Kenny did some comparisons of BackupBuddyVFS and BackupMan and posted them at PDA24/7. I thought they were a little harsh on BBVFS, so took the time to respond. Here is our exchange: TS: I think the BackupBuddy vs. BackupMan debate is very much like the Agendus vs. DateBk5 - they have different strengths so different people will find them differently suited to their needs. Which I why I

At the weekend I remembered that I owned a license for BugMe! which I bought when using a Clie with no Notepad. I stopped using it when I went back to Palms. Anyway, I decided to give it another run and have really enjoyed the ability to use different coloured ‘inks’ on a single note. I also find it writes more smoothly than Notepad, and the thumbnail view, though a bit slow, is very

Reply from Support at Softick: could I try it on a Windows box. I duly obliged and there was no need to reset betwene mounting the card and running a Hotsync. Took the Palm back to my Mac and it still would not Hotsync without a soft reset. Now that strikes me as very odd. Card Export must change some setting somewhere in the Palm's USB controller and not undo that change when it exits.

Browsing PalmAddict today I was interested by the many entries on the 'My top ten applications' theme. And lots of them mentioned YAPS, so I had to find out what it is: a freeware password manager with 256-bit encryption. It also comes with a cheap ($9.95) desktop viewer for Windows. I used to use the freeware STRIP (Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passords, since you asked), and YAPS

It is about time I got around to adding an RSS feed to this Blog. But RSS is not a technology I have used myself, so any advice or suggestions on how best to do it would be welcomed. I am also looking into making the archives searchable.

At last, I have found the solution!! It is an irritating feature of OS X that it keeps a separate trash can on each disk, but will not let the user empty these trash cans selectively: it is all or nothing when you come to emptying the trash. This is a real pain if you are moving music or photos to and fro from an SD card, because if you delete a file, the space is not freed up. The only way

Thanks to PDA24/7, I have found a report from the Dutch Palm Club who used the freeware VFS Mark to conduct a big survey of VFS access speeds on a variety of devices and with a variety of cards. All you need to know to understand the table is that larger numbers are better (VFS Mark gives results as a percentage based on an original sample with an m500 and a Palm branded 16mb SD card). Having

I am finding that after I have used Card Export, I have to reset the Palm before I can Hotsync again. This is a bit of a hassle, but not a major problem in a beta version. Let's hope it get fixed in the full release version. I have sent a big report to Softick, but it cannot hurt if other people do the same,

When Palms at last combined external storage with USB interfaces, it was an obvious next step to provide software to make your Palm into a card reader, or more technically, a USB Mass Storage Device. This is an industry standard, and would allow transfer of data between the Palm's external memory and any desktop with a suitably modern OS (Win2k/XP, Mac OSX). While there are some solutions

I had a hard reset during a meeting yesterday. It was my own fault: for some reason an iSilo file I had downloaded was showing a Docs to Go creator ID and I tried to open it in DTG. The Palm froze and a soft reset just resulted in a flashing Palm logo. So I had to do a hard reset. All this happened without anyone in the room thinking I was doing anything more than fiddling around with my

As you know, I use a T|E with FitalyStamp. I have been using Fitaly for 2 years now and would not think of doing without it. Sometimes I use a Palm without it and I find I can easily remember my graffiti and have no trouble inputting a few commends or one/two word items of data. But I would never seriously consider entering a sentence or more without Fitaly. [Aside: one of my reasons for

Craig has sent me an e-mail saying my idea about sending MMS from the Palm is already in beta testing, thought with limited functionality on all but the T|W. Perhaps PalmOne will give them a helping hand and then bundle the software with the top of the range Zire?

I was thinking this morning about how PalmOne might differentiate a mid-range Zire from the T|E. This got me thinking about cameras on PDAs and I realized what the killer app for a consumer PDA might be: Multi-Media Messaging. You see, the problem with camera phones which use MMS is that they are banned in so many places. But while most people can cope with not taking their PDA into the gym

Mike Rhode has an interesting post about whether PDA OSes will scale up to add new functionality, or whether desktop OSes will scale down to work on pocketable devices. You can read the post and my comments here.

When I decided to move from the T|T to a T|E, I was aware that the main feature I would lose was Bluetooth. I had heard from a reliable source that there would never be OS5 Bluetooth drivers for the BT-SD card because the absence of those drivers was a marketing decision: if you want Bluetooth you must buy a more expensive Palm. So I stopped to analyze my use of Bluetooth on the T|T. I came to

I really love the Covertec case, but the headphones business was getting on my nerves to such an extent that I had started window-shopping for an alternative. Then I decided to take the plunge and modify the case. The point where the hole would need to be has no re-inforcement, being the 'hinge' of the case, so the prospects for making the incision myself were good. I used a single-hole punch

Well, I downloaded the Audible iTunes plug-in and installed it. That recopied the Audible Player to my T|E, so I did a Hotsync to get everything stable. Then opened iTunes and 'Enabled Communication' in the Audible Player. And there in iTunes was 'Palm OS5 Device (main)' and 'Palm OS 5 device (card)'. Drag the file over, activate the device with my password and copying begins (very slowly, of

Yippee!! Though it suggests that there is only Clie support at the moment. I will test it with my T|E and report back.

Mike Rhode has written a reflective piece about PDA use, which contained these two questions, which Mike clearly finds in need of an answer. So here is my answer. But first the questions: "Exactly what am I using my PDA for? Am I simply "making work" for it so that it feels more useful (and justified) or are there actions which are vastly superior when done on a PDA?" Well, first of all I