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Palm Software

15th February 2005

Although I live in the free software world for my PC, I have happily paid money for Palm software. There are a few applications and games that have been well worth paying for:

CityTime World Time display. I find this very useful for keeping track of time between the USA (here) and Australia (family). And because it can display more than just two times, I also keep track of the time with friends in the UK and the UAE. Handy when trying to decide if it's okay to phone them right now. It also does some other neat stuff, like automatically shift the Palm into daylight savings mode. And when flying between continents, I can easily switch current time to the destination time. Great program.
DateBook Calendar enhancer. This is an add-on to the standard calendar that comes with the Palm. It gives you a calendar on steroids. I can store more data, display more on the screen, and keep track of things a lot better. It has the ability to merge your To-Do list as well, but I turn that feature off. It's customisable, and exceptionally useful.
Handbase Database. I've been using this database for a few years. It's easy to use and easy to set up new databases, plenty customisable, easy to search. I use this more than any other program for the Palm. It's indispensable. When it moved to a colour version, it also became very pretty. On the Palm III, the new pretty version was a lot slower, but on the m515, it's good enough. The only thing I wish they would improve was the reporting facilities. They mostly do reporting on the Windows side of things, after the data has been synced to Windows, but I don't use Windows and I rarely look at the data off the Palm. I want on-Palm reporting that is a little better than it is now. Other than that very tiny gripe, I love this program.
Bob's Calculator RPN-style calculator, based on the HP calculators. Good solid calculator, RPN style, but with graphics so it looks like a HP calculator. It's close to a HP11C, and does all that I want in a calculator. Not expensive, but well worth the money. This is now my calculator of choice.
Palm 16C RPN-style programmer's calculator, emulates the HP16C right down to the programming on it. Graphics aren't so hot, but the functionality is perfect. I'm impressed. Impressed enough to pay for it.
UnitConv Units Conversion. A solid, useful mini-app that does a good job and it's there when you need it.
City Maps Maps of various cities, and nifty software to help you navigate. I used it when I went to London early 2003. I still needed a paper map to get started. City Maps didn't have all the tiny little lanes and weird streets. But once I found where I was with the paper map and had a good known starting point, City Maps was useful in helping me plot how to get from place to another. Would I continue using it? Not sure. I find I like paper maps.
YahtC Dice game on steroids. I've always liked Yahtzee. I love this version. It's not just the standard game. It has challenges that require different techniques. Lots of variety, good, solid, robust software. I play this game at least daily.
Seahorse Games A large range of great card games. I bought the games pack and that gave me 12 of the best card games. I don't play all of them. I sometimes play Crazy 8s, Euchre, Blackjack Solitaire and Accordion. I play Monte Carlo often. I play Rummy all the time. The games are well thought out, with good displays, good gameplay by the Palm opponents, and they are fun.

There's also free software that I use that I couldn't do without.
Currency Currency conversion. Sad history to this one. It was written by one author, and then abandoned. Picked up by others, enhanced and maintained. Currently maintained. It's a good program. I used it while visiting the UK in early 2003, and it was excellent in telling me how much the money changers were ripping me off. I hope this program survives, because it's great and deserves to survive.
Plucker DOC/HTML/text reader. In my first few years with the Palm, I used a commercial DOC reader. Paid for it, too. Unfortunately, as they upgraded and improved their software, they went the Microsoft path and added facilities for viewing Microsoft Word and Excel documents, to the detriment of plain old DOC files (which are completely different to the Microsoft .doc extension files). But luckily for me, a new Open-Source program came on the scene - Plucker. Plucker is a wonderful program. You get it from freshmeat.net or straight from the Plucker web site. You can get the staright .prc file, the executable, or if you want, you can get the source code, and compile it on your Linux box using the gcc cross-compiler, if you want. And you can get some good ideas about Palm programming from the code. It reads DOC files. And you can create your own DOC files from text, HTML, anything. From what I read, you can even set up conduits and have regular HTML files downloaded and stored on the Palm for offline browsing. I don't do that, but I do use it to store work HTML documentation on the Palm, and to convert Project Gutenberg books into documents for reading on the Palm. Plucker is a very versatile Palm application, one that I am using more and more.

Where to find Palm software

If I'm hunting for new software for my Palm, something to satisfy an itch, I have a few places to search through:

[Palm Home] [Linux Home]