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Archive and Re-install

This weekend I took the plunge and decided it was time to reinstall the system on my Powerbook. I had been suffering from Kernal panics for a while but hoping magically and pathetically it would go away with some system cleansing. I was wrong. Every few days or even sooner I’d be greeted by a hard freeze.

Archive and Re-install turned out to be an amazing option! My system retained ALL my personal settings and I only had to resinstall Stuffit Deluxe and The Missing Sync – both which had saved and installed themselves at the system level. I did have to re-download all the updates from Apple since 10.3 had been released, but that was pretty easy. I am happy to report no issues since and my computer is actually running beautifully again!

The only clue I have as to what caused my issue is uControl — a really nice way to utilize the trackpad as a scrolling device. When I tried to re-install it I was told it was not supported by my system. Would have been nice of course if it had deactivated itself previously instead of (possibly) causing my issue. I am using Sidetrack as a replacement but still getting used to it.

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The Potential of SIP

There’s a great new post by Chris Holland at The Broadband Daily on the potential of SIP or Session Initiation Protocol. SIP is currently being used by some VOIP providers and can provide a path for IM, Voice and Video as well as file transfer. The beauty is that it’s realtime unlike email. However just like email, it’s quite easy to use.

A SIP address looks just like an e-mail address. It uniquely identifies an Internet user, and encapsulates all information needed to attempt to get in real-time touch with them.

The ramifications of this protocol are far reaching.

Until SIP came along, it was only possible to easily get in real-time touch with somebody within closed, proprietary ecosystems: the traditional telephone system, ICQ, AOL Instant Messaging, Yahoo Instant Messaging, MSN Instant Messaging, Skype, CU Seeme, to name a very few. Each one possesses its own separate concept of a user%u2019s identity and proprietary communications protocols. Users of those closed systems can only communicate with other users of the same system. As a result, entering the real-time communications field was only restricted to a small resourceful elite.

Thanks to open standards and protocols such as DNS, SIP, and SRV records, just about anybody can now become a provider of real-time communications while enabling their members to be globally reachable on the Internet.

SIP allows real-time communications to follow the same adoption path as e-mail. [Broadband Daily]

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Bejeweled 2.0

I was very pleased to see Bejeweled 2.0 ($19.95 from Astraware) arrive in my inbox Sunday! I had a serious addiction to the original game and had been looking forward to the release of the sequel since I learned it was in development.

It’s a great advance from 1 to 2.0, though one caveat. You can’t run it on a low-res device. Bejeweled requires a high res screen so Treo 600 users are out of luck. Fortunately, I also have a T3 here in my gadget lab, so I’ve been able to play… and play! Actually – one more caveat. I like the music so far, but miss some of the intensity I felt when playing the first game as time threatened to run out. The music is now much more ambient and does not pace with the game clock.

Bejeweled 2.0 has 4 modes (Classic, Action, Puzzle and Endless) of play which is two more than the previous game and things can get quite a bit more complex. The original work is still there, just enhanced with better graphics, transitions, features and sound. The new power gems make for some exciting combinations and effects and can push you further than you might have previously risked before clearing a series in order to get the bonus!

In my humble opinion, this game meets the few requirements I have for games in the puzzle genre – simple, yet continuously addictive play with high repeat value. I found myself victim to the Tetris effect – close your eyes after a long session and you can still see the game board with the pieces moving! Puzzle mode adds a good degree of difficulty and gives you more of a brain teaser as well. I’ve taken a variety of screen shots for you…

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Agendus 9.0

Iambic released Agendus 9.0 today and it continues to be offered in two flavors – Pro and Standard. As a long time user I decided to give it a try once again to see if I really did want to give up full Meg of storage for a Calendar / Todo / Contact / SMS / Memo Application. The short answer is that I still don’t want to.

Agendus is a sophisticated application that enables cross linking of functions which is a great advantage to most Palm users. I was very happy with it through a few Palm devices and though I would like it on my Treo as well having installed the previous version as well. Version 9 adds more sophistication (and size) but does not in my opinion work so well on the Treo which makes it hard to give up such precious memory for little advantage.

The Pro version includes Agendus Mail / SMS which is not something I want to use, but you have no way to not install that component. (I did notice after install and expansion of the app, you can delete the Agendus Mail component as well as Tiny Sheet) I wanted to try the wireless options for both the weather and Quotes of the Day, but neither would update for me which is pretty annoying. I also found myself looking at a waiting message a lot as Agendus thought about what to do next in between trying to update or switching views. This kills the speed and simplicity I’ve come to expect from the Palm platform and especially on my Treo which actually has a robust UI designed to take advantage of the platform (5-way and keyboard).

One final nit I have is that my email application of choice – ChatterEmail is not supported as a helper so I am unable to enable that aspect of things to email from a contact or view messages waiting from the Today screen. Agendus is still a nice looking application — if you have a device with the space and power to manage all that it offers you might like it.

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Crazysoft offers Palm Software rentals

According to the Crazysoft newsletter and website, you can now rent any game from Crazysoft. This is a new spin for Palm software and should be interesting to see if anyone else follows… The policy at Crazysoft seems like a good one. You rent for a low price ($2.95) and unlimited access to the software as if it were a full purchased version. The only restriction is that it can only be run 50 times. You can re-rent the same title up to 5 times before it automatically becomes a full version.

By renting a game (2.95$) you will have:

  1. FULL ACCESS to the game. (Like the full version)
  2. NO TIME LIMITS! (Play whenever you wish)
  3. You may start 50 new games and then the rental code will expire.
  4. If you rent the same game for the 5th time then the rental version automatically becomes a FULL version.

I like demo software and have endured my share of long wait times on things I’ve for some reason just chosen not to purchase and this would force my hand a bit to see if I really wanted something or not after I had used it a bunch of times. It seems like a great idea for a small publisher, though the flip side is that since you need to pay to play (literally in this case) you might not be as likely to simply try something new.

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Healing Mail.app

My Mail.app had been acting strange… HTML newsletters from Apple sent to either my main email or my .Mac account never displayed as HTML and my IMAP accounts were giving consistent errors on launch and then lately Mail was not able to Quit without a force quite so I finally decided to take some action…

In doing a google search for my IMAP error – “IMAP command “SELECT” failed” I found very few options to fix things other than trying to add INBOX. to the IMAP Path Prefix: in Advanced options. Immediately I lost all my folders! My server folders all went away since they were not sub folders from the Inbox (that’s what the . means) so I had to go back, undo the change to the path prefix and move the folders to become subfolders from the Inbox. Moving back again, I noticed that my IMAP error on Launch was gone, but I was still unable to quit without Force Quit and this caused the mailboxes to have to rebuild each time driving me crazy with duplicate messages getting displayed again and again as I tested abck and forth. There were times when I was unable to get Mail to really even start… well it would start, but not clear past the initial load of mailboxes and message lists. Mail could be sent at this time, but not received. You can imagine the pain…

My only course of action for the moment was to open Thunderbird which worked great. IMAP enabled everything to just be there which is most excellent and I’d be happy in Thunderbird in general except for one glaring omission… You can’t sync it with your Palm on Mac. 1.0RC was released today which I upgraded to as soon as I saw it and my .9 preferences easily migrated and things were OK. I missed Mail though.

It occurred to me that one thing I had not tried yet was the ol’ kill the preferences trick. Before doing that I decided to eliminate any bundles (~Library/Mail/Bundles) not really needed for now (PGP, HTTPlugin) and then went to the local store of mail (~Library/Mail) and checked some things out. I actually had some old stuff lying in there. I recall my move from a previous machine and had POP folders from before my switch to IMAP as well for some of the same accounts. I archived that stuff and trashed the local copies and was ready to kill the preference file.

Amazingly (or perhaps not) this fixed my problem. Mail.app launched without error, mailboxes as they had originally been and I’ve received a few Apple emails today and they all came through just fine. I even received another HTML newsletter I had previously been seeing only the text to link online. I did have to accounts other my .Mac mail, but the messages were there even though it might initially scare some to see such a clean view at first. I can again quit the app without issue and restart it quickly to begin once again doing my thing.

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AvantGo comes back to life

I just learned that there’s a recently activated AvantGo Beta program and decided to give an old friend another chance… I was hooked on AvantGo early in my Palm days and even used VirtualPC to sync it before there was a proper Mac conduit. There’s still no proper Mac conduit directly from the source, but it’s simple for non-Windows users today if you use a wireless device (you can do it over the air) or on Mac OS X you can use Missing Sync with the MAL conduit as I’ve done.

The latest beta is version 5.7 Build 26. I am not completely certain, but I think it’s the first real release since the company was acquired by iAnywhere. I had given the previous version 5.5 a run, but was really not that psyched with how it worked on my Treo – limited 5-way support and it just did not look all that great.

This latest release fully supports the Treo and allows for much great account management on the device itself. You can now fully customize the display order for channels and even browse the entire collection of available channels from your device which is a very nice addition and enables mostly computer free control. While you can choose to surf or sync the channels you have selected (or any site actually since it is a browser after all) with a live connection, you will be more impressed if you use AvantGo in an offline capacity as the speed in which pre-cached content loads is great.

AvantGo existed before RSS came into the mainstream and it looks like it just might keep on pushing to bring professionally formatted content down to your device with each sync. You can easily read news or site updates from a variety of sources during your commute or simply just killing a few minutes. You’ll need about 2MB of free space in order to install the required .prc files and store content from your account. If you’ve paid for the premium level of service you can keep up to 8MB of information — assuming you have that much free space.

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Command thy Treo (or T3) via Voice

I had actually heard of VoiceLauncher at an earlier stage, but finally gave it a whirl tonight… It absolutely works! The only noise in the room I did my tests was the steady static from a baby monitor. I was able to easily program a few speed dials and call them into action without any searching about which could certainly come in handy for in-car activity when you are trying to be a safety conscious type. There were a few hitches, but these were easily resolved with another recording of the command.

Voice command is a very handy thing to have at times and something I’ve made great use of it on my laptop in the past following an injury and a cast that left me one-handed and unable to really type. We are pretty far from that level of interaction (no text transcription) on a Palm, but for opening applications, panels or simply calling a number it’s quite easy to see the value here.

The app is an amazing 99 Kb and your voice profiles and actions can easily be stored on an SD card. Treo 650 users shouldn’t have anything to worry about if they are interested in checking this one out.

There is a major new release of Jean-Francois Morreeuw’s best selling program VoiceLauncher available! The new version 0.8.5 works with the Treo 600, Treo 650 and the Tungsten 3 (on both the simulators and the real devices!!!). Now you can save database to an SD card, launch a phone call in handsfree mode, utlize newly enhanced recognition capabilities and a new normalization feature (for users who don’t read the tutorial to have a working database), the microphone sensitivity is more accurate, and several small bugs have been fixed!

Application Description

VoiceLauncher is the very first voice recognition application publicly announced and made available for palmOne Treo600 and palmOne Treo650. VoiceLauncher has been fully designed to take advantage of palmOne Treo600 and palmOne Treo650 specific features: 5-way navigator, phone application, signal and battery indicators just to give few examples.

VoiceLauncher can launch applications, panels and phone calls. It can dial through any helper compatible application, and is fully integrated with TAKEphONE phone application, allowing features likes pauses in phone numbering. [mytreo.net ]

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eReader goes RSS

I’ve been enjoying the content at eReader on my various Palms for a while now and am glad to see this addition. I love the link right to the shopping cart! I’ll still have to subscribe to the newsletter for now, since that’s where you get the weekly discount code. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until that also makes its way to the RSS, though they’ll lose some sense of who they are communicating with since I’ve yet to see RSS get to personalized in the way email has been capable for years.

The folks at eReader have added an RSS feed so you can see all the new releases each week. They also include a link to add the book directly to your shopping cart. Excellent use of RSS. [Michael Gartenberg]

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Memory Issue or usage Issue?

By now you might have heard of the potential memory issue for Treo users moving from a 600 or even just another Palm device. The hitch is that the Treo 650 like the Tungsten T5 uses a type of memory called Non-Volatile File System, which enables your Treo or T5 to keep everything you have if the battery runs out or if you switch batteries on your Treo. This is a great new security addition and something I certainly welcome. While I honestly can’t recall the last time any of my Palm devices ran out of juice completely — perhaps not since my m505 or even Vx. I’ve had few since then (TC, T3 and Treo 600) all of which were always safely turned off if I reached the danger point without a cradle or charge cable in sight.

Because of the new file system / memory, the new Treo and T5 maintain a constant backup and as a result write large block sizes (512kb to be exact) so programs and data from previous palms will get rounded up to 512 and eat more space that you had previously thought. For now you have to pay to play… hopefully there will be a fix for some of the more widely used applications to maintain a more trim file if possible.

In the meantime, I’d suggest a good look at what you run on your device and consider how your usage might even change as you migrate to something better. T5 users probably don’t have to worry much since you’ll be enjoying close to 256MB of space, but the 32MB (actually less…) on the Treo might be less than you were hoping to work with…

I’ve found a few things have changed as I’ve moved to a Treo and as I’ve thought about the potential issues with the Treo 650, I’ve already changed what apps I use and think you might as well as you make the adjustment to a new way of working with a Treo. First… Since you’ve got a Treo, consider using it the way it was intended… without a stylus whenever possible. This enable the power and ease of one-handed operation through the 5-way and will really (at least for me) highlight the value of certain apps.

I’ve been a longtime Agendus user.. but have been continually frustrated by the lack of full support on the Treo. I love the professional look and icons, but have actually found myself using it less as I’ve toyed with other options and today actually made the move and deleted (over 1MB of stuff) it from my Treo. Instead, I am using 2Day, by ShSh, which provides a simple 1 screen glance at what’s on my calendar, the day’s weather (from 4Cast also from ShSh) items in my todo list, the number of messages in my inbox (from ChatterEmail as well as other apps), SMS indications and many more features. Its’ fully customizable like all good applications and very easy to use. I can just as easily view today as I can add events. There’s terrific integration with TakePhone another ShSh application I’ve been playing with which enhances your contact and phone applications by making it easy to make calls, view call lists, as well as add or change contact info.

The other major switch I’ve made recently leading to a nice space savings was removing Silver Screen and switching to Initiate, formerly Arrow Launcher from Hobbyist Software. Initiate lets you simply tap the keypad to hit the application, contact, music file or even bookmark on your Treo or SD card. Since it can read the memory card, you can easily move things to the /Palm/Programs directory and have access from there beyond the normal device limits. No need for PowerRun, or any other helper to get to the card. BTW — Butler is another great utility for the Treo… it can handle quite a few tasks including enhacing the reminders on your unit as well as keyboard shortcuts and travel alarms.

I have also taken a serious look at what else I’ve just let sit around without being used and actually was able to easily save a few MBs of space by just being diligent. I don’t use AvantGo – gone. Have not been traveling – killed SF from my Vindigo list and just kept NYC. Games I had not played – gone.

The thing about the Treo I’ve found is that it’s a powerful and unique device. My usage has been primarily communications (email, IM, browsing some RSS), with a twist of entertainment (ebooks, photos etc) and some information management (Life Balance and SplashID) on the side. It suits what I’ve needed and I fully expect the new one to easily handle my needs as well.

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Delicious Library

It’s finally here! I’ve just downloaded it and am looking forward to giving this a shot – could be the ultimate catalogue app ever!

Run your very own library from your home or office using our impossibly simple interface. Delicious Library’s digital shelves act as a visual card-catalog of your books, movies, music and video games. A scan of a barcode is all Delicious Library needs to add an item to your digital shelves, downloading tons of info from the internet like the author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover. Import your entire library using our exclusive full-speed iSight video barcode scanner, our Flic® Wireless Laser Bar Code Scanner, or (the slow way) entering the titles by hand. Once you have all of your items in your Mac, you can browse though your digital shelves, check stuff out to friends using Apple’s built-in Address Book and calendar, and find new items to read, watch, and play using Library’s recommendations. [Delicious Monster]

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Bit Torrent to the rescue

Last night my DVR crapped out(second time, second box), froze and decided to delete everything it had done since 7 am that day. We lost a few primetime programs which we had yet to watch or complete and I was at a loss for what to do (in order to prevent the wrath of my wife really) until I remember my friend Bit Torrent.

It’s amazing and wonderful that you can find such an abundance of programming, both from the past — and more importantly in this case totally current! I even found one of the shows we wanted to catch which had been captured in HD. It’s pretty cool people are contributing their work for others in this way… commercials even get edited out, so you don’t have to even consider fast forwarding… nice! Watching this back on the Home Theater via Eyehome even nicer!

With faster broadband, it would totally be possible to share in almost realtime. I believe in fact that via some form of P2P this is already happening in Korea where over 80% of the population has a broadband over 6MB. It took me all night and a bit of this morning to get both the shows I wanted (The Apprentice and C.S.I. in HD) since they are both an hour long, but this am, I was able to quickly snag the past two night The Daily Shows as well. With the popular stuff, there are quite a few people to connect to which really gets the transfer rates going…

Don’t forget to keep on seeding after you get what you need to keep it good for others.

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1001 for Flickr

Very cool new desktop client for Flickr… You can upload from your desktop or iPhoto as well as view updated photos from contacts and friends.

1001 is a desktop client to be used in conjunction with Flickr, the online photo-sharing website. 1001 not only uploads photos to your Flickr account, it notifies you anytime new photos from either your contacts, everyone, or your favorite tags are uploaded. 1001 allows you to step into the stream of photos passing through Flickr and to quickly see what’s new at the moment. Just run the app in the background and if triggered, 1001 pops up a small unobtrusive window to notify you of new photos. [Kula]

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DIY MMS

MMSLIB is a PHP library for decoding and encoding MMS (Multimedia Message Service) messages. Use it to create your own MMS Proxy-Relay, as the library author has done for his own Peffisaur (nee MMS Diary) app [MobileWhack]

There are many uses for this – like not paying for each message, not having your messages tracked and saved by your carrier or perhaps creating a service for anyone to use… 😉