Sorry for the terse format of these minutes -- my holiday/vacation interfered somewhat, but I wanted to get something out ASAP. Also note that geocities has been acquired by Yahoo! - but address forwarding lets us keep same page and email address (for now?).

PC Magazine (June 8, 1999) reports that developers are bringing realtime stock trading (Discover Brokerage and Aether Technologies) to mobile devices (Palm and Windows CE) "available by June". 3Com and Sybase have joined to allow synchronization of data for remote enterprise users with Sybase SQL Anywhere (PUGSL received email offering a presentation by Sybase of this product - Interested?). Lastly PC Mag says that speech recognition is coming - well sort of, we suspect - like a conduit that allows your desktop to translate speech into Palm friendly format, most likely.

Another internet reader raised the question of repetitive stress injury to the fingers from the tiny script required in the graffiti area. This lead us to ScreenWrite, a "hack" that allows you to use the entire screen as a writing area (bigger strokes, so less injury?) and as a bonus, echoes what you write, so you can see how your writing is or is not close to graffiti. Inkverse distributes Screenwrite which is a Hackmaster addon. Review of some Hackmaster hacks

TinySheet, a shareware spreadsheet, was briefly demo-ed. No conduit as yet?

The Qualcomm pdQ Palm/Phone was again discussed - maybe we will see on someday (yeah right, when CDMA takes over St. Louis - let's get cell phones to work everywhere first).

Avantgo was once again mentioned as the best way to download net content to the Palm (here, on a Palm V).

DOC/MakeDoc (for DOS!) get top honors for moving text files to the Palm platform - reading Issac Walton - Compleat Angler in 160x160 pixel format can be a little tough, but why not.

One member pointed out that changing the default idle time - power off in preferences to one minute (from two) vastly improved his battery life.

The balance of the meeting was spent discussing connections to other devices:

A Palm to Win95 bridge to internet has been accomplished and described elsewhere on the internet. A Palm to WinNT4 bridge was accomplished by a member - whew! And only one week of 4 hours a day effort! Anyway, it can be done, using SP3, RAS, and a gateway program like Wingate. A lot of effort just to connect through the serial cable to the NT box, to the internet, but will give you an idea what a page looks like on PalmScape (the member showed the cached minutes of the last meeting).

Ultimately, an Apple Newton was displayed -- the intention was to use "modembridge", a Newton program to allow connection from the serial cradle to the serial port of the Newton, and from there out the Newton PCMCIA modem to the world at large. More will be revealed on this when and if we ever pull it off -------

The Infrared capacity of the Palm continues to amaze -- we wanted to try beaming ASCII back and forth between the Newton and the Palm, but we didn't have "beamrite" installed on the Newton -- some other time.

We plan to have an IR capable notebook at the next meeting, and PUGSL is working on enabling the IR port of his desktop. We fretted a bit about the operating system of the notebook (Win 3.11), but it occurred to us after the meeting that this really isn't a problem: Penguin single disk backup is a fabulous free program that runs from floppy and also includes IRDA support!

Penguin is based on a LINUX kernel and doesn’t even require a hard disk, It allows a complete backup of a compressed image of your installed programs to a single floppy (one for Penguin, one for backup). It also allows installation of single PRCs (Palm Programs) from a floppy source without a complete hotsync. These latter capabilities were demonstrated using a non-IR notebook at the meeting. Penguin rates a "MUST HAVE" status!

POTENTIAL TOPICS AND MEETING FEATURES

Discussion of future meeting places, times, format, topics is a high priority item for the Saturday, July 17, 1999 meeting - "be there"

Our email list will continue to be used to determine member’s interests in particular applications for future discussion. Even if you cannot attend, drop a note with what you want discussed and we will brainstorm to the best of our abilities and include it in these minutes. The web page will continue with the simple first page and follow a "low bandwidth" style.

As always, meetings are free and open to the public, and any level of experience is completely welcome.

All trademarks and copyrights remain the property of the respective owners. No financial support or other inducements were received from any developer, manufacturer, or distributor of any product mentioned. Privacy of persons in attendance or corresponding by email is maintained to the extent reasonably possible and not collected for commercial use by PUGSL.