Ipsa scientia potestas est

Time has really flown for me since I first received my U.S. Robotics Palm 5000. I still remember my father asking me, “Now what are you going to use THAT for?” Garnet OS (Palm OS) has lasted about 12 years now, and is still (imho) the single most versatile OS for a phone. Period.

Some dissenters may say that the Blackberry, or iPhone, or even the Newton is better than PalmOS based devices. Use whatever device makes you happy, but I am about to give you my master list of applications, and why I use (or don’t use) each one. When you’re finished reading the list, complete with explanations, you may or may not agree with me. Either way the Treo 700p running PalmOS, as of this posting, is a metaphorical “Swiss Army Phone”.

• 4cast

4cast, a weather application made by shsh.com provides some pretty impressive options and functionality. For example, the interval at which the weather data is collected is user-definable. It also has the ability to disconnect from the data-service after collection of info in case you’re concerned about data usage. Also built-in to the weather app is the ability to pull down close-up weather-service Doppler maps. A bit more impressive than the weather app in the iPhone no?

• ActiveSync

Now this app almost doesn’t count because it is built-in to newer PalmOS versions, but I list it because the iPhone simply didn’t come with it. How are business users, who require email/calendar connectivity supposed to use the iPhone? As a second phone to their Blackberry or Treo? That is ridiculous. Use one device.

• Backup Buddy VFS

Backup Buddy VFS is one of the most useful applications I have on my phone. It allows me to, on a predefined schedule, backup my entire phone to my SDIO card in an unattended fashion. I don’t ever worry about hard-crashing my phone with beta testing or h4×0r1ng because I always have a FULL backup of the entire phone right in my hand. The wireless could die or I could be out of service, my SIM card could die, and yet.. I can still retreive 100% minus changes made since my (usually 3am) last backup. Hard-crash your Blackberry on the road without your laptop? Screwed. Hard-crash your iPhone without access to a laptop? Screwed.

• CallFilter

CallFilter, in summation, allows a user to perform (mostly) arbitrary actions on pre-defined schedules based on wildcards and substrings found in either CallerID numbers or call-groups, or wildcards and substrings found in the subject or body of SMS messages. Phew that was a mouthful. Why would this be useful? Heres a really basic one: You only want to carry one phone for both work and home and you find yourself on vacation. You want all calls or SMS messages from work to go to voicemail or not bother you while letting through calls and messages from family and friends. Impossible? No. Can I do this with any other phone on the market, not by a long-shot.  No images here.  Sorry.

• CallRec

This next application has some serious legal implications as it enables the user to violate California Penal Code 632. While I do not use, nor promote the usage of this application, I simply HAD to list it because of its… well.. usefulness. CallRec is an application which can seamlessly and transparently record phone calls made or received on the Treo without any sort of party notification. CallRec stores the bi-directional recording in RIFF (little-endian) data: WAVE audio, ITU G.711 mu-law, mono with a user pre-defined Hz, with option to compress the waveform. Can your Blackberry do this? I didn’t think so.

• Converter

Most phones have some kind of unit conversion application which ships by default. This application simply dessimates all other conversion applications with the ability to convert the following categories:

1. Acceleration (e.x. mph/sec to ft/sec²)
2. Angle (e.x. seconds to radians)
3. Area (e.x. yards² to hectacres)
4. Clothing (e.x. Japanese to USA)
5. Computer (e.x. nibbles to petabytes)
6. Density (e.x. grams/meter³ to pounds/inch³)
7. Energy (e.x. ergs to kilocalories IT)
8. Flow (e.x. ft³/min to litres/sec)
9. Force (e.x. millinewton to kip-force)
10. Fuel Consumption (e.x. litres/100km to miles/gal US)
11. Length (e.x. angstroms to naut. miles to furlongs)
12. Numbers (e.x. binary to octal to hexidecimal to Roman)
13. Power (e.x. watts to donkeys to megawatts)
14. Pressure (e.x. mmH²0 39.2°F to kilopascals)
15. Radioactivity (e.x. becquerel to rutherford)
16. Shoes (e.x. USA Female to UK)
17. Speed - Angular (e.x. degree/sec to turn/min)
18. Speed - Linear (e.x. inches/sec to knots)
19. Temperature (e.x. celsius to kelvin)
20. Time (e.x. nanoseconds to staff months)
21. Torque (e.x. dyne cms to Newton metres)
22. Volume (e.x. millilitres to pints UK to cubic yards)
23. Weight (carats to stones to tones SHORT)

• DateBk6

Datebook 6 radically enhances calendaring by adding features as linking contacts to events and adding special fonts, colors and icons to custom alarms. I won’t go on and on as most of you already use this app.

• FileZ

FileZ is a small-footpring file manager for both the ROM and removable media. One of the nice things about this file manager is that it allows you to beam or send via Bluetooth protected applications. The built-in file manager disallows this action.  No images here, sorry.

• GoogleMaps

Not much to say about this one. You already know what this does.

• HoliDates

Convenient application which allows the user to load Federal, Christian, Islamic or Jewish Holidays into the Calendar. Helpful for planning vacations.

• IPcalc

I work as an IT Manager, and I constantly have to work with IP addresses and CIDR notation. I do not keep the formula in my head for calculating the Cisco wildcard or how many subnets are in a /11. Thanks to Alan Jay Weiner of ajw.com, IPCalc may be used to perform all of these IP calculations. Sometimes I find myself needing to know the broadcast address in MacOS, and yet it isn’t displayed. The broadcast address can be calculated off of the subnet mask and the IP address.

• MultiUserHack

MultiUserHack allows the user to, per application, pre-determine the username which the application calculates for the device. This enables for example the game “Tradewinds” to think the username of the device might be “ralphus” at the same time the application “datebk6″ thinks the username of the device is “dmess0r”. This can be useful for many reasons, but more often than not MultiUserHack is used to “trick” the target application for pre-computed serial-number purposes.

• pssh

pssh, although chock-full of warnings regarding its pseudo-random number generator, is probably the best SSH application for the Treo. Others exist such as TGssh and TuSSH but pssh supports multiple font sizes as well as private key authentication. Unfortunately neither pssh, nor any other handheld ssh application includes agent-forwarding (talk about irritating.)

• Pocket Tunes

Here is an instance where the iPhone has the Treo beat pretty hard. Pocket Tunes is the best audio player on the market for the Treo. Interestingly enough not only does it play audio, it can be hooked into CallFilter, and selected tunes can be played based upon pre-defined rules. Example, if you receive a text message from a monitoring system that includes the word “Critical” in the subject line, you could have CallFilter hook into Pocket Tunes and play an appropriate tune. Lastly, pTunes supports playlists from streaming audio servers. Now I can listen to KDFC or 80s metal FM! Nice.

• quickTake

quickTake is the application I used to make all of the scerenshots used in this post. Pretty self-explanatory.  No images here, sorry.

• Reset Doctor

A new application for me, Reset Doctor is an application which helps manage crashes, cache and preference backups. I use it primarily for the cache management and crash logging.

Here is an example: On 2007/11/30 my Treo crashed, but I wasn’t sure why. I was running a HotSync and for some reason it rebooted. I checked out Reset Doctor’s crash logging, which I had enabled, and found that the following error occurred:

Essentially I was able to determine that running a HotSync, while another application had the preference db open is a nono. I figured that one out pretty quickly and proceeded to HotSync cleanly.

• SplashID

SplashID, simply put, is a desktop-sync’able encrypted database of authentication information. What does this mean? It means you can store logins, passwords, URLs, or credit card numbers safely. SplashID desktop exists for MacOS as well as Windows, so portability is no problem. Use it.

• TakePhone

The *only* reason I have TakePhone on my Treo is for the ultra-rare occasion when I need to “attack-dial” a busy phone number. Example, Zachary’s Pizza only has a single line for taking orders. They do so much business that they don’t care for another number or a phone pool. TakePhone has an interesting option which allows me to put the phone on speaker-phone, set it down on the table, and let the phone redial the busy number until it begins to ring. No more hang-up redial hang-up redial crap.

• VeriChat

The Trillian or Adium of PalmOS. Enough said.

• VolumeCare

The purpose of VolumeCare is to pre-set volume levels for the Handset, the SpeakerPhone, the Headset, and the Microphone Volume. Pretty basic application but it makes the user-experience that much better.

• ZLauncher

ZLauncher is a PalmOS system management program that integrates the system supervisor, application/database manager and expansion card manager. I think Obi-wan Kenobi described it best when he was explaining what “The Force” is.

The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. … It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

One can also make the interface look really, really good.

Here is my “Main” view:

Here is the “System” view with a few more icons. Notice the side bar is missing because I’ve opted for this more compact view.

Here we can see the auto-hidden taskbar where you can tap and drag icons to perform actions. From left to right:

Move to Category, New Tab, Beam, Info, Recycle

Here we can see me dragging the pssh icon over to the “info” tab to retrieve information about the .prc file.

Here we see me dragging the “IPcalc” application to the “Beam” task, which would effectively beam the application via IR.

Here is a quick shot of one of the preference tabs to illustrate how I modified a theme to get the information I needed at a quick glance.

Finally, for giggles, here is my dialer screen as of this posting. I think I found this image somewhere on deviantart.com.

On a seperate tanget yet completely related: Not “applications” per say, but certain capabilities which are also incredibly useful:

• The filesystem which is placed upon unformatted SDIO cards is FAT32. Although not my favorite filesystem, it is supported under MacOS, Windows, and Linux. This means filesystem portability across platforms.
• The backlit screen is so bright, I use it as a flashlight sometimes when trying to navigate in the dark.
• The combination of the phone not being a clamshell design, the ability to turn off the shutter-sound camera/video, combined with the ability to dim the screen down so dark that the phone appears “off” enables the user to take video and photos with aggressive discretion.
• Most every application which runs under PalmOS is very small in application size and memory footprint by todays standards. The apps are lean and run efficiently in tight restrictions.
• Not touted as a strong-point, but insanely important to me: The ability to hotsync with multiple computers without needing to destroy data. No strict pairing.
• Beaming contacts, address appointments, or schedules via IR and sending applications via Bluetooth to other devices is also useful. Let’s say I have an irregular schedule in my calendar, complete with notes and alarms. I have the ability to beam via IR the schedule and all ancillary data to another target PalmOS device. Lastly, lets say I have a contact list group called “Clients”. I have the ability to select the group and beam it, in its entirety, along with all ancillary data to a target device running PalmOS. Not many PDAs other than ones running PalmOS can perform this feat.
• The ability to modem-tether the phone via bluetooth to a laptop. Zero cord wireless internet. Especially useful for those of you who have unlimited data plans.

After this entire post, think about whether or not your iPhone or Blackberry (or whatever smartphone you have) can jump through the kinds of flaming hoops I have put my Treo through. Not everyone has the kinds of requirements which I do, but then again, there aren’t many people who are in my slippers right now. Enjoy.