So I finally ordered a new phone at work, a Treo 700p to replace my Motorola StarTac ST7860W with the battery of 30 seconds of talk-time. At Telecomm, they were joking that this was such a large step, I wouldn't know what to do.
On the Palm side, I'll retire (maybe) my Tungsten T3. With the slider expanded, the T3 has more pixels (320 x 480) than the 700p (320 x 320), although the Treo has a finer dot pitch. A finer dot pitch is bad news for squinting, but with the really bright screen, it just looks smoother to me (and I don't squint).
The SK6688 keyboard driver IrDA is really bad: when it's installed (not active, mind you), I can only use left 1/4 of touchscreen in any app!
I can't run TimeCopy (I've been running it for a while, and it comes with The Missing Sync), which makes sense since the Treo syncs time from the cellular network. My Treo went into a reset loop when I sync'd with it installed. That's added to my blacklist, but not to my badlist unlike the SK6688 driver.
Last night I decided it was time for The Sync, to move my data from the T3 to the 700p. I don't know if this was the fault of The Missing Sync or of some old software, but when the sync was "done," so was my Treo! It was on an endless cycle of reboots, and when I got it out of that (by a system reset; soft reset didn't do it), it didn't know how to be a phone. Great! That's its job. The Palm software is just a bonus for me.
However, a hard reset AND erasing all data got it back to phone status, thank goodness. Now to put my data back ... It's probably cleaner this way, putting apps back one at a time, and testing Calendar, Contacts, Phone, and the new app for functionality. But it does take longer.
These are the apps that I installed right away:
Graffiti Anywhere and Graffiti ShortCuts.prc from my T3 (no way to change shortcuts on Treo, I guess I must keep T3 for that)
Blazer Bookmarks.pdb from before the hard reset
NoteTaker aka MacNoteTaker
HandyShopper and HS2*.pdb from T3
Patience (solitaire)
NFP and Unicycle (each is better at different aspects of fertility awareness)
The Core Pocket Media Player - TCPMP
FileZ (and maybe later IdeaPad that I think has a Mac conduit and desktop app but that might be a different Idea Pad?)
Plucker (hasn't been updated in a while ... wondering if I need to switch offline viewers, but I'm not going back to AvantGo)
Yahdice (yahtzee)
Cribbage (in color on T3, now B/W even with fresh download)
I don't think The Missing Sync is worth as much as its price tag, but it does let me use iCal without having all of my Palm calendars lumped into one iCal calendar as a one-way trip. Too bad I decided that iCal was part of my GTD plan! I decided to justify The Missing Sync's cost to myself by counting up the Palm software I didn't need to buy for Mac-Palm GTD. Most of all, I wish The Missing Sync would show me the HotSync error number -- and let me know there was a HotSync error! I did a reset on my T3 shortly after I bought The Missing Sync, the IrDA driver is enabled by default after a reset, and all of my (missing) syncs failed without errors until I reverted back to Palm Desktop sync, saw the error number, and recognized what it meant. That's just not good software programming! I took that course, and it's better to fail all over the place with error messages than to fail silently, because subtle errors are the hardest to find. (Plus you should check both input and output data for validity, and always try to give good error messages. How hard are those concepts?)
If the reset-loop problems had persisted, I would have used ResetEmu to find the culprit. However, that's for the "what should I remove" approach, and given that I get a new Palm maybe every three years, I prefer the "add what I still use" approach as a way to get rid of the cruft that otherwise builds up.
After I installed Palm applications, I moved on to productivity applications for networked Palms. Top of the list, secure shell (version 2)! The first one I tried,pssh works with my servers, so that's good enough. I could imagine using a VNC viewer as well, like these: palmVNC 2.0 GPL, PalmVNC 2.0 (didn't work on first try; $10 registration requested), PalmVNC 1.40 (free, but might be a bit old since it's for PalmOS 3.1), μVNC for Palm for $19.95. I don't need VNC (yet) so I haven't gone through them.
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