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So What's On My Palm Part Deux: Utilities

October 10, 2001

Just as there are plenty of great applications for the Palm OS platform, there are also a lot of utilities designed to make your handheld computing experience even better than it is right out of the box. Here’s a selection of the utility programs I’m using to “push the envelope” and get more things done with my Palm than it was originally designed to do.

The first, and most indispensible, is Launcher III from Bozidar Benc—it puts the standard Palm OS application launcher to shame. Launcher III provides a tabbed interface that lets you organize your Palm OS applications the way you want. And it also adds some handy little features such as a battery and memory guages, a trash can, and a handy date/time display. While I haven’t yet tried out the new shareware version that includes VFS support and shortcuts to help you better manage applications on storage cards, I will soon. Launcher III is available at Benc Software Productions.

JackFlash is an absolute lifesaver for me, for several reasons. As you can imagine, I test a lot of software. Even with a memory expansion card, I still need more room on my Palm m505. JackFlash lets me take advantage of the extra 1.7MB of Flash ROM that isn’t used by the device’s operating system. That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to store all of my top applications, such as ActionNames, Bonsai, DayNotez, and WordSmith, plus a few games tossed in for good measure. Even better, the programs stored in flash are safe, even if I have to do a hard reset. That can mean the difference between productivity and disaster if you are away from your computer and won’t be able to restore all of your applications and data for a while. You can get it at the Brayder web site.

If you’ve used your Palm OS device for any length of time at all, then you’ve probably heard about BackUpBuddy. If you don’t have it, get it now— you’ll be glad the next time you suffer a hard reset and find out that HoySync doesn’t necessarily back up all of your programs and data every time and you end up having to reconstruct things by hand. Registered users are also entitled to a copy of BackUp Buddy VFS, which is a program that resides entirely on your Palm and allows you to backup the entire device to a memory card. That means that as long as you back up regularly, your data is completely safe. Head on over to the Blue Nomad site today.

Beam Box is a handly little utility that allows you to beam almost anything to another Palm, even programs that supposedly aren’t beamable. A handy drop down menu that lets you see applications and databases by category and the ability to pick favorite apps makes it even easier. Just remember though, that you have to have a copy of Beam Box on the receiving Palm as well, in order for everything to work. Not a bad one to keep on hand, since it’s only 14K in size. It’s available at the developer’s web site.

McFile is a handy little file manager that just might remind you of Windows Explorer. It allows you to see all of the files on your Palm and on your memory card, if you happen to have an m50x or a Sony Clie. In fact it was originally written for the Clie, so you’ll see the choice of Palm or MS in the menus. And you can move, copy, and delete files with abandon, as well as create new directories on your expansion card. The author’s site is in Japanese, so you might want to get the program from here.

TealPaint isn’t strictly a utility program, though it is what I use to generate the screenshots for all of my reviews. It’s also a very nice drawing/paint program for the Palm, and if you have any interest in graphics you might want to check it out. It’s available from TealPoint Software.

The one thing that I wish my Palm had was a better text entry system. Since I’m stuck with Graffiti, I’m very thankful that WordComplete from CIC has come to the rescue. It automatically suggests words as I’m entering data, and it does an amazingly good job of knowing what I want to say. I have set it to make five suggestions after I have entered two letters, and the word I want is usually on the list so all I have to do is tap it and go on. Even better, I can add any word to the custom dictionary with two taps of my stylus. If you do a lot of data entry or writing on the run and can’t always find a flat surface for a keyboard, then you should try this program out now. You can grab it at CIC’s web site.

Last, but not least, we have XMaster, which is my favorite hack extension manager. That could have something to do with the fact that it’s freeware, or it could be just because it works incredibly well. You can download XMaster here, and you can find all sorts of hacks to use with it at several sites, including Handango and FreewarePalm. Some of my favorites include McPhling (a quick program launcher), AlarmBlinkHack (enables blinking and vibrating alarms in ActionNames, BugMe, etc.), PopUpTime (clock & other handy info in any app), PopUpCalculator (calculator in any app), and SafeHack (hides private records at power off).

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this short roundup of the utility programs that I use on my Palm. Next time it’ll be games!

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