PalmConnect - first impressions
starnet!apple!trantor.harris-atd.com!chuck (Chuck Musciano)
Message-id: <9311241914.AA17559@trantor.harris-atd.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1993 14:14:45 +0500
From: starnet!apple!trantor.harris-atd.com!chuck (Chuck Musciano)
To: zoomer-list-1993@grot.starconn.com
Subject: PalmConnect - first impressions
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Content-Length: 6208
Status: OR
First, let me offer my heartfelt thanks to the many people at Casio, Palm,
and Geoworks who have been calling and e-mailing over the past few days to
help me fix my various Zoomer problems. All three companies should be proud
of the people they employ; several people went out of their way to make sure
I was helped as quickly as possible. Special thanks to Bill at Casio,
Jack Miller and Andrea Butter at Palm, and Steve Main at Geoworks. You
people put the "personal" in PDA!
Now that I've buttered you up, on to the assessment of PalmConnect :-)
[ I've elected to abbreviate PalmConnect as Paco, to make it easier to
type and to distinguish it from PC. Plus, Paco seems so... personal.
Anyone got a .WAV of someone saying, "Si, Senor?" ]
Paco arrives in a nifty box, designed by some origami master.
Through various folds and cutouts, it holds the docs, two disks, the cable,
and a DB-9 to DB-25 converter. My only concern was that I did not receive
a registration card or a "media swap" card, as the documentation says I
should have. This may be because I ordered direct from Palm, so they already
know my name and I told them which diskettes I wanted.
Installation was easy, with one complaint: why on earth doesn't Paco
offer the ability to integrate with an existing copy of Geoworks on my
machine? Instead, I have to waste 4 megs of disk space for a runtime copy
of GEOS 2.0 that already exists on my machine. Since I only have 20 megs
free to begin with, this is a bit of a problem.
A simple attempt to run the Palm apps from Geoworks barfed up some errors;
more on that in another post.
Paco works as advertised on the box: "Turn[s] your PC into a gigantic
Casio Z-7000". (I like the mental image of a gigantic Z-7000; shades of
"Attack of the 50 Foot PDA"). I hooked up the cable, tapped on "File Linking"
and Shazam! the PDA B: drive appeared on my Paco desktop! My Zoomer had a
similar icon, and you could tap and explore the file systems from either
machine.
This is so cool and slick that you often get confused as to who is looking
at what where. More than once, I have tried to copy a file to itself.
I was able to back up my data in a snap, hard reset my Zoomer, and restore
without a problem. My Zoomer is happier, and I feel much better, thank you.
Now, the nits:
* Attempting to print to a file from Paco results in a message
complaining about a "missing port driver". I have Paco configured
to use an HP LaserJet 4 (PCL mode) attached to lpt1:. Very weird.
* At some point, I had copied some files from Paco to the Zoomer,
and disconnected. After using the Zoomer a bit, I reconnected.
When I tapped the PC drive icon on the Zoomer, I got a message
saying that the drive could not be linked in. Tapping the Zoomer
icon on Paco gave me the same message. I disconnected, exited
and restarted Paco, and everything was fine.
* I think that the drive icons should remember a current directory
for you. It is so nice to drag some files on the Zoomer and drop
them on the PC drive icon to make them copy over. Unfortunately,
they wind up in C:\, when you really want them in c:\palmconn\document
or something similar. Since the Paco file manager is very rudimentary
compared to regular Geoworks, moving files around is somewhat of a
pain. Unlike Geoworks, you can't view multiple directories at once,
so dragging between directories is not possible.
* I was able to import a bunch of data from my Casio BOSS with little
effort. The field mapping tools are nice. My only complaint is
that they don't remember you mappings. I set up 15 fields for one
BOSS file, imported it, and went to do the next one. I had to
redo the mapping from scratch, which was a pain.
* I had PalmAddress open, and imported some BOSS data into my Address
Book document. I closed that document, opened a second address book
(that I keep company names in) and opened a second BOSS file from
which I wanted to import data. When the field mapper window opened,
it did not show any fields in the BOSS file. I exited and restarted
PalmAddress, and the fields showed up fine. There is some bug in
PalmAddress that messes up importing from multiple files into multiple
documents, it seems.
* There is no export capability! Once data is in a Palm app, that's
where it stays. I'm guessing that Palm will tell me to buy a copy
of Intellilink for $80 to do that. I contend that Paco should at
least offer generic text output, so that I can convert note pages to
something usable on my PC or Unix machine.
I did use Paco to download Maze Runner to the Zoomer, and it worked!
Some oddities:
* You can't see "underlined" files on your Zoomer from Paco. So when
I tried to copy Maze Runner into my Games directory, it wouldn't
let me. I copied it to another directory, which showed up in my
Launcher menu just fine, and I could run the app. Then, within
the Zoomer file manager, I copied the game to the Games directory,
and it worked fine. The Zoomer even replaced the underlined Games
directory with a real directory, and all the system games appeared
in the new directory automagically. Why couldn't this happen directly
when I transferred the file?
* You'll want to run Maze Runner in "line" mode instead of "block" mode,
and I found that a 21x24 maze just fits on the screen.
* The File menu is empty, since Zoomer apps can't have an "Exit" item.
* Although the app runs, it is clear that it isn't "pen-centric".
Writing apps that work well in both environments will be tricky,
I think.
Well, that's all for now. More to come, I'm sure!
Chuck Musciano ARPA: chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com
Harris Corporation AOL : CMusciano
PO Box 37, MS 16/1912 AT&T: (407) 727-6131
Melbourne, FL 32902 Fax : (407) 729-3363
A good newspaper is never good enough,
but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever. -- Garrison Keillor