I dropped a few not-so-subtle hints here and there, but never explicitly mentioned my birthday or my birthday present to myself. I got a palm tungsten t2 for a pretty good price of $216 open box with a coupon from palmone.com. My last pda was the powerful, fun, flexible, and ultimately not useful as a pda, Sharp Zaurus. While I still have the demo unit zaurus I got from a programming contest, the battery life/size of the thing just isn’t useful for an every-day pda. The tungsten takes me back to my roots. I’d had nearly every device in the line; palm personal, palm pro upgrade (you actually stuck a mod chip in the back of the device), palm III, palm V, palm Vx, before jumping to the zaurus. After that brief foray, I’m back in the familiar palm world ready to load up my usual programs and fun. I was mildly surprised to discover that palm hacks no longer work in Palm OS 5, but fortunately, that’s more than made up for my the assortment of new programs that have been developed while I wasn’t looking.

So without further ado, here’s the latest ways I’ve been greasing up my palm, getting is slick and ready for action [couldn’t resist].

Please, by all means comment with your recommendations/suggestions, I’m hoping you all can recommend things to me as well as me recommending to you.

h3.. Utils/System

There are a few utilities that make using the T2 a much easier process. The slide-down tray is not really all that convienant, and if I can leave it up most of the time, I’d rather. To that end, I found two wonderful applications that relieve my need for it almost entirely:

• Graffiti Anywhere - Allows you to write graffiti anywhere on the screen, with any easy way to turn it on/off. [ freeware ]

• Slidefree - A bit of shareware that I’ll most likely register; allows you to pup up a quick menu from anywhere, so I can use the Menu and other buttons/strokes from the graffiti area without sliding the tray. I’ve bound it to holding the rightmost key, which is extremely useful. All the apps that have very flexible configurations and allow you to bind to holding a specific key is great; you get twice as much functionality out of the hardware buttons. [ shareware, $9 ]

• Graffiti hack - Not really a hack in the palm sense of the word, but definitely in the traditional sense. The newest palms come with a ‘new’ version of graffiti (long story short, Palm lost a lawsuit and had to change) which is frustrating to have to change even though it’s mostly the same. Well, some enterprising individuals figured out how to get the original one on newer devices. [ questionable ]

• ZLauncher - Ever since LauncherIII, all the good replacement launchers have been shareware. Unfortunately, that seems even more true these days. I decided to give the cheapest good looking one a shot to see if I could get it going the way I wanted, and indeed I did. While I’d like to find a free replacement, if I’m going to have to pay, Zlauncher certainly has LOTs of bells and whistles to justify it. [ shareware, $12 ]

• BTToggle Pro - I was warned after reading another site that this program is great. I actually purchased it before the palm had shipped here, and I’m glad I did. This is a very useful program that has undoubtedly saved much of the palm’s battery life. Its’ rarely in the way, and does what it does welll with good configuration options. [ shareware, $12 if purchased before Feb 20th ]

• Filez - This is a great utility, comparable to the shareware FPSUtils I used to use back in the day, but even better, this is Palm OS 5 compatible and Open Source. Great app! [ GPL ]

• Ir Monitor - Probably won’t use it all that much, but a really fun app I remembered from before that allows you to use the IR sensor on the palm as a monitor. Fun. [ freeware ]

Games

• Mulg - While I missed this one the first time around, it’s never too late to enjoy a classic game, and this certainly looks like one. [ freeware ]

• OpenChess - Apparently the old classic PocketChess was turned into a shareware program, so I went searching for a new favorite, and was glad I did. While the color graphics are nice, it would be nice to have a palmos5 320×320 opensource chess app as well. I suppose I could always tweak this version? [ GPL ]

• TetAttack (link currently broken, download alternative) - That’s right! My favorite addictive snes game of all time on my pda! It’s shareware, and only $6, but I still haven’t gotten around to registering yet. Likely only a matter of time. [ shareware, $6 ]

• Wordbox - Boogle derivative, and a Wiens family favorite. We’ve probably spent hundreds of man-hours playing this game in competition mode. I know Evan will be glad to see it again if he’s got a new palm to play it on. No main link for this because there’s the original version, the upgraded shareware version, the tweaked version of the original made to work on palm os 5, and then mine even further tweaked so it behaves the game volume preference correctly. Yup, I’m even doing a little (very little) development. [ freeware, shareware $15, freeware, and freeware, respectively ]

• X3 - X3 is an experiment in group collaboration; a free game, it will be tweaked, added and changed exactly as the people who play it and enjoy it want it to. It’s a great premise and while very difficult to start off in at first, eventually isn’t too hard at all. It’s a turn-based space version of Civilization that looks great on my tungsten, and once I got the hang of it a little bit has proved to be an excellent game. If you try it, trust me, keep trying and you’ll get the hang of it eventually, but it does have an unfortunately steep learning curve. Hmm, looks like there’s an scenario editor too. Nifty. [ freeware ]

Media

• Photos - Built in palm app for viewing images; handy. [ builtin ]

• RealOne - Came on the installation cd; decent mp3 player for a free one, eventually may look into other ones, but with only a 128mb SD card for now, I’m not really worried about using it as a portable mp3 player. Nice to have the option though. [ builtin ]

• Voice Memo - Doubt I’ll use this much. [ builtin ]

Apps

• Adobe Reader - Not sure if I’ll ever use it, but it was on the cd, so I installed it. [ builtin ]

• Palm Reader - The classic, though I’m annoyed that there’s no longer a free version and a paid version, merely the paid version that pesters you until it turns into the free version. While not the best ebook reader for the palm, it reads all the paid-for ebooks I purchased a while back online, so I’ll probably stick with it. Nice to have a large section of my library with me. [ shareware/nagware ]

• MyBible - Best bible program out there. Or at least, it was when I first purchased it about 8 years ago. Since then I’ve been grandfathered in for most new versions and translation upgrades, so my initial cheap investment has paid off well. Though I did have to pay $5 recently for the newest upgrade, I’ve been very impressed not only with the product, but with the support team at Laridian as well. They’ve re-emailed me my registration info a number of times when I’ve gone from device to device and lost it. While I wish it had a few more features like bookmark management (which they promised me would be added a long time ago, actually), it has a lot of translations, and now the ability to add your own notes which is handy. [ shareware, $10+bibles ]

• Documents2Go - Built in, but this extremely powerful app allows me to bring around a number of business proposals and plans I’ve been working on and can also handle powerpoint and excell beautifully. Since I’m going to be working on a presentation coming up in a few months, it’ll be nice to be able to have a copy with me. [ builtin ]

Pim

Umm, just take my word for it. They’re there, and they get the job done. It’s a palm.

Comm

• Builtins - Include the dialer, the phone link (installed from the cd, and included the default bluetooth connection information for my t610, very nice), SMS, VersaMail and Web Pro. [ builtin ]

• pssh - Just in time for my purchase a great ssh program for the new generation palm devices was developed, and it’s open source no less, based on putty, openssh, and a few other such projects. I might even turn in a couple of patches myself for things that I need, very, very useful. Combined with my bluetooth phone, I’ve done some nifty things like mud’ing from a moving bus, and other such atrocities. [ GPL ]

• ptelnet - All around useful program for debugging any tcp or serial connection. [ freeware ]

• Web Pro - Yeah, I know I mentioned it above as a builtin, but I found a copy from a Tungsten T3 and jacked it since it the version that came with my device would only run with a specific proxy server that I was unable to access over the cellular network from my phone. I register the software I use and keep, however, this junk was $35 for a minor upgrade difference between the one that came on my device and the other. My conscience may get to me, but I’m not sure my indignation won’t outweigh it. [ questionable ]

Posted by Jordan on Sunday, February 15th, 2004 at 10:51 pm.