I have used Palm PDA’s and now phones for about 8 years, and it’s hard to imagine a more useful device.
Still, the tried and true, i.e. boring, default interface and software deserves a little sprucing up. I have seen a lot of great Palm software, but here I’ll include just what I currently use on my Palm Centro and Jen’s Treo 650.
First, the Launcher Interface. Palm has never changed this in a substantial way. It is highly functional, but also extremely boring. I have tried several alternate launchers and have found them all lacking in some way. Specifically, I have used LauncherX, Facer and iPhony. I won’t bother to explore why I felt each had shortcomings, but instead I will outline what I love about the one I use currently: Treo Launcher.
This is shareware that is fully functional, but if you don’t buy it for $12.95 it occasionally brings up a nag screen for several seconds before taking you to your home screen. This application is functional, yet simple. One of my favorite features is that it doesn’t reinvent the wheel for things like categories but instead uses the underlying PalmOS for that. It simply makes a beautiful, and more functional display, and does it well.
With Treo Launcher running, you can launch applications via the 5-way button or by pushing the icon, just like with the default Palm launcher. However, you can also launch applications by typing the letters on the keypad. For example, if I press ‘p’ pTunes will open. If I press ‘c’ the list will be filtered down to Calc and Camera.
I can easily cycle through categories by pressing right or left on the 5-way button, and pressing down will enter the icons for that category and than I can move around those with the 5-way. Pressing the ‘Home’ button takes me back to the category navigation. There are some options for what to display in the status bar at the top, and you can also opt to have recently opened apps displayed as small icons along the bottom. Jen uses this feature, I don’t…it’s purely a prefence thing. One other very useful feature is the ability to hide certain categories. For example, I put all the crap that AT&T bundles that I will never use into a category called ‘*Junk’ and then use Treo Launcher to hide that category. Now I never have to look at that clutter again.
The bottom line is that Launcher preserves all the functionality of the default Palm Launcher with a few very sensible tweaks, and it makes my Palm screen MUCH more pleasant to look at!
The next logical issue to tackle is that by default, any applications installed to the SD memory card will appear in their own category, which prevents those apps from appearing in one of the ‘regular’ categories. This is extremely annoying! The app that saves the day here is LinkStart which is free for the basic version.
The premise behind LinkStart is to create a symbolic link in the Palm RAM memory that points to an app on the SD memory card. Once this is done, the link can be put into categories just like any application in the native Palm RAM. When the app is launched, it is copied from the card to RAM and then it runs from there. When it is closed, it is copied back to the memory card. This does create a slight delay opening and closing apps, but if you have an older Palm device that has very limited system RAM, this can be a lifesaver. This is the case for Jen’s Treo, and she uses it extensively, but my Centro has plenty of internal RAM so I don’t bother.
Modern Palm devices come with decent mp3 playback capability, RealPlayer on older models (works *ok*) and pTunes on newer models (works AWESOME!) What they do not come with, however, is a video player. Enter TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player)
This freeware application is no longer in active development, as the developer is now working on a soon-to-be-released for-profit application called CorePlayer. I’ll stick with the freeware version, thank you very much. Anyway, You can download TCPMP here or here. You will also need the plug-in packs to decode various types of media, and you can get those, the application itself and the installation instructions all in one shot here. The setup is extremely simple: copy the tcpmp.prc file and all plugin .prc files that you want into the palm/launcher directory. Assign it to the apprrpriate category and it will from there. of course you’ll need some movie files to play, but we’ll cover that in a later post.
**Note: the tcpmp.zip file contains the application and the two plugins I use to view movies I have encoded myself. Depending on what you want to play for movies, experiment with the other plugins as needed.
Jen and I both use our phones as alarm clocks. The biggest advantage to this is the ability to set it to vibrate and have it wake up just you, not the rest of the house. The built-in World Clock application has an alarm option, but it 1) does not work on vibrate and 2) only plays the selected sound once, similar to a calendar reminder. This simply will not do when you sleep as soundly as I. I have experimented with a number of ways to get a decent alarm app for Palm devices, and have located one that works reliably: WeekUp.
WeekUp
WeekUp is available here, and it is fully Centro compatible, which is why I use it. The trial is fully functional for 7 days, and then reverts to the ‘Lite’ version, which strips out some functionality, specifically the ability to have a different alarm time for a particular day without affecting your weekly alarm preset and the ability to use mp3′s as alarm tones. Everything you need to get started is at the link above, and it is ridiculously simple to use. I love it and use it every day.
VFSFTP is an FTP client for Palm.
In my previous job as a field engineer for a data storage company, I frequently needed to access files at the home office while at customer sites that usually had no internet access in their server rooms. This little app was exactly what I needed. You can download it here. The zipped file contains the aplication, installation instructions and the full users guide. **Note: for obvious reasons, this needs a data plan on the phone that you plan to use it on!
This application costs $9.95 via PayPal to the developer. I have purchased it and he has been excellent to deal with, and he got my license key to me very quickly.
So once you’ve used VFSFTP to download your files, then what? Perhaps you want to copy them to a computer. If you have the USB cable for your Palm, you can use Softick Card Export to make a data connection to any computer with a USB port.
This application does cost $14.95, but trust me, it is WELL worth it. (Remember those movie files we mentioned earlier?) The need for this app can be negated by having a USB card reader for the SD memory card, but on the occasion where I don’t have a card reader handy but I do have the cable, this works great. Once you open it and click ‘Connect to Desktop’ you will get a new drive letter in Windows, or /dev/sdXX in Linux, and you will be able to access it like a thumb drive.
The same developer makes a BlueTooth version of this application that also works very well. You can check that out here.
TipQwik
Fully functional tip calculator…’nuff said…
Khronos Palm Stopwatch
Simple, functional app to turn your Palm into a decent stopwatch. One interesting note is that you can make and receive calls, open other apps (like pTunes), etc and the stopwatch will keep timing, until you manually stop it. I used this for cycling before I got my cycling computer.
3XCom
This is about the best freeware file manager I have found for Palm. I have mine set up with side-by-side panels for internal storage and the memory card, with which I can copy files back and forth. ***Note: If you have a newer Palm phone like the Centro, you get a program called ‘Palm Files‘ that does the same things, plus more, and is integrated with bluetooth. I have it on mine, but was unable to get it to work on Jen’s Treo.
Snap
Snap is a freeware app that I used to capture most of the screenshots in this post, and you can get is here. My only gripe with it is that you can’t change the default directory where the screenshots go. The default location is on the memory card at /Palm/Programs/Snap/* It’s a minor annoyance I know, but it would be nice to be able to drop them into albums in the built-in Palm picture viewer.
BibleReader
This is a very polished application available for free here. Several versions of the Bible, such as the NKJV and ASV are available for free, while others cost money, but are pretty reasonable. They also have some commentaries and other works available.
eReader
eReader is available from Palm.com here. Once you have the reader, you’ll need some books. Palm has a number of ebooks for sale here, or you can search through thousands of free titles at manybooks.net. (Hint: if you have a data plan on your phone, point its browser to http://mnybks.net/ and download ebooks straight to your phone) Finally, the alternative computer office suite OpenOffice from Sun Microsystems has the ability to open word documents, RTF, txt, etc. and save them in PDB format for Palm eReader. How cool is that!
I hope you find this helpful. If you have any questions about these apps, or for any not listed here that you have found, please leave a comment!
