| Name | Size | Price | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abacus 0.9a | 120k + 56k for MathLib | FW | Chokes on dates in yy/mm/dd format (translates them into something completely non-intuitive). Seems okay otherwise, but I decided I didn't need a spreadsheet. See also my notes on TinySheet. |
| AvantGo 3.3 | 435k plus synchronized channels (!) | ad-ware |
Come now, over 400k just for the software? iSilo takes less space
than that (just under 370k) including my entire
homepage, the NY Times, Salon, and a handful of
other little things. Sheesh. I tried this hoping I could get some more local news, but in addition to the bloat of the software, the channel for one of my local newspapers is half sports, so I'll pass. Plus I get to give valuable space on my handheld to a bunch of ads to fund AvantGo. Granted, they have done a reasonable job of making the process easy for newbies and computer illiterates, but the cost is excessive IMNSHO. Their uninstall instructions work pretty well. |
| BackMute 1.2 | 1k | FW | Allows temporary disabling of all sound. I decided to solve the problem by permanently disabling all sound. |
| BatteryMonitor Hack 1.7 | 3k + 15k (app) | SW $8 |
Tracks battery usage with subtotals for ON time,
backlight time, serial port use, and others.
3-week timeout demo. Battery Monitor is okay, but I can't justify paying $8 for it when there's Uptime for free. I'm still looking for the perfect battery tracking tool, though. And timeout demos just rub me the wrong way for some reason. |
| BrainForest 2.1 | 109k | CW $30 |
Of the outlining applications I tried, Brainforest
is my second-favorite. It's got a lot of nice
features, it's just that Arranger works better
for me. BrainForest uses a tree metaphor as the name implies. It supports what I think of as standard outline numbering (1, 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.1.1, etc) which is nice. The input methods are kind of klunky with a double-tap required to edit an item's text, and text entry only by pop-up window. You can attach a note to any item allowing large amounts of text to be associated. No export is supported. The display is cluttery with both arrows indicating expanded/hidden branches, and bullets on every item. These shortcomings paired with the steep price have me leaning away from BrainForest. For an extra $10, mac users can get a desktop app to manipulate the outlines, and a windows version is supposed to be available 1Q99. |
| Cribbage 2.1 | 22k | FW |
What the name says. Thought I might learn the game using this, but it was not to be. No opinion. |
| CSpotRun 0.9 | 17k | FW |
DOC reader. Not perfect, but cheap and small count
for a lot. Lets you rotate the text on the screen
so you can hold the Pilot horizontally if that is
more comfortable when reading long e-texts. I really like this program, but iSilo makes it hard to justify having an extra app for doc files. And FlipHack takes care of the rotating screen issue. |
| MakeDocW 0.71 | n/a | FW |
I don't use CSpot anymore, so I don't need a doc converter. ISilo rocks. Converts text or html to doc format for CSpotRun. |
| dbScan | 21k | FW |
I hadn't used this in ages, and when I ran it again, it found no errors in either the datebook or the shortcuts, so I surmise that the bugs it was patching in palmOS have been fixed in the version I'm running now dbScan is a consistency checker for the datebook database put out by the DateBk3 folks for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me. It also has a workaround for a bug in PalmOS 3 that causes multiple copies of grafitti shortcuts to be created. dbScan will clean up the extra copies. |
| DinkyPad 0.92b | 20k | SW $5 |
Very simple drawing app that lets you associate text
with drawings. It's a beta with a last update date
of 7/30/96 which leads me to believe that the stuff
that isn't implemented is likely to stay that
way. There's got to be something better out there. |
| Find Hack 2.8 | 12k | SW $6 |
Adds wildcards (*?), pre-defined searches, and
better search recall to the stock find tool. I just very seldom use the find feature right now. Maybe when I've got more stuff loaded in this will become useful. |
| FitalyStamp Hack 1.0 | 32k | CW $10 (upgrade from FitalyHack) paid for |
This is the same optimized
key layout as the old Fitaly, but with a vinyl overlay
for the grafitti area and all new software to read the
taps from grafitti land. This means that you're not
giving up a third of your screen area to Fitaly which is
a big win in a lot of cases. You have to turn off
FitalyStamp to use grafitti, and it makes it hard to use
hacks which depend on sliding (most notably SwitchHack). I mostly like it,
but the loss of SwitchHack's ease of app switching is a
real drag, and I sometimes miss the ability to use
grafitti along with Fitaly, especially for odd
punctuation which is hard to find in all of Fitaly's
screens.
For some reason I could never get up my speed on the stamp to the level I can get on the on-screen fitaly. That added to the inability to easily use switchhack, and the relative difficulty of using grafitti made fitalystamp more of an annoyance than a help for me. |
| Galax 2.1 | 49k | SW $10 |
Space Invaders. Zap is more fun. |
| Gibraltar 1.0 | 4k | FW |
The pet rock for the palmpilot. Doesn't do
anything, just sits there and looks vaguely like a
rock. The help text is amusing. Purports to be
PalmOS 2.0 only, but seems to work fine in version
3 ;-) I can find a better use for the RAM. |
| GrafAid 1.0 | 3k | FW |
Little app that shows you what your grafitti strokes
look like so you can debug character recognition
problems. Handy. Now that I'm doing most of my input with fitaly I don't really need this anymore. |
| HanDBase | 100k | CW $19.99 |
Database engine. Decided I don't need a database this complex right now. This one will be in the running when I do despite its relative humongousness. |
| HandyShop 1.05 | 39k | SW postcard |
Lets you create shopping lists for various stores,
which can be used both at home to mark what stuff
you need, and out and about to see if the store
you're near has anything you need, and in the store
to check stuff off as you grab it. Seems like a fine piece of software, I just wasn't using it. |
| High Five 1.0B | 15k | FW |
Yahtzee for the Pilot. Needs multiple player support and a score board. |
| Hi-Note 2.02 | 38k | CW $20 |
Hi-Note is unique among the outliners I've tried in
that it supports not just text-based entries, but
also drawings via their own drawing program that's
actually pretty nice. But while it does allow
nesting of items, that's really as close as it gets
to "outlining". It's really more of a
fuller-functioned replacement for the stock memopad
than anything else. There's a desktop program
(PCHi-Note) from SoftEssence
for another $20. Fine program, just wasn't what I was looking for. |
| JFile3.2f | 63k | CW $19.95 |
Database engine. Decided I don't need a database this complex right now. This one will be in the running when I do. |
| Kalk 1.0.2 | 30k | SW postcard | Free (mostly) RPN calculator. Decided I didn't need more than the builtin calculator at the moment. |
| Mapopolis 2.0 | 51k | FW |
Needed the space so I nuked it and haven't missed it. The dinky screen just isn't very practical for this sort of thing Very cool little map viewer for the palm. There are maps available for all US counties. My map of Washington's King County is about 940k which isn't too bad. (8mb makes these things reasonable. I wouldn't want to do this on a 2mb palm) The maps include streets, some businesses, water features. There's even the ability to add your own landmarks. Pretty fun and the price is right. |
| MathLib 1.1 | 56k | FW |
Double-precision math libraries for use with Abacus Decided not to keep abacus so I don't need this either. |
| Memory 3.0 | 12k | FW |
I never use this anymore Replacement for the stock memory gadget. The main advantage to this one is that it sits in the application launcher so you don't have to go dig through the menus for it. This is supposedly for Palm III only. Seems like something that could more compactly be provided by a hack. |
| MenuHack 1.2 | 2k | FW | Provides shortcut to application menus by tapping title bar. Pretty much overkill unless you wanted to remap the menu silk-screen button. |
| MobileDB1.31 | 36k | CW $14.95 |
Database engine. Interface is klunky, and I'm thinking I don't need anything this complex right now. |
| Musician Tools 1.0 | 16k | SW $10 |
Metronome, tuning fork, and circle of fifths
gadget. Didn't use it. |
| Mulg II | 29k | FW |
Game where you roll a marble through various mazes.
Way more fun than that makes it sound. The folks
who wrote this also have directions for how you can
install a hardware tilt sensor in the Pilot to allow
you to play the game by tilting the Pilot to roll
the ball. Sick. Hadn't played it in ages and needed the space. |
| Neko 1.0 | 10k | FW |
Just like the Neko for X. Little kitty runs around
your screen chasing the mouse (or fish or bird) that
you control with the stylus. When he catches the
critter he takes a bath and then goes to sleep.
Very cute, and no dander. Runs too fast when you're dragging the mouse. I didn't play with it for a long time. |
| PalmJournal 1.4 | 12k | SW $14 |
This is a daily journal which I'm trying out as a
replacement for the Franklin paper system Daily
Record of Events change. That's actually one of the
things I didn't use too much in the paper system, so
we'll see how this goes. The idea is that you have
a memo page automatically associated with each day
on which to write stuff that happened that day. I found that a simple memo associated with a datebook event works fine for day-oriented note taking, and for diary purposes, the memopad suits my purposes now. |
| PanaRead 1.01 | 9k | CW $?? |
Doc/memo reader that displays the text a few words at a
time at configurable speed so you can read hands-free.
There's some claim that you can read faster this way
than with standard static text. Works okay, I guess. The persistence on the Palm LCD is a little too long for faster display speeds. And I get all tense when I have to keep up with the speed of the words as they're presented (same as I do with the automatic scrolling on CSpotRun). Cute idea, just doesn't work that well for me in practice. |
| PocketChess 1.1 | 29k | FW |
Nice chess game. Beats me on level 1 (of 4), but a
four-year-old could beat me these days. ;-) I never play it. (That might be why I'm not much of a player ;-) |
| PocketRogue 1.0b8 | 64k | FW |
Rogue! On the Pilot! too cool. It's kind of
bizarre to have to move using the hljkybnu keys of
the original when there's no home row to keep your
hand on. Too bizarre, really. This would be vastly improved by the addition of movement buttons on the screen. It needs some porting to be playable. (With a keyboard hooked up to the Palm, it would be okay, but I don't have one.) |
| QDraw 1.0b4 | 27k | FW |
OO drawing tool. Does lines, rectangles, rounded
rectangles, circles and text. There is no freehand
drawing tool. Nice that you can modify the stuff
you have drawn (move the ends of a line, resize a
circle, etc.). More than I need. DiddleBug is enough for what I needed. |
| Quikwrite | 6k | FW |
Demo of yet another pen-based input gadget. This
one doesn't even attempt to make letters that look
like letters. Instead it divides the input area
into 8 sections (radially around the center) and you
draw letters by moving the stylus from the center
out to one of the sections, then to another section,
then back to center. The purported advantage is
that you don't have to lift the stylus between
characters. As you might expect, the learning curve
is rather steep. But, this might be good for me. I
like the fact that I can write grafitti without
looking at the Pilot (try that with fitaly!), but it's
sooo slow. Quikwrite might take care of both. This
demo isn't really useable, it's just a toy for
showing the concept. And it's not that great a toy,
the menu selections won't come up on my Palm III.
Supposedly a real hack version is coming Real Soon
Now. I'm not going to climb that curve until I know what they're going to charge for the privilege. |
| RPN 2.56 | 38k | SW $15 | Programmable Reverse Polish Notation calculator. Decided I didn't need more than the builtin calculator for now. |
| Samegame 2.0 | 6k | FW |
Game where you are presented with a random field of
patterened boxes and can remove adjacent boxes with
the same pattern. The boxes above fall to fill the
space left. The more adjacent boxes, the higher the
score. Kinda fun. Hadn't played in ages and needed the space. |
| Runtime 1.5.2 | 14k | FW |
I'm just swapping my rechargeables every week so I don't need to be this anal about power usage anymore Battery usage tracker with voltage graphing. |
| Silence 1.3 | 28k | SW $5 | App for setting times when your Palm should be silent, and for telling it to be silent right now. I decided to solve this problem by disabling all sound all the time. I never did like computers that beeped. |
| Snapshot 1.1 | 3k | FW |
Tiny app to snap the palm screen into imageviewer
format. DiddleBug has a snapshot built in. |
| Spec 2.1 | 9k | FW | Little image viewer for palm. Buggy and klunky and why use this when there's TinyViewer? |
| Sums 1.4 | 14k | FW |
Cute little mini spreadsheet for keeping score in
games like scrabble where you need to continually
add up a column of numbers for each player. Just didn't use it. |
| TaskList 2.00 | 79k | CW $50 paid for |
This is the Franklin-Covey task list replacement.
It's okay. Associates tasks with a date, so the
viewing is by date rather than having one big list.
I've started a memo of wishes for a better solution.
I finally got fed up with the thing and replaced it with TodoPlus. There were just too many little bugs that I was running into all the time. There is a newer version from Franklin, but the word I've heard is that it's more about added features than subtracted bugs. |
| ThoughtMill 1.04 | 53k | CW $25 | Yet another outliner. The nicest feature of this one is that you enter text directly on the screen, so the full text of your items is always available. Other than that, I don't really like ThoughtMill much. The drag and drop for rearrangement is unnecessarily graphically busy and quite slow. |
| TinySheet 2.54 | 90k | CW $19.95 | Seems okay, but I decided that my need of a spreadsheet is not sufficient to justify the memory hoggage. What is it with spreadsheet programs that they all have to look like lotus 1-2-3? They take up half the screen with A,B,C headers and 1,2,3 rows, and an infinite number of columns requiring scrollbars in all directions. Sheesh. Let me tell you how many rows and columns I need and provide a simple way to add them on the fly. Especially on the Palm's 6x6cm screen the wasted space is majorly annoying. |
| Tiny Viewer 1.04 | 7k | FW |
Image viewer. Works fine. Cheap and small. Just didn't use it. |
| Titrax 4.0 | 42k | FW |
This is the palm version of the time tracking tool
originally developed on X. It works fine, but I
have a hard time being disciplined enough to switch
tasks in the tool when I switch tasks in real life.
Fortunately it does support methods of
correcting. I'm just am too much of a flake to keep up with this. |
| Uptime Hack 1.2b3 | 1k + 4k (app) | FW |
I'm just swapping my rechargeables every week so I don't need to be this anal about power usage anymore Battery usage tracker with total time since last battery change, total time actually on, and backlight time. Also tracks time since last reset. |
| Vexed 1.3 | 24k | FW |
Game that has been getting LOTS of attention on the
newsgroup. It's fun, but it only takes a day or so to get through all the levels and by the time I finished I was thouroughly sick of it. |
| WPM 0.96 | 9k | FW |
Little app for determining how many Words Per Minute
you can enter with Grafitti. Since I got the Happy Hacking cradle and keyboard I don't worry about words per minute. |
| Zap! 1.1 | 37k | SW $5 paid for |
got bored Little arcade-style shoot at the oncoming enemy spaceships game. RSI-inducing. (Repetetive Strain Injury (Carpal Tunnel)) |
| ZDOC 5.xb4 | 9k | FW (GNU) | A doc reader/editor. This is really alpha quality. I'm not going to mess with it when CSpotRun just works. |