Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 16 Mar 2004 08:51:34 GMT
I upgraded to 10.3.3 over lunch today, and everything seemed to go well. The network browsing support in the Finder is nice, and things seem slightly zippier across the board.
It took me a couple hours to notice the first problem: I can no longer sync my palm (Sony Clie T615c) via the cradle. Something, somewhere is missing, and the palm times out without connecting to the sync software on the computer. Google is nice, but it’s worthless when you’re looking for problems in software that’s only 2 hours old.
Fortunately, the cradle problem isn’t fatal–my PowerBook is old enough that it still has an IR port, so I can use it for syncing. It’s slower, but it works well enough, and I’ve done it before, when I’ve forgotten to drag the cradle home from work. It’s aggravating, though.
At this point, I’m just counting the days until Palm introduces something exciting enough to get me to replace this old Sony. What I want is a union of the Tungsten C and the Tungsten T3. Bluetooth and 802.11, a big screen and a keyboard, and the fast CPU and big RAM that the two share.
Posted in Mac stuff, Handheld and PDA | Tags clie, macosx, palm, sync | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 09 Mar 2004 10:40:31 GMT
My poor, overworked palm (actually a Sony Clie, but it runs PalmOS) lost its memory overnight one night last week; I think something in my pocket was hitting the power button and ran the battery dead. With Palms (and Pocket PCs), one the battery goes, everything in memory goes too, and you basically have to re-install from a backup before you can use it again. Fortunately, syncing your palm performs a backup, but it isn’t 100% reliable, and it doesn’t actually back up everything; when I restored the palm, it lost a few changes that I’d made late in the day before my last sync. Sony ships their Clies with a backup tool that can back up to a memory stick, but it’s slow and you have to run it by hand. And everyone knows that backup that require manual intervention never really happen.
So I did a bit of searching, and found that BackupBuddyVFS is almost universally recommended for Palm backups. It’s faster then Sony’s backup solution, and it can run automatically at a fixed time every night.
Posted in Handheld and PDA | Tags backupbudy, clie, palm | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 26 Feb 2004 09:29:37 GMT
I’ve finally settled on a set of Palm-based organization programs. As mentioned before, I’m using Life Balance for managing my to-do lists. It’s kind of an odd program, and it still needs some work, but the basic concept is wonderfully simple. You use its outline view to define goals (“earn a living,” “spend time with family and friends”) and then fill in details under the goals. For example, I have a number of ongoing and upcoming projects at work, plus infrastructure things like “fill out timesheet.” Each branch of this tree has an importance attached to it, so you can say things like “this sub-tree is very important to its parent” or “this sub-tree isn’t very important at all.” The cool part is that Life Balance can then take this outline and sort it into a simple linear to-do list, showing the most important things at the top. It’s not 100% perfect, but with a small bit of tuning, it’s usefully close. It knows how to handle deadlines, so tasks bubble up the list as the deadline gets closer, and it can handle recurring to-do items. Rather uniquely, it tries to balance the priorities of your different goals, so if you’re getting tons of items completed on your work list, it can bump up the priority of non-work items in an attempt to remind you to be a more balanced person, if that’s what you desire.
The story behind Life Balance is kind of interesting–apparently the author was a VAX sysadmin, and wrote the program in an attempt to regain control of her life while on-call for work. I can certainly sympathize. Apparently I’m not the only one–there have been several positive reviews of Life Balance released recently.
Life Balance runs on Windows and the Mac, as well as on the Palm. Each piece is licensed separately. It seems to sync well on the Mac. There are rumors of a PocketPC version appearing at some point.
For managing my calendar, I’ve replaced the Palm’s DateBook with Agendus. It’s a comprehensive calendar/to-do/contact-management app that is aimed more towards sales types then programmers, but it does a really nice job of displaying upcoming events. I used to lust after the PocketPC “Today” screen, but Agendus more then fills that gap with a zillion different ways to view calendar and to-do items. You can view days one at a time, one or two weeks at a time in a grid, list, or graphical free/busy block view, a month at a time, quarterly, view lists of upcoming events 1/2/7/14/30 days in the future, view isolated lists of to-do items or have them integrated into the calendar view, plus a few others that I’m missing. It supports small fonts at least on PalmOS 5 and Clies running PalmOS 4. I really like the way it looks, and the ability to use small fonts means that you can see a lot of detail on the screen at a time.
Plus, since Life Balance can sync its sorted to-do list with the Palm’s native to-do database, you can view Life Balance items with deadlines on Agendus’s calendar and mark them complete directly from Agendus. The two programs integrate beautifully together.
I’m happy with the two programs, but I have a couple things that I’d like to see improved, mostly in Life Balance. First and foremost, it really needs to be updated with the ability to use smaller fonts on the Palm. It’s hard to tell what’s going on in the outline view because the text is so big that you can only see a handful of lines at a time. Entertainingly, the Mac desktop version suffers from the same basic problem–it has so much window-dressing that it’s hard to see your whole outline at once. Both of these need to be fixed soon.
All in all, though, I’m happy with both programs and bought both of them.
Posted in Handheld and PDA | Tags agendus, clie, lifebalance, palm, pim | no comments
