Palm app suggestions

The guys at the office chipped in and got me a Palm Tungsten T for a wedding present. This being my first Palm, I'm not "in the know" on what the most useful apps and hacks for it are. So, I must beg of the most tech-savvy people I know: post your favorite palm apps and hacks! You can even think of it as a wedding present to me so that you can clear your conscience of not sending one

PS...I honestly couldn't give a care if pocketPC stuff is better, because a Palm is what I have, so please save the diatribe and rhetoric for a more appropriate thread. Thanks bunches.

I liked diddlebug when I had a Palm Vx, but I think the new Palms come with something similar built-in.

I can't remember now where I got it, but I used to have a planetarium program for the Palm Pilot which was absolutely great. You told it your latitude and longitude and which way you were facing, and it drew you a map of what you were looking at. It had little dropdown menus for zooming to the planets, the major named stars, and the Messier objects. Unfortunately I used the Palm so rarely that its batteries kept running down, and it's just on a shelf now.

Peter

Peter, That sounds extremely cool...if you find the name of it, let me know!

You can even think of it as a wedding present to me so that you can clear your conscience of not sending one

I should mention that Bitt is exempt from this guilt trip, since he bought me dinner when he found out about my impending nuptuals.

Planetarium 2.2

My favorite site for Palm stuff is Palmgear. Hacking became a little more difficult with the T but Tealhack seems to work. Apphack lets you use double button punches to increase the four buttons on your palm to 16 or more ( you can use the directional buttons as the second punch). I would also upgrade to Datebook 5 (or whatever the newest one is.) The split screen option is very helpful.

I installed McPhling which gives me a quick way to flip between apps. I also installed CrossingOver which lets you do caps by writing graffiti on the line between the letters and numbers. From what I gatther, this was a popular hack with pre-PalmOS 5.0. Then I installed Graffiti Anywhere which allows me to graffiti on the screen, including the crossing over functionality. Finally, as my intro screen when I turn on my Palm, I installed Today which gives a nice summary of whats going on.

I have many friends with Palms here is a list of some of the programs they use.

TealMeal
http://www.tealpoint.com/softmeal.htm
Restaurant datebase / selection tool. The coolest part of this tool is "The Wheel of Food" you pick categories of you you want click "The Wheel of Food" button and it picks a restaurant to go to.

iSilo
http://www.isilo.com/
An ebook reader. It will fullscreen and autoscroll at 20 different speeds. Oh and the auto scroll is smooth.

Tipsy
http://jrray.org/tipsy/tipsy.html
A tool to figure out who owes what on a restaurant bill. Not only can you enter in prices for each item per person, you can also enter an item and have it split the item across multiple people.

I know they use some other stuff but I don't know the exact names of the programs. I will see if I can get the other programs they use and post it later in the weekend.

Oh, I use an Ipaq and would love for someone to make Tipsy and TealMeal for the PocketPC, it would kept me from switching to Palm.

I'd suggest Plucker, an ebook reader / creator (It's open source too)
It has support for the hires screen of the TT.

I am using it regularly, it features all the stuff other readers have too, for example autoscrolling, hyperlinking, bookmarks, etc.

http://www.plkr.org

Marc

Thanks guys...I will be installing all of these to at least try them out.

Might want to check this thread where we discussed this a few months ago.

After getting my Tungsten C, I've found that I want nice looking icons so I use AppIcon to modify non-color icons to hi-res ones. If you care enough, I can post the process used to make icons and transfer them to the Palm. I also use the Today app you mentioned, with the PalmOS 5 Hi-Res skin by the author. A few other apps are Filez, Calcul-8, and Converter (conversion between anything). I've found a few more games that I like: Marbles^2, Pilotski, Vexed, Tangle, Exodus. These can all be found on PalmGear or FreewarePalm.

Have you tried Mapopolis? It is very handy and pretty cheap too. You can get door to door directions without a GPS.

Take a look at the following

Documents to Go - lets you put Excel and Word Documents on your Palm.
MobiPocket - and electronic book reader (games only go so far as a time sink)
Books- Dictionary/Thesarus, fiction (science of course) Baen books has been releasing jam packed CD's in some of their hardbacks.
A more functional calculator. Your choice of many

Do the T's accept a flash chip? Buy the biggest available. Books average a meg each. (I have 2 dozen loaded now) Swapping is a pain, and you never seem to have the chip you want or even know which to look on.
They also make a handy way to backup the main memory of the palm itself. (I'm assuming the T is like my sonypda/memorystick where this is concerned)

Additional system fonts. (well maybe?) Depends on the resolution of the screen.
I have one font that is sharply readable but eyestrainingly small. That's more interesting than truly useful.

Amen to the Documents to Go.. very cool.
Also the official hard case has two storage slots for sd cards... which helps with having the right one around when you need it.

Funny...noone mentioned Palantir which happened to migrate onto the tungsten last night. Very nice! I like being able to select Append, Insert, Replace, and Enqueue now...quite cool. It does make you painfully aware that your tags need some fixing though .

I think we all just assumed you were aware of that one.

Does any one have a different book reader than Mobibook.

I finally came to realize that mobibook is a cross over from the windows pda world. While the result works well enough. I has some quirks. It's not always on, like other palm apps. Everytime you switch back from another application it seems to have to reload. The wait is agonizing when you are used to better. Also there seems to be something wrong when bringing the pda out of sleep. If the last active app was the reader, and you click the schedule button, It comes back up with the reader instead of going directly to your schedule.

has anyone found any applications that will change the screen to a horizontal view?

Mobibook has that option, So it is possible. I'd suggest crusing some of the Palm hacks. Tealhack, Hackmaster or such and look for a hack addin.

Google scores again.

handyshopper os a great little program

http://www.palmgear.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=software.showsoftware&sid=7C73620C-7A11-42C9-91B92B4E40964ECF&prodID=1350

it is at palmgear too

I, too, have the tags problem with Palantir. Even some of my tracks that are tagged "correctly" are an issue. For example, I have many classical and early music CDs where the artists vary by track. On the empeg, I navigate using an Artist-Album-Track heirarchical playlist.

Is there any way for Palantir to get playlists as well as tracks? Then I wouldn't need to rely on my tags for the Palantir heirarchy. If Palantir used empeg playlists instead of only using "soup", that would be really cool. Or, perhaps it could use both? Is there already some way to do this? Is there some reason why this isn't possible?

I love Palantir. If I had my empeg playlists on my Palm, I would probably use it all the time. My tags are screwy enough that I don't use it very often, though.

FWIW,
Jim

I love Palantir. If I had my empeg playlists on my Palm, I would probably use it all the time. My tags are screwy enough that I don't use it very often, though.

Then fix your tags! Making Palantir work with the playlists on the Empeg would require a significant re-design, which I am not going to do. The logic used for lookups in the app is simple and fast: list the artists alphabetically by name, list the albums chronologically, list the tracks by track number. Soup views aren't the only way to do this on the Palm, but it is by far the simplest, and therefore fast (which is important on a Palm or PocketPC device).

On the empeg, I navigate using an Artist-Album-Track heirarchical playlist.

So if you do it this way on the Empeg, why wouldn't this work on your Palm? Are you using the custom soup views in Jemplode? If you aren't, you should be. This makes it easy to maintain your playlists while adding new music, but it requires accurate song tagging. I use MP3 Tag Studio to re-tag my files, it makes it so much easier. It was a pain to re-tag all my old tracks that I had ripped without tagging accurately, but allmusic.com and a few days later I had all my tracks tagged.

Let me write up a post on how I tag my files, you may see the benefit in tagging after reading it. Look for it in 1/2 hour.

OK, cool. I'll look for your post. As I've mentioned before on this board, I have a rather large CD collection, consuming just over 300GB on my mp3 server. I started the process before version 2 tags were available. The whole thing needs to be retagged, but the thought of that depresses me. The audiograbber version I was using for over half of the collection kept resetting the Year field, so Year is totally wrong in most cases. The "Various Artist" thing is also a problem. I want my "Various Artists" tracks to appear there (yes, I know, tag them that way, but what about the artist info -- some are in filenames, others in tags -- its a mess).

I suppose I've been putting it off too long, though. I run Samba on the server, so I can do it all using MP3TagStudio. It will be a *big* job, though.

Jim

Yeah, I know it's a pain, but you just have to dive in and do it. I can't rewrite my app just because of data integrity issues (but you could, it is open source!). I posted my method of tagging here, maybe others will share their tips/tricks.