Zoomers do, but GEOS generally doesn't. The weird file format is "GEOS VM,"
the GEOS native datafile format. To turn your desktop PC into a Zoomer,
"PalmConnect" contains runtime GEOS and the PalmApps (as is on the Zoomer).
There is a shareware text reader available -- check your local GEOS binary
archive.
> Has anybody written a deferred recognizer? Is it possible to do so?
I think that PalmConnect will do deferred HWR in some of the Apps.
PalmConnect only import/exports the Address Book to ASCII. Intellilink in a
Windows based application that will import/export Address Book, Notebook, and
Calendar files. Of course, the link to/from Pocket Quicken requires Quicken
3 for Windows and another little utility from Intuit.
> Radio Shack's manual is pretty sparse for technical data. Are
> there any books on Zoomers? There seem to be plenty of books
> on Newtons.
Very little technical detail is available. The GEOS SDK is about it.
> For that matter, how actively are people writing Zoomer apps?
> (Scale of zero to ten: zero = no activity at all, ten = Microsoft
> reassigning Chicago team to create Zoomer spreadsheet)
Oh, three or four. A few folks are working to write native GEOS apps. (The
GEOS development system requires a bit more hardware then most folks own.) A
new interpreted language for the Zoomer just went into beta/request for
comments. It seems to have sturred up the armchair programmer in many of us.
> It looks like the infrared port does exactly what the serial port does. >
Is this true? It seems likely because the Radio Shack guy
> mentioned that some day, they'd sell an IR port that hooks up to
> the PC's serial port. Has anybody tried building such an IR port?
Yea, you can link two Zoomers using the IR port just like a physical link via
the serial port (only a little slower). It's pretty cool. The IR port is
accessed via COM3 and COM4 on the Zoomer. (One setting is for two way [low
power] communication, the other for one way [higher power, ie change the TV
channel] communication.) I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the desktop
IR port. Radio Shack salesguys, bluh!
> Suppose I start tinkering with one of the magical start-up files ...
> If I do the hard reset, I know I'll lose all my data, but will it reliably
> set the thing up to be usable again?
Yes. The hard reset (A+B+reset button) wipes the internal RAM and sets
everything up from scratch. If you like tinkering, there are some ways to
setup your Zoomer to make it easier to recover from crashes.
Regards,
Garland