisting other developers in forums for years, and I know how tough it is for them to get past all this stuff. This is why after a major Shadow release theres usually a few weeks of quiet .. time to decompress and come to terms with the sheer amount of crap that had to be shovelled. This is why theres so much time between releases sometimes -- its getting harder to get the nerve up to "dive into the mountain of crap" :P

A comprehensive list of things that annoy me would be enormous as I routinely work around dozens of different Palm OS system bugs every day. But off the top of my head right now, heres what comes to mind .. call it the abridged and shortened summary of the greater litany :)

Ben, and my many friends at Palm and PalmSource - this isn't personal or directed, instead just the frustration as I work arond more and more bugs that make me pull my hair out. Gotta vent and get it off my chest :) I enjoy the platform, and I admire the work and dedication you guys have put in, but we still suffer :)

Edit, Jan 2006: Remember, I love this platform and work on it every day. I wrote this after working around some really aggravating OS bugs and answering hundreds of support emails about it. Don't be going and thinking I'm anti-Palm OS or anything ;)

Note: I could equally flame Microsft Pocket PC, WinCE, etc. I will, but after Christmas :)

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Palm: Manage your Palm device's battery - live long and prosper via under and over-clocking.
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

(This quick posting is inspired by a post I made to the shadow-discuss mailing list; just posted a how-to for making Shadow Desktop export templates, too.)

I know, I agree - when you hear the phrase 'over-clock', the mental image conjured is of a desktop PC video card smoking away or sparks flying from the CDROM tray as the CPU melts down. But chip-clocking is a great way to extend the life of both your desktop PC and your handheld devices - so let me explain :) And remember - clocking (be it under or over-clocking) is safe to perform, especially with modern devices that let you do it right from the operating system!

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Palm: Unlocked GSM Treo 650 finally gets an update
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

I'm sure all the Palm OS sites are mentioning this, but I'm pretty happy about it despite some installation pains. The Treo 650's really needed this! Oh, and Darren -- if you're reading -- this definately makes the speaker more audible!

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Palm: A cheap but useful implementation of the standard 'C' stdio library
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

If you're porting a game or application from some OS to Palm OS, you'll almost certainly need a 'fopen' and 'fread' function, or face altering piles of code to match Palm OS's very different conventions. For games and emulators I've found you almost always need fopen and fread, but rarely file descriptor level open or nasties like fprintf and vsprintf. Still, I've implemented most of those crazies as well, though I keep them in other source files than the stdfile.c below.

I've implemented most of these twice -- a private over-complex and full featured version for licensed stuff, and a cheap quickie non-buffered hack version that I use for most everything -- its just so braindead and simple that I am hooked.

Since so many people need it and hate to search through all my projects to find it.. here you go, ready to use. Note: This doesn't include fgets or other fancier (stdarg) functions, or things like scanf or printf.. since emus and games didn't need them. Implementing those is fully doable and I've sent code around to lots of people -- let me know if you need it and I can try and dig it up to post here.

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Palm: Mobile Data Divergence
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

With the release of the PalmOne LifeDrive, we will now have a widely released mass storage PDA-like device. How the public will react, and how they will use the device is yet to be scene, but at least a few things are for sure -- 4GB of data is a hell of a lot to hotsync and back-up. This will alter behaviours as I'm sure people will not want to sit through enormous sync sessions as long lists of Word docs get scanned for changes. As such, sync will either be performed less often or it will be more selective. Folks will opt to sync the PIM apps and maybe a few other crucial apps, but for mp3s and Word DOC's and other fat media, they'll just copy it over in drive mode or using a card-writer with SD cards or the like (much like we do now for mp3s, since Hotsync is too slow for raw data.) The question that pops to mind is this -- if we're all carrying enormous amounts of data (as 2GB SD cards come into sensible pricing ranges for instance), then will people use card writers and drive-mode more often? And if so -- should applications read and edit raw data from local media cards ("VFS") instead of relying on hotsync?

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Palm: Noodling with PalmSource Installer (PSI)
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

Over the last week or so we've had the PalmOne announcement of their new line of Mobile Managers (presumably beginning with the very soon to be announced LifeDrive device), and also the Microsoft announcement of their Windows Mobile 2005 operating system (to be offered in new devices as well as upgrades for some existing WM2003 and WM2003SE devices.) These sorts of announcements always bring out those who will suggest these are the greatest or worst things ever and invariably the competitive side of human nature shows itself via the comparisons of these announcements. (God forbid they wait until the real devices hit the streets.) Also, I have grass!

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