Solo Media Forums

[Jeff Kirvin]

Like many Palm users, I've always thought that a lot of the fun of having a Palm OS handheld was \"tricking it out\" with system extensions, enhancing its capabilities. But how much is too much? Where do you draw the line between cool and unstable?

Believe it or not, this has always been an issue on Palm OS. One of the first programs I loaded on my 1MB 1997-vintage Palm Pilot Professional was HackMaster. (I think the second was Peanut Reader, which would eventually become eReader.) Palms have always been configurable, and it's this flexibility that's contributed to the longevity of the platform. Anybody remember the Avigo? As even RIM is figuring out with their Blackberry line, you have to encourage third party development if you want the platform to grow.

Shortly after installing HackMaster and a bunch of hacks on my Palm Pilot, I got used to dealing with resets, soft, warm and hard. (I still think \"firm\" is a better term for a safe mode reset, fitting as it does between soft and hard, but no one listens to me on this one...) Early Palms, from the Pilot to the Palm III to even the original Visors, where generous about what they'd accept. You could didn't have to know a whole lot to write Palm OS software back then, because the platform itself was pretty simple.

As technology advanced, the devices got more sophisticated. And unfortunately, they didn't all advance the same way. For a long time, Sony and Palm had different, mutually exclusive high-resolution screen implementations. They both developed a software-based Graffiti area that you could dismiss when you didn't need it and get more display size. Both implementations were different, with different button placement, different methods to call and dismiss the Graffiti area and different capabilities. HandEra and Garmin and Tapwave all came up with their own unique ways of doing the same thing as well. Palm OS today is full of these competing \"standards\" for different ways of doing the same thing on different devices.

For developers, this has become a mine field. Code for the way PalmOne does something, and it won't work on a Sony, Garmin or Tapwave. And PalmOne can't even keep the same implementaion unchanged across devices. Fitaly for the T3 didn't work on the T5. Fitaly for the T5 doesn't work on the LifeDrive.

And now, the end result is that trying to trick out your device is a crap shoot. The underlying mess and complexity of the OS makes it difficult to predict that just because A works and B works and C works that they'll all work together without crashing your Palm.

Timepilot84 on 1SRC recently had an interesting comment after returning his LifeDrive: \"The LD reminded me a lot of running Linux on your desktop. You have to be careful with what you do, and there's no guarantee that everything will work out of the box. I don't run Linux on my desktop anymore, either.\"

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[Jeff Kirvin]

He brings up an excellent point. Over the past week, I did a little experiment with my T5. I removed all the system extensions I had installed, except FontSmoother, which I can't bear to be without. No ZLauncher, no SkinDIA, no pToolSet, no SkinUI, no BatteryMon, just the OS itself. Now, I still had over 60 applications loaded, but none of them (except YAHM/FontSmoother) hooked directly into the OS. My Palm thusly simplified, I went about my business. I read articles in PalmFiction, I surfed the web in Blazer, I edited office documents with Mobi-Systems Office.

And no crashes. Not a single soft reset in a week. This is with Pocket Tunes and Audible set to background playback, by the way. No crashes at all. My T5 was remarkably stable as long as I didn't try to enhance it with hacks. My apps ran fine.

So I started loading them again, one by one. First back was Fitaly, because it's still so much better than either Graffiti. And SkinDIA, so I have some flexibility in what Fitaly looks like. The ZLauncher, because I really can't stand the schizophrenic UI of Applications/Favorites on the new Palms.

And already, some of the crashes came back. Specifically, if I'm in Blazer, rotate the screen to landscape and back, then raise and lower the DIA, the system locks up. It's consistent, happens every time. But after some experimentation, I realized that this error never happens unless SkinDIA and FontSmoother are running at the same time and the system color depth is set to 16-bit (which it should be for optimum font rendering). I fiddled with some of the settings in FontSmoother, and by turning on Blazer Tweak (which prevents the multiple screen redraws Blazer normally does while rendering a web page) and turning on Safe Mode in FontSmoother, I was able to make the bug go away.

But I ask you: is that something most users would have the patience to figure out?

Palms are as stable as any other computer as long as you don't try to alter the underlying OS too much. Once you start to tinker, it's at your own risk.

PalmOne, this goes for you, too.

[Anonymous]

I love that last line!

I'm sure the instability of my erstwhile T3 was caused by something I had put on there and like you, I could not live without FontSmoother (Palm needs to build this into the OS). But maintaining it was becoming a nightmare and in the end, not worth the effort.

Although, having gotten rid of my T3, I miss it already. Such a gorgeous, beautiful screen it has. I'm hoping either the LD gets patched or that the 2nd iteration will prove less problematic, because we all know it's just a matter of time before I have another Palm device.

Don

[Jeff Kirvin]

There are already several patches for the LifeDrive. PalmOne fixed some WiFi problems which also seemed to make Blazer more stable. Tyler Faux released SharkCache, which reduces the \"lag\" if that bothers you. Dmitry Grinberg released LifeButtons, which allows simultaneous button presses in games. And Normsoft is almost done with a patch to fix some of the stuttering in Pocket Tunes.

All we're really waiting for is a ROM update to minimize the preamp hiss and perhaps a newer, more stable version of VersaMail.

[Anonymous]

When I upgraded (?) from my PPPro to the m125, one thing I noticed was that the hacks I was running had been incorporated more or less as built-in features of OS4.
This itself reduced greatly the number of hacks I needed to get what I wanted from the OS and was extremely cool.

I don't use any hacks or DAs on my TH55, but that's mostly due to the fact that the ones I want to use won't work on the stupid thing!
(Problems with Palm model compatability? Welcome to the Clie club. -We have jackets!)

Extensions of one kind or another, ZL, Landscape, Date on Status, and Grafitti Anywhere (If they are all considered so) I've grown hooked on, pardon the pun.

My TH55 does not require resetting, with one exception only:
(honest and true)
NetFront gets a little flaky sometimes and you have to clear the cache file.

Aside from that one issue, my TH is EXTREMELY stable, and I runs me a few things I does. That includes apps written for other Clies, like Movie Recorder and World Alarm Clock.

I think what you are saying about hacks, extensions, and instability would be true on just about any Palm OS handheld, but rings even truer on these newer models where the OS has been (let's face it) tampered with.

I think this also goes back, once again, to Palm not communicating with developers properly.

The fact that Palm is responding with patches is encouraging though.

(Edited for addition of more stuff.)

[Anonymous]

Speaking of Fitaly and the T5, I'm not sure I notice any improvements in font-rendering with forcing 16-bit system wide (with either the FS option or with Force16 Hack). Do you mean a quality improvement or a speed enhancement? Either way, I just don't notice it. As for quality, I find that darkening the fonts the option in FS works well.

Update: Just forget the stuff below; I found the beta of EasyConverter at sourceforge, and the latest beta worked well.


mcc

Another issue: I made a few FS compatible fonts in Easy Converter. The problem is that I get dropped characters, such as the apostrophe and em-hypen, in ereader texts.

This is what I do: I start ereader, find that I want to use my font - ITC Charter or Georgia. I couldn't find a package with Georgia, so I made my own. So, I started reading eReader books in Utopia AA; I went into fonts4OS5 and subbed the font from Utopia to Charter or Georgia. I go back into eReader, and there is an extra space where the apostrophe should go. I exit and use one of the Pruss packaged fonts, and I can see the apostrophe again. Deleting the resource file for the book specifying margins and paging, to force re-rendering, does not help. This actually is a problem even without FontSmoother active.

I see the behaviour only in eReader. I can see the apostrophe in Plucker and every other application that's using the font. Do you have any insight into this?

I was also surprised by how well EasyConverter converts fonts; for a while, like you, I went for stability and did without FontSmoother. I actually thought the Tahoma, Georgia/Charter/Utopia and even the italicized Lucida fonts looked nice. Sure, pixelated, but much better than using the ConvFont package.

[Anonymous]

I have a life drive. It works wonderfully (I have no hacks whatsoever installed). I like the Favorites app. Pocket Tunes runs great, TCPMP runs great, my games run great (no actioners, just puzzle games). After the update blazer runs great with wifi. My bluetooth keyboard runs great. It just works. A few delays, but I don't mind because of the storage. This is the best palm I have ever owned and I have owned most of them.

I guess what I am trying to say is that Jeff is right. Don't muck with the OS and all will work well. Its like when you try a shell replacement in Windows, you get nightmares, but when you leave it alone it runs pretty well.

[Anonymous]

I wrote a similar observation from way back, during a few articles from Jeff trying to dispel myths about WinMob and PalmOS. Crap happens only when power users push their machines. Push WinMob and PalmOS hard enough, I bet you'll find something that bothers the hell out of you.

A bad machine is when Grandma does something simple and the unit crashes. Repeatedly, and often. Defining a bad product in this way, I don't think there are truly that many bad PDAs, music players, computers, etc. out there. Well, maybe the VCR, with that blinking 12:00 problem.

There's even an experience I can tell you. My folks are visiting to help with the baby, and I had given my Dad the iPaq 2210. He's been using it for PIM stuff, and hadn't really added anything at all. Heck, he hadn't even been syncing the unit to his laptop. But I dumped a bunch of photos of the baby on his SD card, and the included software handled it properly.

I actually had to downsize the images before I can get the same photos to display on my T5. I was not pleased. To be honest, the 2210 also was quite snappy and responsive.

It almost made me wanna... Well, you know what would happen. I'll start adding programs and extensions, and soon, conflicts will rear their ugly head. The iPaq will grind to a halt.

So the real question is, if you couldn't add anything more to the PDA, would you rather be limited by PalmOne or MS?

mcc

[Anonymous]

[quote:beaf445e4b=\"mcheung\"]Speaking of Fitaly and the T5, I'm not sure I notice any improvements in font-rendering with forcing 16-bit system wide (with either the FS option or with Force16 Hack). Do you mean a quality improvement or a speed enhancement? Either way, I just don't notice it. As for quality, I find that darkening the fonts the option in FS works well.

Update: Just forget the stuff below; I found the beta of EasyConverter at sourceforge, and the latest beta worked well.


mcc

Another issue: I made a few FS compatible fonts in Easy Converter. The problem is that I get dropped characters, such as the apostrophe and em-hypen, in ereader texts.

This is what I do: I start ereader, find that I want to use my font - ITC Charter or Georgia. I couldn't find a package with Georgia, so I made my own. So, I started reading eReader books in Utopia AA; I went into fonts4OS5 and subbed the font from Utopia to Charter or Georgia. I go back into eReader, and there is an extra space where the apostrophe should go. I exit and use one of the Pruss packaged fonts, and I can see the apostrophe again. Deleting the resource file for the book specifying margins and paging, to force re-rendering, does not help. This actually is a problem even without FontSmoother active.

I see the behaviour only in eReader. I can see the apostrophe in Plucker and every other application that's using the font. Do you have any insight into this?

I was also surprised by how well EasyConverter converts fonts; for a while, like you, I went for stability and did without FontSmoother. I actually thought the Tahoma, Georgia/Charter/Utopia and even the italicized Lucida fonts looked nice. Sure, pixelated, but much better than using the ConvFont package.

[Anonymous]

On my NX70, I really only get crashes only in the following cases:
(1) occasionally when hotsync'ing or afterwards when tapping on HOME icon (pressing ctrl-h is OK, though); and
(2) testing pre-release versions of software (mainly my own in whole or part).
I can live with (1), and (2) is my own choice.

The T5/LD/TE2 are more finicky. It is particularly easy for hack-like applications to crash them, because the standard OS 5 method for hooking into event-dequeued notifications crashes NVFS devices (or at least my unpatched* T5) when the cache is cleared. I just found out about this today, and had to rapidly upgrade mySkin (the new name for SkinDIA) to fix this (released as 1.47 at www.zlthemes.com/Programs.php). I then fired off an email to Lubak telling him how to fix Fonts4OS5--hopefully this will make Fonts4OS5 more stable.

(*I don't patch my T5 because then I'd have to agree to Palm's EULA which prohibits reverse engineering.)

By the way, I would really appreciate it if in addition to posting problems on various forums--and I can't scan them all, though occasionally I google for my own software--people emailed me the problems. I am usually very fast at fixing bugs--if I can duplicate it reliably, I typically have a fix within 24 hours. For instance, Jeff's Blazer problem can probably be fixed if I enable Safe Mode for Blazer always (I already do it for Appshelf). One of these days I should check whether this affects performance; if not, I can enable it for all apps.

Alex