Well, it’s that time of year again–or month, or week, or whatever–when I post my current list of treo software. Plus, I promised Anselor I’d give him a list to start from now that he’s joining the Palm smartphone world. This list is gonna be long though since I swapped out my 650 for a 680 and my memory limits are now staggeringly higher. Without much of a preface then, here’s the list (note that Free == open source, and free == 0$):

MultiMedia

• The 680 comes with an embedded Kinoma player. There’s a hidden upgrade link that saves you $10 when buying the full Kinoma Player 4 EX (comes to $15). I went ahead and upgraded mainly because it’s nice to be able to play flash videos. So now when someone IM or emails me a link to the latest youtube crazy video, I can watch it on the go on my phone.
• I also received the Mobile Music Pack with my 680. It comes with pTunes 3.0, which was unfortunately obsoleted by the release of 4.0 about two weeks after I’d received my phone. No such luck trying to get a discount on an upgrade through pTunes which is crap given that I had just gotten 3.0. Oh well, I won’t ever be purchasing any more of their products.
• Callrec ($20) – Can not only be used as an unobtrusive voice memo application, but is also great at recording phone calls (the built in voicememo program records only your half of phone calls — probably to avoid potential legal issues). It can even automatically record all incoming or outgoing phone calls, though of course, as mentioned before, check to make sure both parties of the conversation are not in “all party consent” states as mentioned in the above link. Or just ask for permission before recording (I plan on using the software during calls with vendors to help me with my note taking and it’s just plain easier to ask).
• TCPMP (Free) is still the best software for viewing movies from SD card

Games

• (UPDATED 07/01/06) Wordbox – Anselor reminded me about this game that used to be one of the best palm games in terms of replay value.  Fortunately, while the original version doesn’t run on modern palm pdas, an updated version exists that is true to the original, with a few minor UI improvements.
• BeCrossword ($7) – Cheap but still nice looking crossword program, but I’ve had a support request into the developers for a couple of years now and they still haven’t added proxy support (which is a super-easy code change — based on the three or four times I’ve added it to to open-source palm programs)
• Bike or Die ($15) – I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again: “Best Palm Game Ever”.
• Kyle’s Quest Dungeons ($15) – Great twist on the classic dungeon crawler. You’re the dungeon master and you have to keep those pesky local heros from coming in and clearing out your monsters. Beta quality game last time I played it though — only have it because it was included in a $40 palm pack of games from Crimson Fire.
• EDGE ($25) – Incredibly well done isometric RPG. Some minor bugs in it, but the story-line is great and the multiple quests available to different classes keep the replay value high. Doesn’t handle being run on a smartphone as well as some of the other programs, but it is a pretty beefy application.
• Firestorm ($18)- Also included on the Crimson Fire CD pack, Firestorm is a GB and GBA emulator for palm.
• Galactic Realms 3 ($15) – Decent top-down space RTS from Crimson Fire
• Highlander (free) – Decent palm puzzle game
• KQ 2 ($15),KQ Classic ($12) – Kyle’s Quest is a fun old-school palm RPG engine. Lots of games built using these two programs, also from CF game pack.
• NesEm ($15) – Relatively expensive (nevermind, they dropped the price!) but it sure is fun to play old NES games on the go. It’s how I realized how much I hated Zelda II.
• OpenChess (Free) – Looks to be a decent chess game based on GnuChess2. Haven’t played it much, but I like the fact that it supports multiple engines.
• ScummVM (Free) – Pretty amazing, but ScummVM plays pretty well, actually. I need to go through and actually play Monkey Island all the way through now. Or maybe Sam and Max hit the road? Lots of possibilities…
• Snails ($20) – Looks nice, but replay value really isn’t all that high. Wouldn’t recommend, though maybe if I played the multi-player more often it would be more fun.
• Solitaire (free – with 680) – For a free game, I suppose it’s not bad.
• Sudoku (free) – Why pay for a palm sudoku program? This free one has been around forever and the author is constantly adding new features. Highly recommended if you like playing Sudoku. One of the commercial competitors actually registered a new domain name just for their product because they were being beaten out in google searches by this version. And I guarantee you the author didn’t do any SEO, people just like it more. Only thing I could ask would be that it be open source. Oh well.
• The Quest ($20) – My latest addiction I’ve already mentioned. Super great RPG.
• Warfare Inc ($30) – Classic, but still a great (and great looking) game. RTS is the vein of C&C. The map editor and ability to download new levels really keeps this one fun. Not sure I’d pay full price for it, but then again, I’m pretty sure I used a coupon when I first bought it.
• X3 (free) – Unfortunately, the grand idea of a game supported by its users didn’t go very far. That said, the game was a solid start. I think if they’d open-sourced it, they might have really been able to find out what a fan-supported game would do. Good luck finding any info on this game. If you want the game itself, leave a comment and I’ll email it to you.

Utilities

• CardTXT (free) – Decent little palm text editor
• Resco Explorer ($14 on sale if purchased before 01/10/07) – Yet another file manager I don’t need. Unfortunately, none of the others that I’ve found allow you to edit the file associations in the palm and that’s becoming increasingly important to me. Of course, it does handle zips as well and so the price is actually pretty good since it saves having to buy other tools to handle that.
• Filez (Free) – the classic is still great
• IconMgr (free) – Very useful utility used to modify icon databases of many other programs (like iSecure)
• RsrcEdit (free ?) – Free depending on when you downloaded it and who you got it from, RsrcEdit occasionally reboots my treo when handling some files, but it’s still incredibly useful for poking around and changing the internals of programs live on the fly.
• SiED (Free) – Decent text editor/reader, but it has a nasty habit of associating itself with file types which can cause the built in Blazer browser to be unable to view php, for example (use Resco above to fix by removing the association or setting it back to blazer). It looks like there is a new nightly build but the directory permissions need to get fixed for it to work again. I might see if the association problem is or can be easily fixed (go open source!) once that’s up again.
• Zlauncher ($20) – Built in file browser and the many other tools are useful, but not really all that necessary. I find that lately I might as well be using the built-in launcher and it wouldn’t impact me much.

Network

• Chatter Email ($40) – Even without the free upgrades for life it would be worth every penny. Light years better than the built in versamail. Three cheers for IMAP idle!
• pSSH (Free) – Because some of us have fingers small enough to type pretty quickly on the treo keyboard. And I do have an external keyboard for times when the laptop is unaccessible. Hasn’t been updated in a while probably because it hasn’t needed to be. Does everything I could want.
• Opera (free) – Not a bad browser, I just can’t get myself used to using their interface it’s so different from the standard palm style interface.
• Vagablog (Free) – Interface doesn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles of some of the other palm blogging programs, but it’s fast and light and I really like being able to post drafts from my palm whenever an idea hits me. Most of my last half dozen posts or so started out as a one or two line summary vagablog post in draft that I then fleshed out the next time I got to a PC.

PIM

• Directory Assistant (free) – Needs some tweaks to work better with the 680, but worked great for the 650.
• Converter (free) – Convert all types of units
• Docs2Go (included with 680) – Nice to be able to open/edit office documents and PDFs on the go if I need to.
• Plucker (Free) – Even though I’ve got online access from the Treo, Plucker the offline html viewer is incredibly handy. I convert all sorts of ebooks into plucker format for on-the-go reading. Besides, given the limited power on the 680, using the network for reading things I can convert ahead of time and throw in my memory card is silly.
• GoogleMaps (free) – In a native palm format, finally! Amazingly nice. If I have to go back to using a web proxy, this app alone might cause me to spring for a more expensive data plan.
• iSecure (Free) – The successor to Secure It, iSecure is a great open source secure archive solution. I use it for logging not only usernames and passwords, but bank account information, anything sensitive I don’t want to forget.
• Shadow Plan ($16-$22 depending on if you get the desktop components) – I always get the feeling I’m not using shadow plan to its fullest potential, but the ability to export to XML and directly convert to other mind-mapping software formats is really really attractive.
• MyBible ($10 reader only–each translation or document extra) – I’d like to investigate other palm bible programs, but unfortunately I’m locked into this because of the sheer number of purchases I’ve made in this format. This, boys and girls, is why DRM and other forms of lock-in are bad. They limit the ability of the marketplace to adapt, letting you get stuck in ruts like this software that hasn’t been substantially improved on in years and years despite major upgrade numbers (and even for-pay upgrades). Don’t get me wrong — at one time this was the best software out there and it’s still good, but if there was something better I couldn’t really consider moving to it unless they had a trade-in program for all my existing bibles.

Posted by Jordan on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 5:29 pm.