We had the excitement of TWO brand new VISORS at our meetings. These are similar in appearance to the PalmIII, with a plastic case in a variety of colors, but at a great price. With 8 meg of memory for $249, this is a real winner.

The IR port is on the side instead of the end. They come with a USB cradle with serial optional for a price, but we suggest getting a USB card for about $30, even for older computers. USB may also require updating your operating system to Win98rel2 for best functionality.

Memory expansion appears to be through a proprietary 'smartmedialike' card.

We are waiting eagerly for the TRGPro to come out, as it supposedly has compact flash memory expansion. This memory allows you to swap PRCs in and out of the PalmOS 8mb base memory. How about 40megabytes of swapable memory??!! The TRG also is said to have flash memory which makes the OS upgradable, unlike the VISOR (so we are told). That's what you get for another $100 ($349) and waiting 'til mid-February 2000.

Check out the mail list on the main page - there is a link to the onelist mailing list maintained by one of our users.

We had the pleasure of greeting a new member who is currently engaged in C programming for the PalmOS in what he described as a "vertical market environment", which means the application is used to exchange data with the corporate database.

He uses CodeWarrior for the programming environment and shared one of his personal 'hobby' applications. He has created a mapping application that incorporates global positioning satellite (GPS) data sent from mobile amateur radio operators across a radio packet network to each other with a scalable map of the St. Louis (or wherever) area.

This is truly phenomenal technology - think about the movies where you have seen Air Traffic Controllers looking at a map of aircraft transponders - this is what this looks like, superimposed on a highway map.

The 'APRS' system used by amateur radio is not the innovation here, it is displaying it on a Palm that is really wild!

He also indicates he will help with a 'Programming for PalmOs' tutorial that we plan to start by the February, 2000 meeting. Thanks

RUMORS AND NEWS

A COLOR PALM? Rumor has it that 3.5 test builds of the PALMOS contain code that references 160x160x8 bit displays, which implies color to some of us. We don't know what the hardware will be though - still snooping this out.

Another user asked about importing addresses from another PDA. He has a casio or whatever and has backed up its data on his PC. D. Pogue's book on the Palm/PalmPilot, first edition pages 200-207 covers this in detail. Basically, if you can get the data into comma delimited format, you are set. It is a matter of ordering the fields (name, address, phone , ....) in the correct order before importing them into the Palm desktop for installation on the Palm.

Return to topThis was a short meeting, with no meeting in December due to holidays. next meeting January 22, 2000 (fourth Saturday due to room availability).