Leslie Franke

A few months after being introduced, Palm has made the decision to kill its first generation Palm Foleo. The idea behind the Foleo was that it would connect wirelessly to your mobile device, thus allowing large screen viewing and typing as needed. Many analysts have derided the product as disappointing, though, and with a large amount of software related bug fixes threating to delay the launch of the Foleo, Palm CEO Ed Colligan has decided to cancel the entire project instead.

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Smart Box Design’s Triples 2.0 (formally known as Nine Men’s Morris) is one of the world’s oldest strategy games. Introduced during the time of Roman Empire, the game is a two player board game in the same vein of chess or checkers. Each player has nine pieces to move along the board’s twenty-four intersecting places. The object of the game is to place your pieces in ‘mills’ (three pieces in a row, horizontally or vertically) which then allow you to capture one of your opponent’s pieces. To win you must leave the opposing player with only two pieces or no legal moves.

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One of the best Palm websites on the web, PalmAddict, has recently received a new facelift. The new design is very well done with the content of the page being very easy to scroll thought and read. If do not regularly visit PalmAddict blog you are most likely missing out on some great Palm related content.

BinaryClock is a clock and alarm program from Tamoggemon Software that is a little different than your average Palm clock. At first glance, the software is confusing since the time does not appear like a normal digital clock, but in a series of shifting patterns of black squares and rectangles on a white background. Read through the manual, though, and you will find it is not hard to learn how to tell the time with a little bit of practice (there is a method to the madness).

If this type of time telling is not up your alley, BinaryClock will also display a text string with the time in a user configurable look. Colors and shapes in the binary display are also customizable. There are options to decrease or increase the border of the blocks and to change the background and foreground colors. Besides the clock, Binary Clock also includes an alarm feature. The program allows you to configure a different alarm for each day of the week and also supports Palm devices with vibrate and LED.

(Added: 06.19.06) Another nice feature of BinaryClock 2.0 is that it lets you view truetype fonts using Font Bucket, a free program which is included in the download. Using Font Bucket you can import any Windows fonts you would like into Binary Clock. In addition, BinaryClock provides full-screen capabilities allowing it to look nice on any handheld. (End Addition)

BinaryClock is an inexpensive time-telling application that takes a unique approach to telling time. It would be nice if you could schedule multiple alarms and there is a learning curve to tell the time. If you would like to have a novel time telling application on your Palm, take a look at BinaryClock.

For another review of BinaryClock check out Palm Discovery’s review.

I have updated the Facer Nuvola theme to work with Facer 3. This theme is free and can be downloaded from here. I believe that this is a complete theme. All elements have been skinned. The background image is just a gray screen, it is up to you to choose the jpeg you want for the background. If you would like to use the image seen in the screenshot you can get it from the Crystal ZLauncher theme. Note that this theme will only work with Facer 3.1 and higher.

Information on the Nuvola theme for earlier versions of Facer can be found in this post.

Opera Watch has a informative post about whether we will ever see the Opera Mobile browser for the Palm OS. Basically it boils down to the fact that there is insufficient interest from Palm itself. While the newer Palm browsers are workable alternatives and Opera Mini is full of issues when running on the Palm OS, it would be nice too see Opera develop a browser for the Palm OS, breathing much needed innovation into the marketplace.

Update: 5.31.06. There has been some confusion about Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. They are different products. To see a good example of the difference look at Opera for Windows Mobile Pocket PC.

In a my previous post on the best smaller Palm blogs with original content I mentioned Palm Addicts and MobileRead as two great bigger Palm resources. While I have mentioned Palm Addicts recently, a quick word about MobileRead is in order.

MobileRead is a news site and forum primarily dedicated to reading on handheld devices. MoblieRead’s front page features news dedicated to reading on your handheld as well as general handheld news. They also have specific forums on ebook devices, ebook software (such as for eReader and Plucker) and forums dedicated to using software like Sunrise and iSilo to transfer data on the web to your Palm device, as well as several general handheld forums. I especially like the forums dedicated to transferring web content to your handheld. The great thing about MobileRead is if something reading related can be done with your Palm, someone here has already done it or can show you how.