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Archive for January, 2006

Anti-Virsus Software on a Palm

Published on January 31, 2006 in Palm

Writing on Palm Addict with a healthy dose of skectpicsm, Peter Wolchak recently posted a news release from Symantec announcing a new anti-virsus solution for the Palm OS. Anti-virsus software, on a Palm, is a classic case of a solution without a problem. No real viruses have infected a Palm device. They may exist in theory, but not in the wild. There was one Trojan horse program, of note, that was limited to a specific application, the Liberty emulator, and was quickly withdrawn. This trojan arrived as a crack for PalmOS application called Liberty, claiming it would convert a shareware version of the application to a registered version. Anti-virus software for the Palm is doing one thing and one thing only, cashing in on people’s paranoia of viruses. At this junction I would not waste my time or money to install any anti-virsus software on your Palm.

Palm Crystal DIA Skin

Published on January 26, 2006 in Palm

I have made several small changes to the Crystal DIA skin. Basically I fixed the size of the status icon in landscape mode and in portrait mode made the bluetooth icon move to the right a little farther than the default skin (on the T3 at least) to cover up some of the background space. The updated Crystal DIA skin can be found here.

Palm Crystal DIA

Customizing Your Google Personal Home Page

Published on January 25, 2006 in Web

Google Personal Home PageThere are many sites on the web that allow the user to set up a personal, customized homepage. Google has recently jumped in the ring, becoming more and more competitive. The Google Personalized Home lets you add your own customized content, such as news, RSS feeds, stocks, weather, etc.

I am not a heavy user of the Google Personalized Home page but do use it to quickly get several pieces of information. What makes the Google Personalized Home page stand out is:

  1. The Google Personalized Home page is clean and fast with no adds.
  2. There is a mobile version that works very well on small devices such as a Palm.
  3. The Personalized Home page is extensible. Besides the functionality the default addons (modules) give, you can also add different modules that allows each individual user to customize their page to their liking.

While the Google Personalized Home Page has the standard modules such as a weather forcast, Gmail preview, and RSS feeds, several other modules are worth having. They include the following:

  1. Personalized Home – This module allows you to change the look (skin) of the Google Personalized Home page. A user can change the background colors, the column spacing, link and text color, and add a background.
  2. Weather Map – Provides a weather map for a given zip code region.
  3. Photos from Flickr – Provides a photo gallery/slideshow from Flickr. One large photo or nine smaller photos can be shown at a time.
  4. Date and Time – Places a small calendar and clock on the page.
  5. UPS Package Tracking – Tracks a UPS package.
  6. Del.icio.us – Displays a user’s del.icio.us links with a favicon.
  7. US Traffic Information – Displays Yahoo traffic information on a Google map for a given location.
  8. Almanac – Calculates the sunrise, sunset and current moon phase.
  9. Free Text Message – Send a free text message (US only).
  10. Module Manager – A module that allows the user to save their favorite modules in cookies.

Note: There are many more modules available at Google Modules, an unofficial directory of modules to add to your Google Personalized Home page.

Opera Mini on the Palm LifeDrive

Published on January 24, 2006 in Palm

Joel, from 1src, has posted an excellent Opera Mini on the Palm LifeDrive, review . Read the mini review here.

Opera Mini Released

Published on in Palm

Opera has released Opera Mini worldwide. Opera Mini is designed to allow web browsing on mobile phones which are otherwise incapable of using a web browser. Besides working on mobile phones, Opera Mini runs well and is an excellent browser on newer Palms which can run the IBM JVM. Changes to the earlier builds I believe include include two screen modes (compared to three) and smooth scrolling.

You can download Opera Mini from the product’s homepage or directly for the Palm from here. While the download page only lists the Treo 650 and the Tungsten C, I have ran Opera Mini with success on a T3 and others have reported success on other Palms. For more on how to load the IBM JVM on your Palm see the first part of this post.

Update: The file can be found at http://mini.opera.com/global/opera-mini-advanced-us.jad. The easiet way to get this on your Palm is by using the IBM Java VM application. Open the appliction, click the install button and enter in the above URL, and the Palm will then download the file and convert it into PRC file for you.

Opera Mini

Note: For those concerned about privacy, a word of warning. Opera Mini uses a remote server to pre process the page before sending it to the phone thus it will store the cache, cookies, and passwords for pages visited on the service provider’s server.

News via Opera Watch.

Best Palm Websites

Published on January 20, 2006 in Palm

The following is the second part of my “Palm Best Of” series, laying out what I feel to be the best free Palm software, the best Palm developers, and the best Palm websites. Listed below are the best Palm related websites on the Internet and, also, the mobile versions of some very popular websites. The best free Palm software was presented earlier and an article on the best Palm developers is still to come.

Palm Related Websites

Forums

1src – Palm related forums and news. They have the best help and discussion forums on the web for the Palm T and Sony Clie handhelds.

MobileRead – Palm and PPC related forums and news. They have excellent ebook reading and mobile web reading forums.

TreoCentral – Palm Treo orientated forum and news. Probably the best Treo forums on the web.

News

Palm247 – Palm news updated daily.

PalmAddicts – Palm news blog which is updated on a constant basis. Any Palm news worth mentioning will probably be posted here.

Software and Ebooks

Memoware – Large listing of free ebooks. These ebooks are compiled by members of the site and are available for downloading in many different ebook formats.

PalmOpenSource – Directory of open source Palm software.

PalmGear – The largest directory of commercial Palm software on the web. The complaints of users and application developers about Palmgear is long and varied but their mere size makes them hard to ignore.

Palm Friendly Website Portals

PDA Portal

Treobits

Small Sites

Palm Friendly Websites

Accuweather

Amazon

AOL Portal

BBC

CBS Marketwatch

Bloglines

ESPN

GMail

Google

Mail2Web

Mapquest

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Merriam-Webster Thesaurus

MSN Mobile

New York Times – Page One

Technorati

USA Today

Wunderground

Yahoo

Firebug Firefox Extension

Published on January 19, 2006 in Firefox

Joe Hewitt has developed a new Firefox extension called FireBug, desccribed as a “sort of a combination of the DOM Inspector and the JavaScript console, in a frame at the bottom of each browser window”. In addition, it allows you to inspect XMLHttpRequest responses and offers per-page logging. Be warned it is only an alpha release, but it worked pretty well for me in the short time I tried it.

Who Am I?

Leslie Franke Profile

Leslie Franke:[les-lee fran-key]; 1. Husband and proud dogowner; 2. Seventh-day Adventist; 3. Web Designer; 4. Atlanta Braves Fan; 5. Northeast Ohio Native; 6. Bottle Caps Lover; 7. Certified 'Freakonomic';