In today’s connected home we take pictures digitally, listen to digital audio on our MP3 players, and download and watch digital movies on our HD TV’s.  All of these digital media files take up a copious amount of space and the growth of these files is outpacing our ability to store and protect them.  Thankfully, storage has become relatively inexpensive – a 1TB hard disk drive can be purchased for well under $100 and the pricing on 2TB hard disk drives is starting to move in that direction as well.  Not that I can tell the future, but I expect to look back on this article in a year or two and see a 3TB or a 4TB hard disk drive priced at the levels of a 2TB hard disk drive today.

Within the digital home you may want to share your media with others inside and outside of our homes.  To make this possible many vendors are offering home storage systems to store and protect your digital media lifestyle.  These devices connect to your home network and enable you to store and share your media with your family through PC’s and connected devices, such as home theatre systems, digital media extenders, xBox 360, PS3, the Apple TV, and even with friends and family outside of our homes through cloud based services.  Also, with several of the products you can backup your data to cloud based backup services so if there was to be a fire in your home, or a virus outbreak your precious data would be protected.   These services aren’t free, but when you think about your important family albums that are all digital what are they worth to you?  It is a small cost in those terms.

Another other use that I have found for these systems is sharing files between my various home PCs and Macs – instead of dumping files to a USB Memory Stick and Sneakernetting them from place to place I can copy files to my home digital media storage system (NAS Device) and share files among all of my computers.

Having used a number of these digital media storage systems over the past several years I have had to go through the buying process; working through my own requirements, researching and evaluating the options in the market, and finally selecting the right system for my usage.   In an attempt to make your purchase decision easier I wanted to share some thoughts on how to select the right product for your environment.  I am not going to attempt to recommend a specific product because your requirements will likely differ from mine, rather I am going to encourage you to explore many of them by taking a moment to think about what you want to be able to do today and in the future with your digital media.  From my perspective, the worst thing that you can do is buy a product that doesn’t fit your needs and then return it or use it only to have buyer’s remorse.  So, take the extra time and do the research;  laying out your requirements clearly and then buy what best meets your needs – take the time to read reviews online and download and read the product manuals – there are some real gems to be found within the product manuals as well as in the online communities and forums for these products. Unless you live alone you should also talk with your family members to understand how they intend to use the product.  For example, if I was buying something for my mother, it would have to be super-simple and seamlessly integrated with her computing experience as she is not a techie, not even close.  She would need the system to automatically backup her Mac using Time Machine and that would be all that she uses the system for – she rents her digital media through DVDs at RedBox and Blockbuster.

There are several considerations to think about when looking at digital media storage systems, including:

1. Who is going to, and how are they going to use the system?

If you are only storing pictures then you need one type of digital media storage product, like adding a USB connected hard disk drive to your wireless router, which is an option on many of the wireless routers on the market today.  If you are going to be streaming digital media as well accessing your pictures then you may need a totally different system.  Finally, if you are going to stream media throughout your house then you need to think about getting a system with multiple drives, a good bit of memory, and a fast connection to your network.  Now, you are going to ask why?   There are a few reasons why, including:  streaming media requires a good bit of consistent performance, more than you are going to get from a single drive system with a slow connection to your network.  A single hard disk drive can generate between 4-6Mb/s of consistent performance – that is from a SATA-2 drive.  While the vendors of the hard disk drives will claim higher levels of performance, these are usually burst modes and are not consistent, which is what you need to stream media.  Imagine you are watching a HD movie or streaming high quality audio, how much performance do you think that you need?   If you encode your video at 480p, standard DVD, then you are going to need approximately 3 Mb/s of consistent performance to replay the video.  Also, you need to make sure that your home network can support the performance of the streaming media.  Don’t rely on Wi-Fi alone, you may need to physically wire your components together with Gigabit Ethernet to get the best consistent performance.  And, if you are looking at streaming 1080P video then you need to look at 50 Mb/s of consistent performance, which means that you will need to look at striping across several hard disk drives in a RAID configuration.  This is what you need to stream HD quality video from your HD Video Camera or Blu-Ray quality video.

What is RAID?  RAID is an acronym that means Redundant Array of Independent Drives, in other words data is stripped across a number of drives and the performance of the drives is combined, thereby increasing the performance as well as providing resilience and reliability in the case of a single drive failure, using a parity drive.  This article is not about RAID, nor am I going to go into detail on parity configurations, but suffice it to say that many of the vendors that provide these systems have created their own RAID configurations that maximize the available amount of storage from the stripped drives as well as protect your data in case one of the drives fails.  Also, many of the systems offer hot-swap drives enabling you to replace a failed drive on the fly without shutting the system down and they will automatically restore the protection of the system while restriping the data onto the new drive.  While the restriping process is occurring the performance of the system will be degraded because the resources of the system are being used to restore the resilience of your data.  For larger hard drives this can take a day or more depending on how much data is stored on the system.  If you want to read all about RAID I would suggest visiting Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

2. Price

There are products available for under $100 to several thousand $ and everything in between.  And, what you spend depends on what you want the system to do.  Some of the sub $100 systems only use one hard disk drive which can be problematic if the drive dies and you haven’t backed it up.  Many of the systems will come with a single drive and several empty drive bays so you can customize your system based on capacity by adding drives.  Before adding drives to a system make sure that you check the vendor’s website to ensure that you are using tested and supported drives – don’t want to compromise your warranty, or more importantly your data.  Vendors test the drives to ensure that they are compatible and work with their suppliers to work out issues with the drives by upgrading drive firmware, or in some cases disqualifying a drive all together.

3. Physical size of system

Single drive systems are the size of a textbook from college.  You remember textbooks, right?  The larger systems with multiple drives will take up the size of a breadbox.  I always wondered how big a breadbox was and the answer is, approximately 12 inches by 6 inches high and deep – a bit bigger than a large loaf of bread (According to Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadbox).  The size of the system from a physical perspective does not take into account the airflow that these systems need to ensure they stay cool, so make sure you read the manual and place the system in a location where it gets the proper airflow.  I put my system in my home office closet next to my network printer where it has a good deal of airflow and central access to power and networking connections.  Many of the systems have an information panel on the front of the system that will show you the status of the system as well as used and available capacity.  One other important feature on many of the digital media systems is physical security and many include a standard Kensington style locking slot.

4. Look and Feel

Now, I am all for aesthetics and I want my system to look “cool” , but that is something that is very personal and I am going to leave to each of you to determine what you think “cool” is.
The vendors have designed the systems to look like they would fit into any home technology environment – some of them even look like books on a bookshelf, while others look like small versions of servers.  Most of systems have access lights to show drive access as well as management displays on the front of the main unit so you can see what is going on in real-time.

5. Environmentals (Airflow, thermals, sound, and more)

This is an important part of selecting a system and I was surprised when I purchased my first system to find that the fan in the system made so much noise that I had to place it out of the way behind a door to ensure that I would not hear the sound of the fan.  Further, the system got hot, we are talking hotter than I thought it should and it would burn my fingers if I left them on the system for too long, so I had to put some insulation under it to keep it from burning the shelf that it was on.  I read online that these were known issues with the system, and I should have done more research before buying the system.  My second system was not only quiet, because I checked, it ran cool, and it used 1/10^ththe amount of power that the first system used.  So, in upgrading I not only got a better system in every way, I got a system that delivered on the environmentals.  Finally, one feature that I really liked on the new system was that it automatically shut down the power based on a user selectable calendar for each day of the week and weekend day, meaning it turns off automatically and drops from full power utilization to only a trickle when it is powered off, only to restart early in the day and be ready for my usage when I need it.   Also, the current system that I am using has the ability to remotely monitor a connected UPS.  What does this mean?  If the power to the system is interrupted and the UPS kicks in the system will monitor the UPS and before it gets powered down inadvertently the system will shut itself down cleanly.  By cleanly shutting down the system you avoid having to clean the file system, and no, I am not talking about taking about a toothbrush and some cleaner and physically cleaning the system, I am talking about the RAID program replaying a log to ensure no data was lost when the power was interrupted and market the file system super-bit clean.  Did I use enough techno-babble in the last sentence for you?  If you want to know more about this process you can look it up on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_file_system

6. Capacity and Expandability

Most of the systems on the market today start with a single 1 or 2TB hard disk drive and can easily be expanded by adding multiple hard disk drives.  Adding drives is a simple operation of removing a drive carrier and installing a new hard disk drive per the vendor’s instructions and installing the drive back into the system.  The system will automatically recognize the drive and stripe the data across it, or you may have to configure the system based on the performance and capacity options that you want to have for your specific environment.  Usually, drives need to be added one at a time and the process of getting to the maximum capacity may take time and some of the systems on the market will right-size the drive based on the capacity of the first drive installed, so if you install a 1TB drive and then want to add 2TB drives, the capacity of the 2TB drives will only be seen as 1TB.  To fix this one would need to backup all of your data and then start with all of the same capacity hard disk drives.  Other systems on the market will take whatever hard disk drive capacity you throw at it and build a RAID configuration delivering the maximum capacity to you.

7. Integration-Interconnection

Most of the systems on the market today offer both Wi-Fi and Wired connections.  While Wi-Fi offers a simple connection without wires it sacrifices performance for that simplicity.  We have all read the performance claims of 110Mb/s for 802.11n Wi-Fi networks, but realistically the theory and reality are quite separate.  To really deliver the performance there is no way around a physical wired connection.  Sorry, you are going to have to deal with the harsh reality that technology companies don’t always tell the truth and that streaming media will take every Mb/s that you can throw at it to ensure that you get an entertainment quality experience in your home.  Also, you need to think about how many people are going to be accessing the system at the same time.  In my house we have three “Power Users” that all access streaming media at the same time.  My oldest son will be streaming media from Netflix on his Wii while my youngest is looking at pictures on my home media storage device and I am streaming home movies to my Mac.  I checked the network and we were pumping some serious I/O to the tune of 80 Mb/s.  Now, I wouldn’t say that every user in the house needed to be streaming media, but the idea is that I want them to have that capability and utilize the media when and where they want to.

The Netgear ReadyNAS also supports connecting an external UPS and monitoring it for a change in the status of the power coming into the system and will gracefully shut the system down if the power fails.  I have not hooked a UPS up yet, but am planning to do so shortly.

8. Backup – what is all of this I hear about backup?

In the 70’s and 80’s the number one concern that I heard from my parents related to their media was that they were afraid that their physical, analog home movies and pictures would get burned up in a house fire, or lost.  Thankfully, it never happened, but they made copies and stored them at another family member’s house just in case.

Today, all of those physical memories have been replaced by digital files that live on spinning media that is going to crash at some point and you will need to have a backup to ensure that you can still access your digital memories.  What are your digital photos worth to you?  Your memories?  So, why don’t you back them up?  There are many answers to that question it is too complex, or simply too costly, or I never thought about it, to name a few.  With many of the digital media storage systems on the market today they offer the ability to automatically backup the system to a cloud based backup service on the Internet.  This service is available for a fee and you can access your files securely from any other system that can connect to the Internet.  The fee is modest, under $100 per year for the average user and the pricing is based on capacity.  The system can be configured to only backup certain files or directories (folders) so you only pay for what you think is important, for example children’s pictures.  A word of caution, if you have a lot data, say 1,024GB, a full TB be prepared for a rather lengthy upload process.  You can do a quick calculation to figure out how long your upload will take by measuring the speed of your upload and then dividing your total amount of data to be backed up by the upload speed.  In most cases you are probably looking at least a week to backup a TB of data.  On some of the systems available on the market there is a USB port on the back of the system that enables you to connect a USB hard drive and backup the system.  This is a simple and inexpensive way to backup the system, but it requires you to manually backup the system and will not protect your system should you have a fire or a virus.

9. Sharing your media

Many of the products on the market today enable you to share your media, specifically your pictures, through a publishing mechanism.   By sharing a published link with those that you want to see the media they can easily and securely access the media on the Internet.  My current media storage system lets me share my pictures on the web to my family members who live in other states.   While the capability sounds great, the implementation is less than what it should be.  Picture sharing sites offer a rich experience and enable those who view shared media to order pictures and access the media in a simple and visually rich environment.  The implementations of the current media storage systems seems a bit archaic in comparison to the current set of web based photo sharing sites and I think it is a case of trying to be all things to all people instead of focusing on what they are good at and leaving the photo sharing to the photo sharing experts by creating a digital upload service where photos are automatically uploaded to the photo sharing site by the media storage system.

10. Protocol Support

For every type of media and streaming there is a protocol that you need to support it.  For iTunes, the media server needs to be able to act like an iTunes Server so iTunes clients, such as Macs and PCs can see and share all of the stored digital media.  Most of the media servers on the market today leverage open source technology to deliver many of the major protocols on the market, including those listed below:

• Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA): enables a DLNA certified device to access media on a DLNA certified server.  For more information on this process please visit http://www.dlna.org/digital_living/how_it_works/
• Time Machine:  In every apple Max with Snow Leopard there is a built in backup solution that enables you to roll back and find files in a simple to use interface and digital media systems that support the Time Machine protocol can backup Mac clients remotely and automatically on the network.  For more information on Apple’s Time Machine please visit http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
• iTunes Server:  Instead of having to have all of your music on every system in your house you can use a digital media storage system with an embedded iTunes Server to share your music with all of the systems in your home.
• Windows Media Server:  With an embedded Windows Media Server you can stream Windows Media Files and MP3 files to any connected system.
• CIFS (SMB):  Allows you to share files between Windows and Mac systems on the network.
• AFS:  Allows you to share files between Mac clients on the network
• NFS:  Allows you to share files between Linux and UNIX clients on the network.

NOTE:  Files shared between CIFS and NFS can be seen by both systems at the same time and may leverage Samba file sharing technologies and include a locking mechanism so file ownership is kept intact and keeps you from overwriting one another’s changes to the file.

• BitTorrent:  For file sharing over the Internet a BitTorrent client is standard equipment on many PC’s – with a BitTorrent client embedded in the digital media storage system so you can offload the task of getting files off the Internet from your PC.

11. Support & Warranty

When buying anything in the technology market it is important to check out the support and warranty offerings from the vendor.  I checked through the knowledge base of the vendors that I have purchased from and found them to be chuck full of good information.  I did have a hard drive fail in one of my units and I called the vendor and they processed a RMA and cross-shipped a new drive.  Many of the systems offer three year warranties today and that is a good option to have, but you need to check on the specifics of the warranty and find out what is covered in terms of parts and shipping charges.  Also, I played “dumb customer” and called their technical support center to find out what kind of help I can expect when I have an issue and all of the vendors that I called were very supportive and knowledgeable.  As you know, calling support is the luck of the draw based on who is on the other side of the phone line, sometimes it is a great person, other times it is a newbie who is green behind the ears.  You may also want to check on how frequently the vendor updates their product’s firmware (OS platform) and how their product quality has been received by trolling through their knowledge base.  Most of the products on the market will support an auto-upgrade feature by downloading the latest revisions and installing them directly from the vendor’s website.  This is a good feature and keeps you from making a costly mistake by downloading firmware and then not upgrading the system correctly.

12. Hackability

For “Power-Users” that may read this and wonder if they can hack their systems and improve the performance, change a parameter, or add a new protocol?  The answer is most likely “Yes!”  Communities have sprung up around these media servers and offer the know-how and instructions to hack the systems, but be aware that doing so may void the warranty, or require you to reset the system to get support in case of an issue, which means that you may lose your data when you perform a system reset.  Again, read the directions on the system to know what you can and cannot do before you buy the system.

13. Simplicity-Complexity

All of the systems that I have used are relatively straightforward to setup and manage requiring a minimal amount of tech savvy.  When installed all of the ones that I have used automatically register with the DHCP Server and get an IP address.  From there, you configure the system on a management console that is usually web based.  In the case of my current system there is an application that when launched will find the media storage system and allow you to manage it securely.  All of the systems that I have used allow you to set an administrator userid and password to ensure that only you have access to manage the system.

Other Considerations: A word about copyrights; for those of you that copy music or videos that is the property of others please be aware that you are breaking the law and while I cannot condone your actions, you need to understand that your media is also property, your property, and should only be used by those that you want to have access to it or have copies of it.

So, What Were My Requirements and What Solution Did I Select?

NetGear ReadyNAS NV+ with four drives.

http://www.netgear.com/readynasvault

Other systems that I evaluated included the following:

• Buffalo Terastation
• Drobo – I could not purchase the Drobo due to budget concerns and the Drobo required an external box to connect to the network.  The initial design point for the Drobo was a better USB Storage System for Mac users doing animation and digital video.
  
• Iomega StorCenter – The Iomega seemed a bit clunky and inefficient, but did provide the best performance based on comments on the Internet.
  
• HP MediaSmart Server – This system is based on Windows Server – Home Edition and has a good deal of performance, but I wanted an open source solution so I could hack it.
  

Who is going to, and how are they going to use the system?

In my environment I have myself, a power-user who will stream media of all types, my oldest son who is getting into web development, and my youngest son who is mostly interested in streaming music.  Also, I have my parents and friends that want to see pictures of my family and significant events.    We needed a system that has multiple hard disk drives to support higher performance and delivery of media on the network and Gigabit Ethernet is a must have.  For streaming media alone we needed at least two drives to generate the performance that was required and having four drives gives me a bit of headroom when I go to a higher resolution video – not that I am going to be distributing 1080P video anytime soon – just too costly in terms of capacity and bandwidth at the moment.

Price

In 2009, when I decided to purchase a Digital Media Storage Server I had a budget of $500 for the system with all of the drives and I wanted about 4TBs of overall storage for my current and future digital media storage requirements.  This budget was based on buying a second hand system on eBay or Craiglist. If I was looking to buy a new system I would need to raise my budget a bit too around $750.  I have seen new systems that fit my needs on eBay for less that $500 and I bought my system on Craigslist with 2x500GB drives for $200.  That left me $300 to buy drives and I replaced the two 500GB drives that came with the system with 1TB drives and still have some change left over.  I bought the 1TB drives at TigerDirect, after checking the vendor’s website for supported drives.  The drives cost me $59 each and I needed four (4) of them.  So, I spent about $240 for the drives and had about $60 left, which I quickly spent to upgrade the system memory to 512MB, from the standard 128MB which resulted in an increase in performance of ~20%.  Today, you can buy 2TB drives for $69 each and double your capacity, provided they are supported in your system, which my system supports.

Physical Size of the System

This is an area where I am constrained as I needed to put the system in a closet in my office next to my laser printer.   So, the size is critically important to me as is accessibility to the hard disk drives and other parts of the system.

Look and Feel

This is an area where, admittedly, I have less of a concern as the system is going to be in the closet, but the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ is a winner in my book as it has an industrial chrome-silver look that fits in well in my clost.  The current revision of the ReadyNas product has followed the pendulum swing back to black.  Thru the years I have found that the market moves from a gloss black outer to a more industrial look depending on what is hot in the Home Theatre market and today black is back.   The ReadyNAS has a great LCD display and four disk access lights on the front of the system that make understanding the status of the system as simple as looking at it.    The disk status lights also help identify failed drives, should a drive fail.  I would highly recommend looking at systems that show you the status of the drives and location so you don’t remove a good drive by accident and lose your entire data set.

Environmentals

I had owned a Western Digital MyBook World – 1TB NAS in the past and the single fan on the system was so loud that I had to keep the door closed on the closet that contained the system and I could still hear it.  I put some foam insulation around the WD product to help quiet it and it was still loud.  Several websites suggested replacing the main fan to quiet it down.  Instead, I sold the WD system and bought the ReadNAS NV+ which is very quiet.  With the door open I can barely hear the fans or the drives spinning.

The ReadyNAS NV+ also supports the automatic power down – power savings feature.  The system starts at 6:00am and shutdowns at 11:00pm every day.  Below is a picture of the web management tool that is supplied with the system showing the configuration screen for the automatic power down feature.

ReadyNAS Management Console – showing the Power Time for Automated Shutdown and Startup

Capacity and Expandability

I needed ~3TBs of storage for my needs today and for the next few years.  I should give you some background on my media needs.  I have about 25,000 songs, each ~1MB in size, a few hundred home videos consume between 100MB-1GB each.  Additionally, I create backups each few months of my personal and work data that comes ~80GBs for each backup.  So, today, I am consuming 1.3TBs of storage and expect to consume 750GB per year of capacity.  So, with four 1TB drives, I have ~3.4TBs of usable capacity of the system.  The 600GBs of capacity is used for RAID overhead and protects me in case a drive fails, which has happened in the past and I was protected and did not lose any data and when I installed a new drive the system immediately recovered and rebuilt the data from the bad drive. The ReadyNAS system uses a Netgear version of RAID called X-RAID that creates a balance between reliability and capacity which also supports automatic expansion of the system as one adds additional drives.  X-RAID is Netgear’s proprietary “patent-pending”  solution where the “X” stands for “eXpandable” as most traditional RAID environments can only extended by relaying out the data (restriping) requiring one to delete all of the data, while the X-RAID system automatically extends the volume when a new drive is added and restripes the data to take advantage of the additional capacity.  For more information on X-RAID please visit http://www.readynas.com/?cat=54

Integration-Interconnection

The ReadyNAS NV+ is well integrated into my environment as I needed to support streaming media to a variety of platforms including:

• Apple TV with Boxee
• LG LHB-975 supporting DLNA
• Apple Mac
• Windows PCs
• iTunes

Backup – what is all of this I hear about backup?

I use the ReadyNAS NV+ as a backup target for my system and I have yet to do a full backup of the ReadyNAS, other than my main files, which I backup to another USB Hard Disk Drive, so in theory, I am protected in case I lose one set by two backups.  Netgear offers a ReadyNAS Vault Cloud Based Backup Service, but, in my opinion, the pricing is off a bit from where I expect it to be, so I am not using a cloud based service.  Also, I would like to see Netgear, or the Netgear community, which I will discuss later, offer integration with other 3^rdparty cloud based backup services like Mozy, so I can affordably backup my data to a cloud based service.  This would need to be an unlimited capacity option for me as I have a lot of data and I put value on all of it, plus I really don’t want to go through all of my data and categorize what needs to be backed up and what does not need to be, much easier to backup my entire data set.   I expect to see the major cloud based backup services offer this kind of service and integration in the near future as the home market moves from dedicated PC’s to these shared digital media devices.  One solution is leaving a computer on and using it as a shim to move the data from my ReadyNAS to the online backup service, but this could prove to be problematic as the ReadyNAS will automatically power down in the middle of the backup operation and would need to be restarted the next day, over and over again.  With a 500Kb/s upload speed I am looking at a couple of weeks to completely backup my digitial media library.  All of a sudden the upload speed is critically important and the Internet Providers caring for download speeds becomes an out of focus discussion – I need a 10Mb/s asymmetrical Internet connection at the same price I am paying now for my 9Mb/s download with 500Kb/s upload speed.  This would cut down my upload by a factor of 20X – significant.  Integration would put the control of the entire operation in my hands and support the automated power-down and power-up and remember where the job left off so it can restart without having to do so from the beginning of the data set.

I thought of buying a 2TB hard drive in an enclosure for $100+ and use it as a backup target as the ReadyNAS has a one touch backup that works with USB hard disk drives and will backup the entire system to the USB connected drive.  A nice option, but doesn’t really work when you get over 2TB of stored media/data on the system.

Also, the system included backup software for your PC’s and Mac’s on the network that simply backups your data on a schedule to the ReadyNAS system.  I tried the software for a few months and then realized that I didn’t need it as I was backing up the same directory on my PC once a month and could manually handle the task with a quick automation setup in Windows.    For my Mac’s on the network I have Time Machine setup to automatically save their data to the Time Machine on the ReadyNAS – and it is super simple to setup  and I was able to re-purpose my USB Hard Disk Drive for temp space while I edit digital video.  For instructions on setting up Mac Time Machine with a ReadyNAS check out http://www.readynas.com/?p=253

Support & Warranty

The ReadyNAS system that I purchased had a three year warranty and the latest systems from Netgear and others come with a five year warranty.  I used the warranty once and found the support team at Netgear to be very knowledgeable and fixed my problem on the first call.  Also, the Netgear online knowledge base is very good and well categorized.  I was able to resolve several of my questions without having to call Netgear using their online knowledge base.

I would not say the same for the WD MyBook World that I purchased before the Netgear – their support site was very poorly categorized and their search engine was ineffective.  When I had a drive fail in my WD product it took over a week to get a replacement and the instructions for replacement were very poor.  Thankfully, the owners of the WD MyBook World came to the rescue as they had posted copious amounts of information on the procedure and what pitfalls to avoid when attempting the operation at home – as a note, some operations that you may want to do void the warranty, so check out what you are doing before you void your warranty.  Also, understands your level of technical expertise and don’t go in over your head as you can irrevocably destroy your data.  An example of an operation that I was concerned with was when I upgraded the firmware (Operating System) for the ReadyNas from a 3.x to a 4.x revision and the main password changed and I needed to reset it to get into the system.  The operation requires rebooting the system and holding the Power button down until one of the LED flashes and the Power button is released and the system re-installs the firmware thereby resetting the password and your data is kept.  If the LED flashes twice your data is deleted and the system is reset back to the way it came from the factory – suffice it to say that I was very patient when performing this operation as I did not want to reload 1.5TBs of data from my backup on a USB Drive.  The operation went smoothly and I was able to

Hackability

The Netgear ReadyNAS has an online community of users that support each other and share knowledge as well as a group of developers whom have built 3^rdparty applications that seamlessly integrate with the ReadyNAS platform.  This one of the main  reasons that I selected the Netgear ReadyNAS product.  The ReadyNAS Community is at http://www.readynas.com/and there are applications to manage and augment the ReadyNAS product, including iPhone Apps, Picture Sharing Apps, Management Apps, and much more – some 300 Apps in total.  Some of the Apps are from Netgear while the majority come from developers in the community.  One of the more interesting Apps available for the ReadyNAS is a TIVO App that enables you to store your TIVO recordings directly to your ReadyNAS, thereby saving precious space on your TIVO.  Check it out at http://www.readynas.com/?p=4324

Simplicity-Complexity

Setup and configuration of the ReadyNAS was another reason that I selected the product for my environment – it was a simple as plugging it into Power and the Ethernet and it automatically acquired an address from my DHCP Server and I ran the RADAR application on my Mac and it found the ReadyNAS and I was able to access it, setup my network shares for my PC’s and my Mac and I was off to the races;  adding digital media and accessing it from my media streamers and on my wireless network.

The web management utility that comes with the ReadyNAS is supported on all of the major Internet Browsers on the PC, Mac, and Linux, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari, which makes it perfect for mixed environments.

There are some setup options, which you need to read the manual for, but once the system is setup it is very simple to manage the system.  Also, the system automatically checks for upgrades and will download them and install them bringing your system to a current version – a nice feature for those that like to stay current – I must admit that I am more of a get it working and stable and leave it alone kind of guy – as long as it is doing what I expect it to do why change it, or as the old adage goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

Filed in categories: Articles, Audio, Video, TV Gear, Desktop Computer Gear, Home Tech

Tagged: Entertainment, media, MP3, NAS, Storage, Utility

13 Things to Consider Before Buying a Digital Media Storage System originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on February 16, 2011 at 11:00 am.

I’m an enthusiastic proponent of backing up your systems, so when I was offered the opportunity to check out GoodSync2GO, I took a shot at it.  There are a plethora of programs/utilities that say they will painlessly save your data without having to think about it and I wanted to see where GoodSync2Go fits in.  Is it really easy, fast and automatic?

Here’s what it purports to do:

• Automatically backup all your critical files to ensure you’ll never lose them.
• Easily Synchronize your files between multiple computers and devices.
• Completely portable with GoodSync2Go for USB flash and portable hard drives.

To be clear, there are 2 main products in the line:  Goodsync which runs on a PC or Mac and the product I tested which is Goodsync2Go which can run on a thumb drive or external disk.  The functions are the same.

I downloaded the file to an external usb disk drive as instructed and ran the installation from the drive.  After a couple of minutes I had a couple of folders with various files and the Goodsync2Go executable.  Double clicking on the file started up the application.  I was expecting the exe to autoplay when I plugged in the drive, but it didn’t.

GoodSync backups are called jobs.  With the paid version of the app you can have an unlimited number of jobs and files within those jobs.  With the free version you are limited to 3 jobs with 100 files within the job.  It should also be noted that the free version has no support.  I had the paid or “Pro” version.

The first backup or job I created was for Quicken, a program I use extensively and many times I run it on different systems.  To keep the data synchronized I do a backup of the file on the current system and take that file and restore it to another system using the Quicken software.  It’s worked for me without problem.

Unlike using Quicken’s backup, GoodSync doesn’t know which folders/files to back up, so you have to tell it.  The online manual shows you where to find correct folders for several Windows applications, Quicken being one of them.  After finding them on the PC, I selected my usb drive as the destination and Goodsync created a folder.

The first step in the process is to analyze the files to find the differences between the source and destination or as described in the instructions between the left and right side of the Goodsync window.  The first time I did this the results were as the screen shot from above detailing that the files on the left should be copied to the folder on the right.  Although I was setup for two-way synchronization, because there was nothing at the destination, this essentially became a straight copy from left to right.

After hitting the sync button, the results showed the files were equal from left to right.  I would then take the usb drive to another PC that has Quicken installed and perform a synchronization between the folders on the drive and those on the second PC.  Ideally your data files are now the same on both PCs.  There is a caveat though.  You must not make changes on both data files at the same time or synchronization may get confused.  To quote from the manual  “Therefore GoodSync cannot sync two database files on Left and Right if both file(sic) were modified. Not seeing the internal structure of these files GoodSync will declare a conflict, as it sees two files both of which have changed”.  Another issue is that you must locate the receiving folder on the second computer, thereby requiring another step to do a copy.

After several weeks of using GoodSync2Go I came to the conclusion that it is too complicated for my purposes.  I used it to synchronize 4 different applications/folders between several computers and found myself  reverting to those applications built-in utilities to back up and restore the databases.  Using those I didn’t have to browse for the file locations on the PCs.  It might work for you and because you can try it for free, there’s nothing to lose.  A word of caution:  Make sure you know which way the files are being copied.  I wiped out my Quicken database because I didn’t pay attention.  I copied obsolete files over current ones by mistake.  That would never happen using Quicken’s backup and restore.

On the plus side it’s very flexible.  The backups and synchronizations can be run automatically.  Also, it allows one to synchronize to network devices and ftp servers.

Filed in categories: Desktop Computer Gear, Laptops and Gear, Reviews

Tagged: Software, Utility

GoodSync2Go Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on February 23, 2010 at 3:33 pm.

As you all know, I have been searching for the ultimate gear bag for years.  I posted a glowing review of the Duluth Traders Fire Hose Field Bag just a few weeks ago, and that was the best bag I had seen.  I bought an Asus eeePC 900HA (one of the last available 9” netbooks) a week ago, and to my dismay, it did not fit in the rear compartment.  Since this was to be the notebook computer I am bringing with me storm chasing this year, I need access to it from my seat in the van to do video and photo storage and light photo editing.  The Duluth bag, as amazing as it is, was not going to able to be the bag of choice for my trip.  It needed to be about half an inch wider to get the starring role there.  So, the search resumed.

I was doing my browsing on Ebags.com, and this little beauty hit my eye and I immediately wished I had seen this years ago.  Oh, the problems it would have solved.  I put in my order and a week later it showed up at my door.  I knew immediately that it would be the perfect bag for stowing all of my storm chasing gear in a compact but well-organized place.  It’s called the Olympia Multi-Purpose Waist Pack.  It’s made of black ballistic nylon with orange/yellow lining inside for maximum visibility.

The specifications are:

Size: 8″ x 12″ x 6″
Weight:1 lb , 8 oz
Capacity:600 cu. in.
Material: Rigid poly ballistic fabric
Warranty:10 Years
Linear inches:26″

The back of the bag has a zippered compartment to stash the waist belt.  I will probably not be using this feature, and the belt tucks very nicely behind.  Each wing flap of the belt contains a small zippered compartment perfect for stowing keys or change or a small mp3 player.

flap pocket

The main compartment is very open and contains a floating flat mesh pocket for travel documents.  My passport and travel papers fit perfectly in here.

The front of the main compartment has two flat fabric pockets.  They hold:

- Vixen pocket monocular
- Kestrel 4000 weather meter
- Emergency backup battery charger with cables for my phone, camcorder and iPod Touch.

The rest of the compartment is open.  There is no key-fob dangly thing in this bag.  The main compartment is spacious enough to hold:

- 9″ Asus eeePC 900HA netbook in its protective sleeve
- belt pouch with Droid phone, iPod Touch and earbuds
- belt pouch with Sony SX-41 camcorder and spare battery
- belt pouch with Canon S90 digital camera, spare battery and spare memory cards

The three belt pouches will be on my belt while on the chase, the space left in the bag will hold my fold-up jacket and any other sundries I get on any particular day.

There are two large pockets on the front, with zipped pockets in front of each of them that hold:

- a small notebook with pens and pencils
- business cards and my Olympus pocket voice recorder
- More cables and a USB memory stick
- pill case, Dramamine, a lot of spare AA and AAA batteries and a USB memory stick
- Sony Reader Pocket

And two mesh pockets for water bottles on the side, into one goes my Garmin Colorado 400t GPSr!

Here is all the gear it can hold (the Garmin GPS is tucked into the left mesh pocket):

To see a video of all this gear being packed into the bag, see my video at

Conclusion:  A great gear bag at a great price!

Filed in categories: Gear, Reviews

Tagged: bag gadget camera travel compact organizer, Case, Shoulder Bag, Utility

Olympia Multi-Purpose Waist Pack Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on January 10, 2010 at 10:40 am.

When I got an iPhone, I abandoned the harsh wake up of my old alarm clock. (Love the “Harp” sound…) One of the first things I do in the morning is check the weather and read the online news. With Mendelini’s iPhone app, Glance, I can see the time, the weather and a scrolling RSS feed before my feet hit the floor. Considering there are over 200 different alarm clock apps in the iTunes App store… not to mention the very effective built-in Clock app… Glance is an elegant, customizable clock application for Apple’s iPhone or iPod Touch.

If you keep Glance on in a dock or stereo, and set the “Do Not Sleep” option, you’ve got three types of instant information at… well, a glance; clock, weather, and news. The button on the main display allows the user to dim the display for nighttime use. The alarm clock has nine possible sounds, none of which are system sounds. “Good Morning, Your Majesty” is my favorite, or maybe I just like the name.

The app displays a scrolling RSS feed and offers eight News Feeds: BBC, BoingBoing, CNN, Digg, Fox, Google, Onion and WSJ, Sports Feeds: ESPN or Sports Illustrated, Tech Feeds: Engadget, Gizmodo, Slashdot, TechCrunch, Mac News Feeds: Apple Hot News, Apple Insider, MacNN, Mac Observer, MacRumors, and TUAW. There are also two Gaming Feeds, four Entertainment Feeds and three iPhone/iPod News Feeds.

Glance went live in the iTunes store on August 1, selling for .99. The developer is actively seeking feedback through Facebook and Twitter, so new RSS feeds and additional sounds are sure to be added.

Mendelini’s Glance is a colorful and useful three-in-one app that will certainly evolve with time and user input. The scrolling RSS feed, weather and alarm clock all in one screen is handy and makes Glance stand out from the over 200 alarm clock applications available in the iTunes app store.

Some of the Glance settings...

Filed in categories: iPhone, iPad, iPod related, Watches and Clocks

Tagged: iPhone, iPod Touch, Utility

Mendelini’s iPhone App – Glance originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 11, 2009 at 6:05 pm.

The Palm Centro. Small. Cheap. Powerful. No Notepad program.

Ah, Palm… I know things are not going that great for you right now, but come on- leaving NotePad off the Centro? Forcing thousands of your devoted fans to use (shiver) pencils and paper for quick notes? You might think that Voice Memo is good enough, but one cannot scribble the design for a working Flux Capacitor in Voice Memo now, can one?

OK, so you can beam NotePad from any other Palm that has it (although I understand that notes saved on another Palm cannot be opened on the imported version). There are also some good freeware versions that work nicely (such as DiddleBug). Then there is Electric Pocket’sBugMe! Notepad.

[BugMe's Main Screen- clean, simple, well-organized... and an example of how everyone seems to test pens and notepads.]

BugMe! is a Notepad replacement for $19.95 that has been around in various incarnations for years. It brings some nice touches to the party. The addition of drawing tools and colors is the most visible part, and it greatly helps my doodling and notes to be able to change colors. The addition of ‘rubber stamps’, or icons you can place and move is fun as well- and you can use many standard icons, such as Datebk and other programs use. Fun, but honestly not something I use often.

[Simple, intuitive drawing tools and a good color pallete.]

[Some of the 'rubber stamps' and a rather dumb doodle using them.]

Another fun and more useful tool is the ability to draw or write on images- photos, screenshots, imported images- pretty near anything BugMe! can display, you can scribble on! In my sample, I took a photo of some shelves for sale and scribbled the approximate dimensions on the note. Other examples can include marking directions on a map, putting people’s names and/or numbers on photos, etc.

[Photo with written notes, and embedded phone number.]

About the phone number* on that last screenshot… If you use the Text tool, you can embed a phone number, website, etc. in your image and open it by tapping on it. There are some limitations to this, but it is quite handy! BugMe! is full of nice touces like that- a sweetly simple alarm that opens the image and whatever notes or links you associate with it, and other nice features in 1.23M of space. It runs nicely on the Centro- stable and easy to see. The icons are simple and easy to figure out, and there is a well-done menu with ‘undo’ and other familiar commands that makes it hard to mess anything up too badly. (*- the number listed here is a local business. It had to be a real number to work for the demo. Please don’t call it.)

BugMe! can be thought of as a Notepad replacement, a simple ‘Paint’ program, and a nice alarm all rolled up into one package. I find it so useful that it is one of my ‘Old Reliables’ that I almost always have on my PDA. To make a really bad pun, BugMe! is one of the few programs that has never bugged me.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

BugMe! Notepad: Palm OS Utility Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on November 27, 2008 at 8:15 am.

The Palm Centro is an amazing device for its price and size. I love mine almost unconditionally- almost. Today, I am going to rant about a couple of the things that bug me.

{Rant Mode}. A couple of things that tick me off about the Centro include the odd tendency for the built-in alarms to only sound once or twice regardless of how you set the repeat, the worthlessness of the ‘green button’, and the inability to easily reprogram other buttons. I mean really- as a Certified Power User, why do I have this dumb big green button that apparently does absolutely nothing? {/Rant Mode}

I’ve already expressed my fondness for Hobbyist Software in earlier reviews of their software titles: Initiate and Power Hero. This review looks at a program that could have been written just to help the Centro become more of a power tool- Butler.

alt="Butler Menu 1"/>
alt="Butler Menu 2"/>

[Butler's menu is so long, it takes 3 screens. Here are two of them!]

Butler is “the assistant who thinks of everything” according to the website. If by ‘everything’ you mean handling the Palm’s alarms, button assignments, key guards, and even LED use, then yes, Butler thinks of everything! The $14.95 program comes with a 100% satisfaction guarantee and a years worth of free upgrades, and the typical sweet trial offer that Hobbyist uses on other programs. After my trial, I knew I had to have this and Hobbyist graciously offered me copy for a full review.

Butler does so much that a review like this can easily become just a quick list of features, parroting the website so let me touch on a few highlights.

alt="Butler Alarm"/>
alt="Butler Attention"/>

[Alarm Manager and Attention Grabber screens]

I hate to wake up, and have kind of an odd schedule of when I need to be up. Normal alarm clocks are not flexible enough so I have used my Palm ever since they got loud enough to work. When I started using my Centro, I could not get the alarm to sound often enough to do the job- a few chirps and it was done.

Butler, however, features not only a good, intuitive alarm element that lets you set 6 different independent alarms, it combines with Attention Grabber (a program that helps make sure you don’t miss alarms or messages) and Flexible Alerts. These work together to allow you to tailor an alarm to flash the screen, flash the LED, vibrate, launch programs, start up MP3 files, and more.

With this arsenal, I can create a series of alarms that pretty much force me to wake up on time just to stop the cacophony! (Between you and me, I still use the default alarm in Calendar as a pre-alarm so I can stop Butler before it explodes.)

alt="Butler Button"/>

[One of the button managing screens]

Applications like Key Launcher, Volume Keys, and Buttons allow me to assign more keys to more functions than I can remember! Resetting the volume control keys to scroll keys was handy, but giving me a quick button for Memos and Notepad* saves me tons of aggravation on a nearly hourly basis. I have a LOT of memos on my Palm and I use them and Notepad for a lot of things, and I really missed the Quick Buttons other Palms included. No more- now I can launch them with 1 or 2 button presses as long as I remember the buttons because, of course, they are not labeled as such this way. Using the button management software, I can set up many other options simply.

(*= OK, so Notepad is not standard on the Palm Centro- rack up another annoyance. You can beam it from another Palm, or use something like BugMe

alt="Butler Keyguard"/>
alt="Butler Keyguard Icons"/>

[Keyguard Manager and Keyguard Icons]

A suite of security applications allows you to tailor the keylock- how and when it works, what it displays, timing, and so forth. I like that it can be rigged to display status icons, like battery, memory, etc. It almost makes up for the loss of the status elements in the Centro from the Tx.

Butler finishes off with some nice touches- it addresses you politely as you request, it can restore some “old” features, and so forth.

alt="Butler Prefs"/>
alt="Butler MP3"/>

[A couple more screens...]

This little 211k program is stable, well-documented and supported, and reminds me a lot of the ‘Power Toys’ for Windows in the mix of fun and powerful. This program has been officially added to my list of programs to automatically reload whenever my Centro is wiped out.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Butler – Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on November 7, 2008 at 4:31 pm.

With the nearly endless number of usernames, passwords, web logins, bank accounts, credit card numbers, software licenses, and other sensitive/personal data everyone has to have these days to keep up in the digital age, I long ago turned towards a secure/encrypted password manager. It is the ONLY way I can keep track of all the electronic accessibility and critical information I need to keep with me 24/7. Plus the fact one must keep personal information secure with the constant threat of identity and cyber theft, I do not see how folks can live without a (mobile &/or desktop) program like these.

I will be up front about using SplashID since my early Palm days, through Windows Mobile (back to Palm) and now on my Blackberry. That said, when the flood of new applications for the iPhone/Touch hit iTunes, not only did I want to try SplashID but some of the other leading password managers as well. This article will be a comparative look at how SplashID, eWallet, and 1Password stack up against each other.

Quick Look Comparison Table:

I will not go into every nuance of each of these iPhone applications or their desktop companions but their overall usage and capabilities.

I first want to state that I believe the three main features of a good password keeper are:

1. Password protecting and encrypting your data/information
2. Allowing you to organize/tweak your information in a manner that best suits your use
3. Having the ability to input or modify information/data on one device and have it sync those modifications everywhere else you keep this information.

SplashData’s SplashID

Like previous versions, SplashID for the iPhone/Touch gives you a great deal of control over the record types, field design, and data content. It allows you to organize and tailor your data in a manner suited best for you. To make input quick and easy, SplashData provides templates for all standard categories.

Click thumbnail to see full size image

SplashID uses 256-bit Blowfish encryption to protect its database. Like the desktop version, SplashID for the iPhone uses a single password to access your confidential information. Within this application you have a majority of the function and ability to tailor the categories, fields, and data right on your iPhone that you do on the desktop versions. SplashID on the iPhone allows you to create new, edit, and/or delete categories and individual entries.

I was able to export all of the data from my Windows version of SplashID for the Blackberry and seamlessly import the vID file into the Mac desktop version.

Once you have your data in the desktop version of SplashID, you can wirelessly sync (as long as both platforms are within the same wireless network) the data from/to your iPhone/Touch to/from your Mac (or PC).

You will need to have the latest desktop version of the application ($20 or a free upgrade if you already have version 4). The wireless sync process was easy and surprisingly quick. Currently, SplashID is the only secure password/information keeper application that has both a PC and Mac desktop companion versions.

Once the data is on your iPhone/Touch, navigation through the various categories is quick and intuitive.

Agile Web Solution’s 1Password

1Password for the iPhone is an application that enables you to log user names and passwords for websites and securely save them on your iPhone. Along with its primary function, the program has the ability to store other types of sensitive information (i.e., credit cards, bank accounts, social security numbers, etc.) as well. That said, 1Password for the iPhone is a definitely a ‘scaled down’ iteration of the desktop version. It can not auto populate log-in and password fields in the mobile version of Safari. This fact, in combination with the iPhone’s current inability to copy & paste if you have complex user names and passwords, means you will need to write them down and then hand enter them into mobile Safari. But if you are recalling them to enter them on your desktop, you obviously can view the info on your iPhone and enter it on your keyboard. This is very similar to SplashID and eWallet but for those of you currently using 1Password on your Mac be forewarned.

Both the desktop and iPhone versions of 1Password has two tiers of password protection, a four digit log-in to get into the application and a master password that can be added to individual (or all the) entries. The master password adds an additional level of security to your critical information (something eWallet and SplashID do not have).

1Password for the iPhone can wirelessly sync with 1Password for the Mac ($40), an application that enables you to auto populate website login information into your favorite browser. Currently, there is no PC version of 1Password.

I was able to export my data from SplashID and import the csv file into the desktop version of 1Password.

Since this application was primarily designed to keep web login information, its ability to input and display other types of sensitive information is more limited than other secure information keepers. 1Password gets the job done but it is definitely not as polished (at least in terms of non-web log in/passwords) and robust as the other two applications in this review.

Ilium Software’s eWallet

Ilium has done a very nice job of creating a great user interface for eWallet (iPhone/Touch) in terms of both looks and usability. The application comes with many pre-loaded graphics, allowing you to visually spruce up your data. Functionally, data is broken down hierological into Wallets, Categories, and Cards. eWallet comes with many (very helpful) pre-made templates, to help lead you through the data input process.

Ilium uses 256-bit AES encryption to secure your data. Like the PC desktop version, eWallet for the iPhone uses a single password to access your confidential information. eWallet enables you to create many different ‘Wallets’, each with its own password.

Within each ‘Wallet’ you can create many different ‘Categories’ to further organize your data/information.

Illium provides a large selection of templates to easily input the data and keep information organized.

Click thumbnail to see full size image

Also, within each ‘Category’ you input each entry on its own ‘Card’ based on the provided templates.

Click thumbnail to see full size image

If you wanted to spend the time and effort, you can make each Card be completely individualized. From the color and background to curved or non-curved edges to the icon you associate with the entry.

Initially, the iPhone application was released as a standalone product with no desktop sync capability. But on 8 Sept 08, Ilium released updates to both their Windows PC (6.1.2.24688)
and iPhone (6.1.2.115) versions of eWallet which enables you to sync via WiFi.

The sync process required Bonjour for Windows to be loaded on your PC before the wireless sync will work. Once again, the computer and device need to be on the same wireless network.

If I did not have a Windows machine lying around, this really would be a deal breaker for me. I can not imagine the amount of time it would take (and the hassle it would be) to input all of the data directly onto your iPhone/Touch.

eWallet for the iPhone is $9.99, half the cost of the Palm or Windows Mobile versions and according to Ilium it may be a limited-time introductory price (they are not sure). The desktop software (Windows only) costs $9.95 or a free upgrade for those who already own eWallet 6.

Click thumbnail to see full size image

Since the beginning, Ilium has promised a syncable desktop version for Mac ‘sometime this year’. In my opinion, Ilium released eWallet (iPhone) before it was ready for primetime. With the bar set at wireless desktop syncing for a majority of applications, it seems like Ilium was rushing to get eWallet out the door and into iTunes. That being said, I am looking forward to trying out the Mac version of their desktop software. I am planning on taking the time to organize and tweak the look of each of my data entries (and hopefully clean out all my old/useless info in the process).You can keep up-to-date via Ilium’s eWallet iPhone blog site.

Conclusions

Overall, all three of these iPhone applications do a good job of securely protecting your sensitive information. Which one you will ultimately prefer really depends on where you are coming from (i.e., the type of data, how you are using it, and the desktop platform you use). I am not going to tell you which one is best overall. All I can tell you is that I will continue using SplashID for the time being. Primarily due to my being use to it, all my data is tweaked the way I like it, and its always been a rock-solid performer for me. However, once Ilium releases a Mac version of eWallet that will sync with the iPhone/Touch, I will be giving eWallet another try. I like the graphical interface and hierological tiers of data keeping.

Just the iPhone/Touch applications range from free (1Password) to $10 (SplashID & eWallet). To make these iPhone/Touch applications (no matter which one you choose) truly useful and easier to manage/use, I highly recommend buying the desktop counterpart as well. The combined price of the iPhone/Touch application plus desktop companion ranges from $20 to $40 dollars, very reasonable for the safety and security of your critical data/information.

I have to mention the fact that since I suggested the concept of this review to Julie, the number of secure password/data keepers has increased many fold. I searched iTunes and here are a half dozen: Keeper ($0.99), Lockbox (Free), Lockbox Pro ($1.99), Mecrets Password Manager ($9.99), Saphir – The Password Manager ($7.99), Memengo Wallet ($1.99) and My Eyes Only ($8.99) to name a few.

Filed in categories: iPhone, iPad, iPod related

Tagged: iPhone, Software, Utility

Secure Information Keeper software for the iPhone and iPod Touch originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on October 7, 2008 at 10:00 am.

Hobbyist Software is
now on my official list of "Good places for Centro/Treo software",
and their browser/launcher Initiate Pro is
an example of why.

As faithful readers will remember (ignoring for the moment the question of
whether I actually have any faithful readers), I have previously
reviewed a group of browsers before here.
At the time, I was unimpressed with launchers in general and not looking at
them very aggressively for a while- even though one comment about the review
mentioned Hobbyist Software’s Initiate.

Initiate is available in a ‘standard’ or ‘pro’ edition. The standard edition
is a capable, but rather typical browser that sells for $9.95. The Pro edition
opens a wide variety of files, supports voice commands, and even lets you launch
websites from your memo pad. The Pro edition runs $24.95 and takes about 600k
(assuming I counted all of the applicable files- this is one of those
applications that uses several small files in addition to the main program.) So
far it is stable and plays nicely with my Palm Centro.

Hobbyist Software was kind enough to not only offer me Initiate Pro to try
out, they signed me up for the on-line tutorial
they offer. Every day for a week, they sent me a nice little e-mailed lesson
covering one aspect of Initiate. This is a great idea. Most of the lessons only
took a minute or two to go over. While many of the concepts are familiar to power
users, it really helped to figure out some of the more novel aspects of Initiate
Pro. (Besides, Hobbyist obviously knew a real power user wouldn’t read no stinkin’ manual.)

You already know what a regular launcher does- opening programs (hopefully
including those on your memory card), using icons to perform a variety of
tasks, offering skins to customize the experience, etc. Unsurprisingly,
Initiate does all of this, and does it well, even in the ‘standard’ edition.
You can display backgrounds, download or create skins and icon packs, and even
install a variety of plug-ins (free or low cost) to further customize your device.
Many of the plug-ins (listed here) are designed
to work seamlessly with the Datebk6
or 2Day programs. (Note- a
review of Datebk 6 is in the works, and 2Day is a possibility in the future.)

The three areas Initiate Pro shines are search, views, and launching
assorted files. Like the newer PC and Mac OS’s, Initiate Pro lets you select a
specific file, and open it with a click. If the file is an image, it will
automatically open the viewer you assign. If it is a contact, it will dial the
number (or send a message). If it is an MP3 file, it will play it (Initiate
even has a built-in player if you want). Movies, books, documents… it opens
them quickly and reliably. Interestingly, it can even open web sites from Memo
entries and other sources.

alt="Main Browser Screen"/>
alt="Power User Screen"/>

[The Main and Power User Screens]

Under launching, let’s not forget that it can also ‘Voice Launch’ anything
it can launch otherwise as long as your device supports voice recording! Record
the commands, then next time you say them, they will launch your files or
applications.

You can view things in the default ‘Applications’ view, which looks like
every other icon-based browser. Like many browsers, the top and bottom of the screen can
become very cluttered with icons, commands, etc., but you can configure most of
this away. You can also go to a ‘Power User’ view where it will lit things more
like the ‘List’ command under ‘View’ in Windows. The screen now shows every
file that Initiate can play with. Clicking on the ‘binoculars’ icon allows you
to list various categories, such as music files or files on the SD card. I
don’t know if Hobbyist Software counts this as a search element or a view
element as it works for both nicely. The ‘Power User’ view coupled with the
search makes it easy to open the files I have scattered all over my Centro’s
memory.

Palm’s search capabilities have always been good but underutilized by most
users. Initiate allows you to ‘SmartSearch’ for anything on our Palm,
usually with only a few letters. Type in a letter, and all files that start
with that letter. Type any other letter, and now it only shows those files with
that other letter in it as well. For example, if I type "MV" when Initiate
is open, it brings up five of my files- three contacts, a memo title, and an
application (MobiTV). A quick scroll or tap and it is open. Initiate also
offers ‘SmartGuess’ in which it tries to fill in missing web info or phone
numbers for you. Both of these functions, and most others, can be turned off or
adjusted in ‘Preferences’.

alt="Searching for MV"/>

[Using the search features for 'Mv'
Notice the letters in the upper left corner]

Initiate Pro is loaded with features- so many there are still a lot I have
not used in weeks of use! This makes the tutorial series they offer very
helpful. They also offer a lot of help on their website- which is nice because
I needed it a lot. Most of Initiate is easy enough to figure out without help,
but it is good that they offer it in such an organized fashion. At one point in my experimentation, I got to an odd screen that took some time to get back out of. The helps helped.

alt="Menus"/>
alt="Preferences"/>

[A small sample of the settings you can play with.]

Overall, Initiate Pro is a well-designed power program for the Palm
Smartphone power user. It is hard to do justice to large programs with this much going on. Hobbyist has a great trial policy (full versions with escalating nag screens for most programs), so if this review has tweaked your interest at all, give it a try!

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Initiate Pro – Palm OS Utility Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 18, 2008 at 4:20 pm.

Hobbyist Software offers a great line of software for the Palm
Treo and
Centro user, and some of it can even be used for other Palms. When I asked for some codes so I could trial their products for a long enough time to figure them out, they were very helpful. They started me with Initiate Pro and Power Hero. I am still learning about Initiate Pro, so let’s look at Power Hero.

The claim is that “Power Hero gets the best from your battery!” I am one of those lucky power users that can charge my PDA at work, have a charger in the car, and a battery-powered booster, so low charges are rarely a problem for me. However, I know that a lot of users are not so lucky as to be able to recharge when they wish, and I think that they will find Power Hero a great value at $14.95.

What does it do? Basically, it turns things off. Yeah! When all is said and done, it shows you charts of your usage and turns things off. That’s about it. Period. Done. Bye bye!

You are still here? Ah, you want details! OK, Power Hero gives you the ability to set a lot functions so they turn off according to various schedules or timers. Things like Bluetooth, keyboard, network, phone (without signal), infrared. Things that constantly put out small signals, or that are looking for signals all the time. Your Bluetooth-enabled Palm, for example, is constantly looking to see if there is a Bluetooth device in the area even when you don’t especially want it to be.

Many of these systems can be toggled on or off in the Preferences, but Power Hero not only pulls them all together, but it adds more things than you can easily find there, AND gives you the ability to add rules for turning on or off.

Scheduling, for example, lets you turn your phone, network, Bluetooth, Infrared, keyboard, and/or screen on or off at various times of the day, while Power Saver lets you decide various rules, like “Turn Network off after (fill-in the blank) minutes”. The Main Screen of Power Hero lets you turn the things listed earlier on or off right there as well as showing you a power usage chart and a screen brightness slider! Turning off unused features, reducing screen brightness when you don’t need it, etc… this is all stuff they have recommended for Palms for years, all rolled into one simple and powerful package.

[Scheduling and Power Saver screens]

Power Hero uses less than 150k, and shows no tendency towards being unstable or crashing. The screens are done like many good Palm screens- no major surprises and only a few things that are not intuitively obvious (in my mind, this means a good understanding of the Zen of Palm.) It really helps if you have a Bluetooth headset (which I don’t), and has several other features other power users might drool over- like power-related shortcuts that can be used in a launcher. One glitch I found was that the Bluetooth features seem more tuned to headsets than syncing the Palm, etc. Minor issue, quickly resolved!

[The Main Screen (with quick access buttons and screen slider) and one of several screens about the charge status]

[Preferences settings]

Bottom line: Has it helped me? Not massively, my Palm rarely gets below 70% charged. Will it help you? If battery life is a concern- then the answer is a definite YES! Not only do I think so, but Rob at Hobbyist Software proudly proclaims, in big, easy to see letters, “100% Guarantee: If for any reason you don’t think Power Hero is fantastic – I will give you a 100% refund.” Other users report about a 30% improvement in battery life- which seems well worth the asking price.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Hobbyist Software Power Hero – Palm OS Utility Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on July 29, 2008 at 8:00 am.

I have thought of myself as a Palm Power User since the days of my old Handspring Visor Deluxe (Ice), back when cell phones were big bricks and Windows was an unstable annoying platform. Now, I am using a Palm Centro Smartphone, cell phones are in danger of vanishing as they get smaller, and Windows…

Part of the reason I think of myself as a Power User is that my entire life is in my Palm- a diary, useful numbers, codes, passwords, etc. I often worry about security- especially as I get more absent-minded- but I generally just rely on the internal security features… unless I turn them off for being annoying or causing glitches with other programs (they seem to dislike software with alarms.)

I have tried various third-party software for this- ‘wallets’, secure memo programs, etc. in the past, and found most of them rather tedious. I mean, the info is already on my Palm, where I want it to be. Most of these want me to re-input everything in their specific locations. I’ve got vital games of Spider Solitaire to play, I don’t have time to re-input everything!

Enter Ilium Software and eWallet. They asked for a review and provided a key. After bad experiences with wallets, I was less than enthusiastic but the program won me over.

[Getting started screen]

[Sample Cards- 'credit card' and 'passport']

First, they offer a desktop version that syncs with the Palm, and can also store info on-line for you. Being able to do everything on my laptop made the process much less annoying. Next, they actually do the wallet idea right- the info is stored on cards that you can format to look just like the cards you might carry in a wallet. They give you sample cards, icons, free icon and background packs, a small design program, and more to let you design the card the way you want it. The card can show or hide vital information for another level of security.

This ability is a blessing and a curse. It is great to create a series of virtual credit cards, calling cards, etc., but you still have to make each one. The program can inport data from other similar programs, but not from various locations across your Palm. Now, not only do I have to imput the data, I get sucked into playing with the look of each card! (And you know that I HAVE to tweak each and every one until it is juuust riiiight!) Besides the front of the card, eWallet also allows you to store a ton of other data as if on the ‘back’ of the card- additional phone numbers, useful info, etc. I use it for payment due dates, interest rates, etc.

[Making Your Card- database and part of the customization process]

So… how secure is all of this? eWallet uses a ‘strong 256 Bit AES encryption’, which is apparently a very good system. It uses a simple password you choose to get into, and after a certain number of failed attempts, it locks up. It automatically saves changes, syncs to the desktop and web (if you want), and can even be used as a ‘auto-fill-in’ tool on websites if you wish. (Personally, I love this feature. Other auto-fill-in programs make me nervous wondering who is tracking the info.)

There are things that make or break programs for me. The looks, ‘clunkiness’, features, little details that show careful thought, and the overall ‘gestalt’. eWallet offers a lot of features either built-in or as free downloads- a password generator, a decent interface, a relatively small footprint that seems very stable, a decent website, icon pack, background editor, and more.

As I use eWallet more and more, especially on my laptop, I am more and more impressed with it. I like the way I can use it to generate a strong, secure password to use on the Internet, then use the fill-in feature to access the sites. (I generally rely on a few rather weak but easy to remember passwords which I know is a terribly unsecure method.)

The thing I like about eWallet for my PDA is that I can create categories for my cards, then quickly and easily select a card with a simple PIN number. It takes a little getting used to storing my stuff this way instead of the more ‘organic’, but less structured way I am used to, but it is happening.

About the only thing I can think of that would make the program better would be if it paid your credit card for you!

eWallet is $19.95 for one version (PC, Palm, or Windows Mobile), and two versions (PC and either Palm or WinMobile) for $29.95.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Ilium Software’s eWallet – Palm OS Utility Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on June 30, 2008 at 8:00 am.

One of my favorite mobile apps is ShoZu. So when Julie asked me to do a piece on a *really* useful mobile app, I didn’t have to look too far.

What is ShoZu?

ShoZu sends/receives content (photos, videos, etc.) to/from your web-based services directly to/from your mobile phone. It completely cuts out the intermediary – your desktop – in the process. The best part about ShoZu is all of this happens in the background – invisibly and automatically.

ShoZu works with dozens of web-based services including Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Picasa, etc.

Download, Installation and Setup

I loaded http://m.shozu.com on my mobile browser to begin the process of downloading and installing ShoZu

As you can see from the screenshots, the download/install process is pretty straight-forward. The installation is followed by a terse warning titled “Please be aware”.

I clicked OK to reach ShoZu’s main screen.

The main screen has 3 options
– “Share-it” is the outbound service – it’s what lets you upload content from your phone to the web.
– “ZuCasts” is the inbound service – it’s what lets you download content from the web to your phone.
– “Contacts” is the outbound contacts backup service that backs up your phonebook contacts to your web-based ShoZu.com account

But wait – before I can use any of this, I gotta setup a ShoZu account. The sign-up process is breezy – ShoZu doesn’t even ask for a username or password!

Share-It

I then proceeded to setup the “Share-It” service. Naturally, to use this service, I need to tell ShoZu what I want to share and where I want to share it (ShoZu calls them “destinations”).

ShoZu supports upwards of 30 such destinations. Each such destination supports different types of content. Here’s a snapshot of where you can share your content:

a)Photos: Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Webshots, Twitter (through TwitPic), Box.net, Buzznet, Cellfish, Faces.com, Friendster, HotSMS, Hyves, Kodak EasyShare, Qipit (for conversion to PDF), Pikeo, ipernity, etc.
b)Videos: YouTube, Box.net, Dailymotion, blip.tv, Box.net, Buzznet, Cellfish, Seesmic, ipernity, etc.
c)Blogging: Twitter, Blogger, Dada.net, LiveJournal, MetaWeblog, Moblog, Typepad, Vox, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress

d)Citizen Journalism: BBC, CNN, ITV, Scoopt

Additionally, you can also specify email IDs and FTP account details for direct uploads to custom locations.
Phew! That’s a lot of coverage, isn’t it?

I chose to add Flickr as a destination first.

Immediately thereafter, I received a confirmation-seeking email from Flickr which completed the process of linking my Flickr account to my ShoZu account.

And then I added my YouTube account as a destination.

Right – adding destinations was easy – now, I am ready to upload.

Once I say ‘Yes’, the entire transfer process takes place invisibly in the background. Naturally, I don’t have any screenshots to share…

After that, the next time I click a photo using my mobile, ShoZu pops up soon after the capture – asking whether I’d like to upload it to Flickr or some other source.

I can also hand-pick existing photos and upload them to your destination(s) selectively.

I am allowed to add tags, titles and description to the photos before uploading.

If your phone as GPS (mine, didn’t unfortunately), ShoZu can also geo-tag your photos before uploading them. Now, isn’t that really cool!?

ShoZu allows uploading photos to multiple destinations in a single upload operation.

I can also ask ShoZu to auto-send photos. I can even ask it to compress photos to save time/data.

Although, ShoZu doesn’t really require you to login to your online account, I was curious to see how it looks…

My destinations were duly “synchronized” with my online account. There’s also an option to add destinations/sites from this web-based account.

ZuCasts and Contacts

Let’s look at ZuCasts now. ShoZu gave me an option to subscribe to 60 ZuCasts. I browsed through all my options…

… and chose to subscribe to the Webshots “Photo of the Day” ZuCast. Again, the process of subscribing to ZuCasts is so simple – there’s hardly anything to write about.

ZuCasts are downloaded invisibly. There’s an option to save ZuCasts in a “Saved files” folder.

You can also subscribe to your friends’ Flickr photo streams or Facebook updates as ZuCasts.

Let’s look at the Contacts service. Once you switch the service on, it keeps uploading contacts slowly, gradually and invisibly to your ShoZu.com account.

Data Transfer & Notification Management

As you have noticed so far, ShoZu is all about data transfer. The “Share-It” and “Contacts” services upload data and the “ZuCasts” service downloads data. Data charges in some parts of the world can be very steep, so you might want to be careful, particularly with ZuCasts.

ShoZu allows you to choose how you want to connect to the internet – I chose my GPRS account, but you want to use Wi-Fi instead.

Let’s look at two of ShoZu’s super-cool features.

One – ShoZu also has this magical ability to know when you’re roaming. In most parts of the world, data charges are higher when roaming – so ShoZu suspends all data transfers when you’re away from your home network.

Two – When ShoZu wants to notify you of something while it’s running in the background, I doesn’t throw a pop-up. It composes a local “text message” and ‘sends’ it to your SMS inbox, without ever using your mobile network.

As soon as I stepped out of my home network and began roaming, my phone buzzed and I was told I have a new text message. This text message turned out to be a local message from ShoZu…

The moment I entered my home network again, I saw another message…

Of course, at any point of time, you can see the transfer status to know just how much data ShoZu’s been consuming in the background.

Impressions

You simply cannot ignore ShoZu if you:
-upload mobile photos/videos on your photo/video sharing websites
-update your facebook status or tweet often
-blog while on the move
-send photos/videos to email or FTP accounts

ShoZu has been around for more than 3 years now and the maturity shows. The application is rock-solid and behaves exactly as expected without freezing or hanging-up.

Handset support is widespread, ranging from Windows Mobile to Symbian S60 to UIQ to Palm Treo to even the Blackberry – the iPhone is not supported yet, though.

It integrates beautifully with the phone’s camera application. So much so, that after a point, you forget it’s a 3rd party software you installed – you begin believing it’s a part of your phone’s native OS. It’s really that stable.

On the downside, like all powerful toys, ShoZu can hurt if not handled with care.

I’m sure there are a lot of ShoZu users who’ve chosen to auto-upload photos/videos and then forgotten about it. Some day, ShoZu might end up uploading something on their Facebook profile that they would rather not.

Moreover, if you choose to use your mobile network to connect ShoZu to the internet, you should be prepared for some heavy duty data consumption – particularly, if you end up subscribing to a lot of ZuCasts. In ShoZu’s defense, it does warn you about these perils from time to time, but hey!

Also, a powerful application like ShoZu can drag your phone a bit. You see, mobile phone processors don’t really have a lot of juice yet, unfortunately.

ShoZu “auto-starts” in the background and while that’s a convenient feature, it effectively means your phone takes slightly longer to start up.

Similarly, ShoZu has a larger-than-normal memory footprint, so lesser memory is available for other applications causing them to slow down a bit.

But then, ShoZu does so much for you – do you really those other applications?

Filed in categories: Windows Mobile related

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Pocket PC, Software, Symbian, Symbian OS Related, Utility

ShoZu Mobile Photo and Video Sharing Application Review originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on May 16, 2008 at 6:00 pm.

One of the perpetually unresolved debates among web users and observers alike is, “Who among the big three – Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail – has the best email service?”

Well, there’s no such debate as far as mobile web users are concerned – Gmail has the best mobile email client by far.

Sure, you can access your gmail account by loading up gmail.com on your mobile phone’s browser (just like you do on your desktop browser) – but mind you, we’re talking about the somewhat-oddly-named “gmail for mobile application” – a free downloadable email client for your gmail account. We’ll just call it GMA to keep things simple.

Let’s start…

Point your phone’s browser to http://gmail.com/app to download and install GMA on your mobile.

The process is simple and straight-forward. Within seconds, you see a message asking whether you want to start the application.

When you start GMA, you’re greeted by a “Java” splash-screen, reminding you that you’re using a Java MIDP software.

Immediately thereafter, you reach the familiar login screen. Please note that you cannot signup for a new gmail.com account from GMA – for that, you have to go to gmail.com from your desktop’s browser.

Once you login, you’re taken to your inbox.

One of the first things you’ll realize is that the look-and-feel of GMA is very similar to that on your desktop browser. – Complete with that trademark google clean-cut interface, that unmistakably friendly color scheme and the background-loading-of-the-second-email-while-you-read-the-first-one.

GMA even loads regular attachments like word files and images.

GMA supports the most frequently used gmail commands.

It even has mobile keypad shortcuts (just like keyboard shortcuts for gmail in your desktop’s browser).

#1 is the shortcut for search (works superbly)
#2 for compose
#3 for mark as unread
#4 for reply
#5 for reply all
#6 for forward
#7 for delete
#8 for report spam
#9 for archive
#0 for refresh inbox
* key for star/unstar
# key for view message

Sadly, you cannot label messages in the current version.

Reading and replying to emails is easy.

But we found a slight annoyance while composing a new email.

GMA does not allow entering email addresses in the “To:” field. When you click on “To”, instead of a text box, your contact list with your most frequently used contact loads.

If you wish to send an email to a not-so-frequently-used contact, you’ve got to choose “all contacts” from the menu. If you wish to send it to a new contact, you’ve got to choose “add new email address”.

The “Go To” menu can be customized to load messages with specific labels.

The settings menu has a few interesting and self-explanatory options. If you’re on an inexpensive data plan, we suggest you keep the “Preload unread mail to open faster” option checked. Yup, this is the same background loading feature that gmail first impressed all of us with 3 or 4 years ago.

There’s also an option to add a “sent from gmail for mobile” signature at the end of all messages, but this signature itself cannot be edited.

The engineers at google managed to fit in a help screen as well.

So, that’s gmail for mobile application for you, then. It’s a simple but powerful application that lets you do almost everything you need do with your gmail account.

Don’t you feel like taking it for a spin, right away?

Then, go ahead and load http://gmail.com/app on your mobile.

Filed in categories: Windows Mobile related

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Pocket PC, Software, Symbian, Symbian OS Related, Utility

GMail Mobile originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on May 6, 2008 at 4:20 pm.

One of the great things about PDA’s is the ability to carry a huge library of books in electronic form. I must have a couple hundred books on mine, ranging from reference to how-to to light fiction. It is sweet to be able to carry 20-30 pounds worth of paper in a few ounces of electronics!

Many Palm users use this ability to carry one or more versions of the Bible with them- makes those cute, little, nearly impossible to read ‘pocket-sized’ Bibles obsolete! There are many options for ‘e-Bibles’, from iPod versions to MP3 spoken versions to e-texts that can be read by most text readers, to dedicated readers with special tools for the job. These last versions are what we will look at here.

‘Special tools’? Few general-purpose text readers have the ability to quickly find a single sentence in a large book the way Bible verse-finder tools can. Most of the programs we will look at can find a verse in about three taps, or search for a single word or phrase. Many text readers allow book-marking, and some even allow note-taking, but few do it as well as dedicated Bible readers do- and the ability to highlight or make notes is a key element for serious students in any field. A big difference is that most Bible readers can do some form of split screen to allow you to compare two documents at the same time.

We are going to look at four readers-

- Laridian’s MyBible v4.2
- Olive Tree Bible Software’s BibleReader v3.69
- GMPSoft’s Bible With You v7.32
- palmbibleplus.sourceforge.net’s Bible+ v3.3.21

These share many characteristics, such as similar simple installation, similar program sizes (small for readers, and each Bible or document adds bytes), etc. Given that they do an identical job on the same platform, this is not unusual. They also offer similar free content, often including things like the King James, American Standard, World English, and Darby’s New Bibles, and Matthew Henry’s Commentary. All can use your memory card to one degree or another, at least to store content on.

Laridian’s MyBible

Laridian’s MyBible For Palm 4 (the actual reader) costs $10, and you need the reader even to read any of the versions they offer for free. This is the big disadvantage of this particular program. On the other hand, they have the cleanest look and interface of the three’ which I guess is only fair since they are the only ones charging for their reader!

alt="Laridian Genesis"/>
alt="Laridian John 3"/>

[MyBible- Genesis and John 3:16]

Laridian offers a wide variety of Bibles, study Bibles, research and reference tools, devotionals, and bundles. Prices on most products are about the same as the paper version would be or as other companies charge for their e-products. For example, the New International Version Life Application Study Bible would cost $39.98 in e-format from Laridian and $39.99 or more in hardback from Amazon.com. They also offer many resources designed mainly for pastors and church staff.

alt="Laridian Split"/>

[MyBible- Split Screen- NIV and Amplified]

For an apples-to-apples comparison, here is what you would pay for some common products from each of these sources: MyBible reader- $10, NIV Version- $29.99, Easton’s Bible Dictionary- free, Matthew Henry Concise Commentary- free. Total: $39.99. (Note: this does not include bundled offers, and different collections of books would reveal different outcomes.)

MyBible Pros:
- Some unique content
- Clean look

- Strong tools, like split screen

MyBible Cons:
- $10 core program
- Little Spanish or foreign content

Olive Tree Bible Software’s BibleReader

Olive Tree Bible Software’s BibleReader is free, and in fact is most often downloaded with some other files. It has a default look that I find hard to read- blue letters on a light yellow background. It is easy enough to change in Preferences, but I cannot seem to locate a way to make my choices the default.

alt="Olive Tree Matthew"/>
alt="Olive Tree John 3:16"/>

[BibleReader- Matthew 1:1 and John 3:16 (with changed colors)]

Olive Tree offers a large library of Bibles, including several free versions- many in foreign languages including Tagalog and Esperanto. They also offer reference tools, devotionals, and a good selection of e-books. Prices are similar to Laridian and paper versions. Olive Tree also offers the iLumina Mobile- a ‘multi-media Bible’ for handhelds that offers maps, movies, etc.

alt="Laridian Split"/>

[BibleReader- Split Screen]

To compare: BibleReader core reader is free, NIV Version- $24.95, Easton’s Bible Dictionary- $5.00, Matthew Henry Concise Commentary- free. Total: $29.95.

BibleReader Pros:
- Free reader (free reader + free content = free eBibles!)
- Lots of free and low cost content (although much of it is rather old and public domain)
- Large (largest?) downloadable library
- Spanish and foreign content

BibleReader Cons:
- Awkward default look

Both Laridian and Olive Tree keep track of your records and do a good job of offering updates, re-downloading, etc. So far, both have resisted the growing trend for ‘download insurance’ that so many companies are charging to allow you to re-download things you purchased. Both companies also offer versions for PC, PPC, Blackberry, iPod, and so on.

GMPSoft’s Bible With You

GMPSoft’s Bible With You seems like a somewhat ‘stripped down’ reader compared to the previous two- fewer commands on the top bar, fewer options, smaller library. It does not offer a split screen, but does have a nice clean interface. It seems to be sold bundled with Bibles which sort of hides the reader’s price, but the King James Bundle costs $8.50 with a comment that the license for the KJV itself is free. Some of the prices seem a bit high, probably because of the way things are bundled.

alt="GMP Genesis"/>
alt="GMP John"/>

[Bible With You- Genesis and John 3:16]

Bible With You does not seem to offer quite as much scholarly content, or quite as much pastoral materials as some of the other choices do, but it does offer a good selection of Bibles, helps, and eBooks.

To compare: Bible With You and the NIV Version together- $29.90, Easton’s Bible Dictionary- $4.00, Matthew Henry Concise Commentary- $10.00. Total: $43.90.

Bible With You Pros:
- Clean, simple look

Bible With You Cons:
- No split screen

PalmBible’s Bible+

PalmBible’s Bible+ is part of the thankfully large group of quality freeware offered by SourceForge and the Open Source movement. It and all of the content it offers is free. The interface and look is similar to MyBible- and maybe a bit nicer looking.

alt="Palm Bible Genesis"/>
alt="Palm Bible John"/>

[Bible+- Genesis and John 3:16]

PalmBible does not offer as much free content as Olive Tree does, but it is still an impressive library. The Bible versions available include The Message, God’s Living Word, World English, King James, English Standard, and Modern Young’s Literal. You should be able to satisfy most of your needs at their site. Like most Open Source sites, PalmBible is not quite as user-friendly as the other two profit-driven sites are, but it is not hard to figure out.

To compare: Bible+ does not offer the NIV Bible, but all versions are free. No Bible dictionaries. Matthew Henry Commentary- free. Total: Free.

Bible+ Pros:
- Clean look
- Intuitive interface
- All free content

Bible+ Cons:
- Does not do split screen as well as some others
- Site not as user-friendly
- Not as large of a library (but it is all free)

Summary

In summary- they are so similar in some many ways, just go with the one that offers the most stuff you are looking for.
- If your Bible use on the Palm is rather casual, or you enjoy playing with Open Source stuff, stick with Bible+ and go on with your life.

- If you want more depth, a bigger library, and/or a multi-media experience- give BibleReader a try.
- Bible With You would be the choice if they offer the selection you are looking for and you don’t need all of the features of some of the others.
- MyBible is probably the version to use as a ‘gold standard’. I think it offers the best mix of content and interface, and the $10 fee is pretty reasonable, especially considering that most upgrades so far have been free or very cheap.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Palm Bible Readers Comparison: Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on April 11, 2008 at 3:24 pm.

Last week, I discovered that two of the most frequently asked questions we receive are “How can I stay in touch with my IM buddies on my mobile phone?” and “How can I make VoIP calls from my mobile phone?”

So, earlier in the week, fresh from a vacation break, I set out in my quest for the perfect IM client & the perfect VoIP client for mobile phones. I found the solution to *both* the problems in fring.

fring is an IM client that runs on Symbian and Windows mobile phones. So what’s the big deal with that, you ask. Well, consider this:
— fring supports *all* major IM networks: Skype, MSN (Windows Live) Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM and Gtalk
— apart from text chat, fringsters (yup, that’s what fring users are called) can also make VoIP calls to their IM comrades
— you can also make VoIP calls to regular phones using SkypeOut or an SIP service like Gizmo
— you can tweet straight from fring without sending a text message to 40404 (US) or 21212 (Canada) or +447624801423 (UK & rest of the world)

Impressive, eh?

Here’s the best part. fring bypasses your mobile network and works on regular/mobile internet, instead. You can connect using your mobile data network like EDGE/GPRS/3G or even Wi-Fi. This means you can save some serious money by placing VoIP calls (instead of regular mobile calls) and using text chat (instead of SMS messages).

So, how much does fring cost? You can get fring for the unbeatable price of zero dollars. Yup, fring is free.

By the way, in case you haven’t notice it yet, the name’s fring, not Fring.

Let’s take fring for a spin and see if it lives up to its promise.

Download

Fring works on Windows Mobile (ver 5 and 6), Symbian (ver 8 and 9) and UIQ handsets that support 3G, GPRS, EDGE or Wi-Fi. Nokia N-Series? No problem! Nokia E-Series? You got it! Sony Ericsson p1i? No sweat! Palm Treo? Come right in! Does it work on the iPhone? Not yet. Blackberry? Sorry, try again later. Of course, you also need a data plan on your mobile subscription… and no, just WAP won’t do.

Click on thumbnail to see fullsize image

You can download the fring installer straight to your phone or you can choose to download it on your PC and then transfer it to your phone. If you choose the former, you will need to visit http://www.fring.com/download and provide your phone make/model, mobile phone number and email ID (optional). Immediately thereafter, you will receive an SMS with a download link on your handset. You can also visit http://wap.fring.com from your phone.

If you do not receive that SMS or if you do not wish to provide your mobile number, you can also download the installer on your PC from at http://www.fring.com/download/Symbian_UIQ_Windows_Mobile/

Installation and registration

I chose the former. The next page on the desktop was a confirmation screen. Within seconds, my Sony Ericsson p990i buzzed. I opened the message and launched a link in my phone’s browser.

Click on thumbnail to see fullsize image

Then I was taken through the usual installation rigmarole – a series of OKs, really. Uninstalling is as easy as uninstalling any application from your phone.

Click on thumbnail to see fullsize image

Immediately upon completion of installation, you need to register as a fringster. A simple unassuming registration screen asks you for a User ID, a Password and a Username (a nickname, really). Fill it in and you’re ready to go.

The “default” screen of fring is a buddy list. My buddy list had only one user – called “fring test call”.

Next, I selected “Configure Services” from the main menu to add my IM/VoIP accounts to fring. I was able to choose my IM/VoIP account (see following picture). Fill in your details and voila! You’re signed into to your IM/VoIP account. You can also sign in to your account from SIP providers like Gizmo, VoIP Stunt, etc.

Once you register your IM/VoIP account(s), your buddy list gets populated with all your IM/VoIP contacts in one consolidated list.

Usage

Right – this is where the rubber meets the road.

The big fring icon on the top left corner of the main screen shows the overall connection status. Green means you’re connected to the fring service. Any other color means you’re not. Moreover, a status bar near the bottom left of the main screen shows individual connection statuses for each of your IM/VoIP services.

The statuses of your buddies are shown just before their names. They can be either online, offline, busy or on a call (see red box in the following screen). Too bad, fring doesn’t color code buddies by their network – they all appear one below the other.

You can also see a call quality indicator near your buddies’ names, much like your handset’s network quality indicator. This is an indicator of the expected call quality between you and your buddy based on the connections you are on. If both you and your buddy were on a Wi-Fi connection, for example, the indicator would be quite healthy. On the other hand, if both of you were on a regular GPRS connection, the indicator would probably show only one bar and that usually means it’s a bad idea to place a VoIP call to that buddy. Of course, this works only when the other buddy’s a fringster too.

To look for the buddy you want to chat/talk with, you can browse through your buddy list or type the first few characters of the buddy name in the search box.

To chat with an online buddy, just select the buddy and click on chat. Chats open in their own tabs so you can have multiple concurrent tabs. My chats worked fine. The handset’s dictionary (with my custom words) & all language options were available.

To place a VoIP call, click on the call button, instead. In my tests, I made a few fring-to-IM VoIP calls with buddies who were logged into their IM clients from their PCs (I was connected on my home Wi-Fi network). I also made a couple of SkypeOut calls using my SkypeOut account. The call quality in every case was as good as a regular phone call or a regular internet VoIP call. I also have a SkypeIn subscription and asked a friend to dial from SkypeIn phone number from her regular phone. This, while I was signed into Skype from fring. Within seconds, I got an incoming call on fring and I was able to talk clearly with my friend.

I also signed into my twitter account and was able to tweet effortlessly. There’s no support for Jaiku, though.

Features and Impressions

Fring is a native phone OS application and not Java. On my p990i, I found fring very stable even after several hours of usage and running in the background. Even when I got a regular incoming GSM call during a fring call, fring was able to relegate itself to the background very gracefully without crashing.

On the other hand, as long as fring runs in the foreground or the background, a data connection remains active and that can mean creeping consumption of battery life and more importantly, data. The folks at fring have put up an estimated data consumption chart on fring.com (see chart below).

Click on thumbnail to see fullsize image

The call and chat functions work absolutely fine. I was able to test call quality on Wi-Fi and chat on regular low-speed GPRS connections. The application can became slightly sluggish, though, in longer chat sessions (I observed this after my chat conversation had lasted for some 200 messages & 20 minutes of usage). But that’s largely a function of the phone’s power and not so much the software’s. Besides, all one needs to do to work around this, is to close that tab and continue chatting in a new tab.

Fring provides an option to import/display your phone contacts as buddies in your list. You can then choose to place regular phone calls or SkypeOut/SIP calls to those contacts *from within* fring. That, in my opinion, is a very handy feature especially for users who’re on high speed 3G or Wi-Fi networks. There is a history feature too.

Conspicuously absent from fring’s impressive repertoire, though, are buddy list management options. You cannot add or delete any IM buddy (you have to go back to your desktop for that). Only other fringsters can be added or deleted from the buddy list. There is an option to “add new contact”, but that only allows you to add fringsters by sending them an SMS invitation.

I was unable to test fring’s acclaimed auto-roam feature that allows automatic movement from a 3G/EDGE/GPRS network to a Wi-Fi network when fring finds one. So, if you’re out on the street connected to fring through your mobile data network and you walk into a coffee shop with a Wi-Fi hotspot, fring would put you on the Wi-Fi network automatically. From what I’ve read online, it appears this feature works rather well.

If you’re an IM, Twitter or Skype user (that’s pretty much all of us, ain’t it?), then fring is a must-have for you. According to its cofounders, fring was born “out of a desire to fundamentally change the way people communicate”. I’m not too sure it’s reached that far yet, but it has certainly integrated IM, VoIP and mobile telephony in a way that no other application has ever done.

Filed in categories: Windows Mobile related

Tagged: Software, Symbian, Symbian OS Related, Utility

fring Mobile IM Client: Symbian OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on March 13, 2008 at 5:09 pm.

A while back, I posted an article about my beloved Palm T/X and how it was doing after a couple years of use. (See the article here.) One major finding was the loss of calibration that was driving me crazy- I had to literally tap the very bottom edge of the screen to access the lower row of buttons.

A few years ago, there were several calibration tools, but time and newer operating systems has whittled it down to… well… pretty much this one- PowerDigi by PalmPowerups. The $16.95 program is small (a tad over 200K), and runs well on any Palm OS 5.0 and higher device. Which is OK since I never had anywhere near this much problem with calibration loss on older Palms anyway!)

Running PowerDigi is really easy. Punch the big ‘Calibrate Now’ button…

[PowerDigi- the 'Big Button']

… Then,choose how accurate you want the calibration (aka- how many taps can you do before you go bonkers?), and tap away.

[The PowerDigi Tap Torture Selection, er, I mean, Accuracy Selection Screen]

Sadly, the actual calibration process did not screen-capture for me, but imagine an orderly game of ‘Whack a Mole’ if the moles would line up nicely across the screen. A spinning target marches across the screen, tap by tap by tap… I find that the Medium option is great, and I am frankly a bit afraid of the Accurate one!

Another interesting feature is the ‘Test Mode’, which shows the target and lets you try to tap it away at different places on the screen. Try it before and after a calibration to see the difference, or play it as a really boring, pointless game (but one that would be more fun than some of the games I have been trialing lately.)

I found that I was so used to tapping in the wrong place to accommodate my mis-calibrated unit that it feels funny to touch actual buttons on the screen! I also found that the Graffiti area became more accurate for me! (Small scratches in the area still make some characters ‘iffy’, but it is about 60-70% more accurate.)

The company offers good demos (14 days full function) to see if the thing will work for your dying device. It really helped me, and I think it will help you! This is one of those programs that just plain works!

I am still looking at other ways to upgrade and update my old T/X- a new digitizer screen, batteries, etc.- but for under $20, the biggest single annoyance I had has gone bye-bye.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

PowerDigi: Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on March 3, 2008 at 4:29 pm.

Released in November of last year, the latest offering of Opera Mini, version 4, hasn’t really sent shockwaves through the World of cell phones. Whilst the iPhone browser (which I think is very annoying!) has been hailed as a revolutionary success, Mini has taken the sidelines slightly, but as I have learned, this isn’t really a position it deserves.

Supported by any cell phone with Java, Opera Mini is extremely compatible, and very capable of turning an ordinary phone into one with the same web browsing facilities that one might only associate with a smartphone. The use of a Java interface slows start-up to a certain extent, but after getting used to this twenty or thirty second wait for the web, it really isn’t a problem.

For a free piece of software, Opera is very powerful indeed. For me, top of the list is the small-screen rendering. For a long while, I have been ever so slightly fed up of having pages squashed and having chunks missing when using other mobile browsers. Mini 4 shows the user a fullscreen overview of the page and then decides a good starting point, which it suggests you zoom to. Another feature that stands out is the synchronization with a PC. The browser uses a ‘mouse’ for the user to choose a point to zoom to, and by giving the option to synchronize bookmarks with your main browser, Opera allows you to move between your PC and mobile device without noticing too many interface differences.

Admittedly, this new found mouse does take a little getting used to, as do some of the shortcuts, which, as they are useful, bear no resemblance to those on conventional desktop browsers…

Oh, and what’s more, you can very quickly switch to the new landscape mode – very iPhone huh!

But on the subject of speed, I didn’t really notice much of a difference with a conventional mobile browser, but considering that the page is being rendered to the size of your screen, the average 16 seconds or so that it takes to load BBC News site (dependent on your connection…) is pretty impressive. The Mini browser works by sending your page to the Opera servers for ‘processing’, before being returned to your phone compressed, and therefore as a slightly smaller file. This will inevitably bring down data charges, however if you have a data plan this isn’t a problem, and at peak times, the Opera servers perform much slower.

There are the occasional niggly things that I have noticed though; the difficultly to save images, the menus are a bit annoying occasionally, and it has a fairly high crash rate. But no other browsers can offer quite what Opera Mini can, and for those reasons, I can look over these problems to a certain extent!

But overall, a real success… The browser was nice and easy to use, had a quick installation, and the compatibility with such a wide range of handsets is a real bonus. It is worth pointing out that the interface is greatly improved if you learn your shortcuts! )

And as for the desktop, I’m still a Firefox boy at heart…

Filed in categories: Windows Mobile related

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Pocket PC, Software, Symbian, Symbian OS Related, Utility

Opera Mini v4 Mobile Web Browser originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on February 19, 2008 at 9:18 pm.

Dear Santa,

I have been a really good boy this last year. A really, really good boy. I swear I had nothing to do with the Gadgeteer site crash incident!

Anyway, here is my list of the utilities I think you should bring all good Palm users. (I did thank you for the Palm Tx a couple years ago, didn’t I?). In order to keep the list manageable, I have broken it up into sections. Here is the Palm Utilities section.

Red Mercury’s Acid Image viewer is available in three versions- Basic for $17.95, Standard for $29.95, and Pro for $49.95. My ‘Wish List’ version is ‘Basic’ unless the user needs to work with GIF, BMP, and TIFF formats. Acid Image allows users to store photos which they can then rotate, zoom, crop, group, rename, and create interesting slideshows. To me, for the Palm to be a complete pocket tool it has to hold my wallet photos and other images in a useful way, and this program does a better job of this than the built-in viewer.

alt="Acid Image- image"/>
alt="Acid Image- list"/>
alt="Acid Image- options"/>

[Acid Image: showing an image, a list of images, and options]

Beiks BDicty reference tool, loaded with at least the English Pro lexicon ($15). Most of us do not need the $10 Pro version of BDicty, which adds the ability to add words to the lexicons, so the free version and a good dictionary is adequate. I park the English Standard on the Palm, and the larger English Pro lexicon on the memory card. The dozens of free and low-cost add-ons makes it a nicely versatile program for a variety of users.

alt="BDicty lookup screen"/>
alt="BDicty- some lexicons"/>
alt="BDicty- a definition"/>

[BDicty: showing work window, list of lexicons, and an obscure definition]

NorthGlide’s Neat Freak Pack is a nice combination with Clean Up and Uninstall Manager, which do pretty much what they say for $19.95. Clean Up finds the bits and pieces of junk scattered on your Palm and memory cards and helps you decide if it should be deleted or not. Uninstall Manager does a wonderful job of removing all the stray files, even offering you options like deleting other files installed the same day, running programs in a ‘Sandbox’ mode that allows you to try programs safely and erase them completely, and more.

alt="CleanUp"/>
alt="Uninstall Manager"/>
alt="Uninstall Manager Sandbox"/>

[Neat Freak: showing CleanUp, Uninstall Manager, and Sandbox]

eReader Pro is a $4.95 upgrade from the free eReader that I like for the extra features it offers for the low price. One big use of my Palm is as a book reader. I download books almost weekly and love having a complete library at my fingertips. If you get the eReader.com site’s newsletter, you get a weekly discount code good for pretty much the entire site, and I appreciate that they store your records so you can re-download easily. With more and more sites going to a ‘download protection’ scheme (pay extra so you can re-download anything you might loose) I appreciate eReader’s customer friendly approach more and more. Oh, and I like the interface and functions of the program too!

alt="eReader List"/>
alt="eReaader Book"/>

[eReader: showing part of my booklist, and an open book file]

FileZ. Ah, FileZ, what would I have done without you? This freeware program is a solid file manager utility that works almost seamlessly between the handheld and memory cards, letting you beam, rename, delete, move, change properties, etc. on nearly every file on our unit. I have run FileZ on every PDA I’ve owned since my first Handspring Visor Deluxe (Ice), and it is one of the first programs I reinstall after a crash or cleaning.

Geek Sounds is a freeware list of MIDI sounds to replace and supplement the built-in sounds in the Palm. Set the alarms in Calendar to the theme from Airwolf, or Notepad alarms to the Flintstones tune. OK, so most of the themes are a bit dated, they are still fun and work better as alarms than the simple warbles and rings the Palm comes with. About the only downside of this program is that the tunes tend to get stuck in your brain!

alt="FileZ open screen"/>
alt="FileZ file list"/>
alt="GeekSounds"/>

[FileZ: Opening Screen and list of files. Also GeekSounds partial song list]

iSilo is one of those programs that I use a lot but barely scratch the surface of. Available in a full mode for $19.95, or a free mode with limited functionality, it is a great tool for working with a wide range of document formats, Internet sites, and more. I use it mostly to view documents I snag off the Internet with the companion iSiloX program. iSilo can even replace many of the features of AvantGo when used correctly. It also plays nicely with another of my favorite sites, Memoware.com, a great site filled with useful stuff.

alt="iSilo list"/>
alt="iSilo book"/>
alt="iSilo hyperlink"/>

[iSilo: showing a document list, open book, and a page of hyperlinks]

NVBackUp is a nearly perfect backup program that has been reviewed on this site before and continues to be a wonderful tool for me.

Now, where next? So many good programs…
- Pocket Tunes for music lovers,
- TCPMP or a similar movie player for video fans,
- HandPainter Pro for the artist (this is so far the best Palm drawing program I have found for ease of use and quality of results).

alt="NVBackup"/>
alt="HandPainter Pro"/>

[NVBackup and HandPainter Pro]

And this does not even include any of the other great programs for the right person out there- the movie guides, workout trackers, career aids, and so forth. Nor does it touch on the hardware elements- cases, screen protectors, cables, lost and found services, stylus replacements, memory cards, keyboards, and other things that make such great stocking stuffers. Well… maybe later dear Santa. I know your time is valuable this time of year, so I will end now and pick up soon in a list of the games I think every Palm user should experience.

Filed in categories: Articles

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Palm OS Utility Wish List 2007 originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on December 12, 2007 at 4:39 pm.

Being an overweight diabetic is a pain in a lot of ways, but one of the biggest is the ongoing job of trying to lose weight- which always seems to find its way home. I welcome any tool in the fight, and CalorieKing’s Handheld Diet Diary was brought to my attention as a possible ally.

alt="CalorieKing Opening Screen"/>

[CalorieKing Opening Screen]

Once I was through the simple installation process, I was presented with a few screens asking about my gender, height, weight, and average activity level which was used to calculate my Body Mass Index (BMI) and a calorie target. You can then go in and tweak the calorie target by adjusting target levels of carbs, proteins, fats, and fiber levels you wish to aim for every day.

So far, so good! Now you fill in the diet diary on a daily basis. Select a meal, enter the values, and sit back and watch the pounds roll off! Snicker! If only. If you know the values, great, otherwise we face the dreaded Food Database! When installing, you had the option of the Normal Database of 10,000 foods or the Full Database of 45,000 items. Most of the food databases I have encountered while trying to track my diabetes have annoyed the bejeezers out of me- what category is instant oatmeal in? How do I adjust for serving sizes? How do I count additives?

alt="CalorieKing Database 1"/>
alt="CalorieKing Database 2"/>

[The CalorieKing food database]

I found CalorieKing’s food database to be better than average when I was using brand names- especially for common diet foods, and about average when I was looking for other foods. All in all, I find using carb reference books quicker and easier- look the stuff up and plug the numbers in. However, one thing that the database does allow is for you to put together elements for a meal and save them- useful if you often repeat meals. The database also lets you adjust serving sizes on the fly- saving you the math.

alt="CalorieKing Daily Log 1"/>
alt="CalorieKing Daily Log 2"/>

[The daily log- tracking 'energy' and carbs]

alt="CalorieKing Summary"/>

[A Daily Summary screen]

I like the diary screen and the flexibility of the options there. You can choose to display calories, carbs, fats, etc. and it shows a scroll bar and how you are advancing towards towards your daily goal. It allows you to track fluid intake as well, which is unique. Multiple show and hide, add or remove options exist all over. I found it to be well-designed and easy to use. A nice program from a company that makes several nice programs. The fact that the program syncs with a larger desktop version is just a bonus!

alt="CalorieKing Bonus 1"/>
alt="CalorieKing Bonus 2"/>
alt="CalorieKing Bonus 3"/>

[Speaking of bonuses, the program is loaded with free calculators and articles]

There is no doubt that tracking calories and intake is a good way to accomplish weight management. Many experts recommend a food diary for most people to help them get a firm grasp on exactly what they are eating, in part because they often really do not track it and over-indulge. This program will help you do exactly this for $29.95.

On the flip side, $30 is more than I would spend for a good carb reference book, journal, and calculator, which is one strike against it. I think the paper system would take less time to use and be good enough for my purposes. A minor quirk is that the Daily Summary screen shows a place for ‘exercise energy’, but I cannot find a way to enter it into the Palm program. The biggest single thing I have against the program is just that it is kind of a drag- both to use and to be reminded of your physical state all of the time. I have to force myself to use it- which is not very rewarding or motivating.

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

CalorieKing Handheld Diet Diary: Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on November 29, 2007 at 9:06 pm.

One of my favorite MS-DOS applications was a program called InfoSelect. InfoSelect gave me a functionally endless stack of small note cards and a great search tool. Make a note, any kind- contacts information, scheduling details, grocery list, books to find, phone messages, etc.- and InfoSelect would store it for you, and find it in a heartbeat. To sweeten the pot, you could create reusable forms, color-code things, and much more. It was sweet.

In the Palm World, Memos does this to a very small extent, but has limits on note sizes, numbers of categories, and so on, plus the Global Search is a bit slow.

Enter ScrapBook from Slow Cooked Software. For $15, you get a program that can keep a nearly endless supply of notes of many types, organized how you want them, and combines it with a powerful search tool so you can locate any note in an instant, and imports/exports to Memos with just a few clicks.

alt="ScrapBook Opening Screen"/>
alt="ScrapBook Memo Screen"/>

["ScrapBook" Opening Screen, and With a Memo Showing]

Each note gives you a window for the note proper, and a ‘keyword window’. The top line of this window is the note’s title and you can add additional keywords on other lines. The program even includes an autofill that helps you generate keywords based on previously used terms. You can encrypt the notes (and search them while encrypted), and file them in unlimited folders and sub-folders- as deeply nested as you would want to go.

The search function can go by keywords or look for strings of text in the main body. I found partial phone numbers buried in my notes almost instantly. I was mildly disappointed that the search string was not highlighted in the results, but it was still crazy fast.

alt="ScrapBook Memo Search"/>
alt="ScrapBook Global Search"/>

[The Two Search Windows- within a memo, and over all memos]

Is it as sweet as my old InfoSelect? Close… really close. Some things that miss a bit include:
- The keyword/title window is near the bottom of the screen (which feels odd)
- It does not use colors at all, which has the benefit of using fewer resources and being easily compatible with several Palm models, but would really enhance the program
- Probably also related to compatibility- it does not use the full screen or rotation options of the Tx and related Palms. With the on-screen buttons and keyword window, the main text memo window ends up rather small. This is my biggest ‘real’ gripe.
- The screen layout is a bit clunky- it does not quite capture the ‘Zen’ of the typical Palm program simplicity and transparency
- The program suffers from a common problem many small powerful programs share- the documentation somehow makes things seem harder than they really are.

alt="ScrapBook Memo List"/>
alt="ScrapBook Maximized Memo Screen"/>

[ScrapBook's Memo List, and a view of the Memo Window maximized]

I can get a lot of Memo replacements, from freeware to the Palm version of InfoSelect for $69.95 (and even at that price, it does not use color or look as cool as the old MS-DOS version did). Of all those I have tried, I like the combination of power and flexibility that ScrapBook offers while taking up under 150K in memory (not including the actual memos).

So, why would I use this program over the free and built-in Memo? After all, I can save all sorts of info in Memo and search for it quickly with Find’s global searches. ScrapBook offers better organization of the memos- categories, sub-categories, etc. ScrapBook offers encryption and integrates it into the search feature. ScrapBook’s search is not tied up going through Docs to Go or the other programs that can slow it down.

ScrapBook also allows you to use your Palm in a new way. In much the same way as some day-planner systems use lots of small notes that are captured during the day, then sorted and organized later, ScrapBook would let you capture small bits of data all day. A few keystrokes and it is organized, and a few more keystrokes and it is recaptured.

It may not be pretty, but it is good. In the right hands, this is a true powerhouse program!

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Slow-Cooked Software ScrapBook – Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on October 26, 2007 at 12:00 pm.

Many of the new Palm software titles over the last couple of years have been targeted for the medical field. You would almost think that every doctor, nurse, technician, and other health-care provider is issued a free Palm upon graduation (which might be a way to boost the sagging visibility of my favorite electronic device!) OK, I was a certified EMT in my state back some 20 years ago and actively teach various first-aid and CPR courses. Why not take some of these texts for a test drive?

I decided to trial offerings from two companies- Skyscape and Pocket Mobility, focusing on materials for Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) so I could compare apples to apples in a field I know at least something about. I downloaded the full versions courtesy of generous offer from Handango. After using them for a while, I then decided that comparing them head to head was not going to work so well because of the very different approaches the two programs take. So, let’s just focus on Skyscape for now.

Skyscape offers a quite large variety of medical texts in many formats and is now offering some for the iPhone. They cover specialties from allergy/immunology to veterinary medicine. They offer quick guides, in-depth books, news updates, calculators an absolutely incredible array of products- including several useful free tools and titles.

alt="Pocket EMT Opening Screen"/>

[Opening Screen for Pocket EMT from Skyscape]

The title I selected is ìPocket Reference for EMTs and Paramedics by Clayden and Bledsoe. (On their website, this seems to be called Pocket Responder for ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support), which may be a newer version. See below.) It sells for $29.95 and includes a desktop version. For an additional $25, you can purchase it preloaded on a memory card. These two features seem common for Skyscape products obtained from their site. Considering the cost of most medical texts, I found the costs at the site to be pretty reasonable.

Downloading and installing the program was annoying. Perhaps because I got it from a third party, I had to sync and re-sync several times before everything seemed to work correctly. There was a mildly confusing series of registration screens and pop-ups that ended up with me having loaded several new programs on my computer. It was not difficult to do, but it felt very awkward and was time-consuming.

After installation, I had a new start-up program on my computer- the Skyscape control panel, that handles uploads, new information, and a few other programs that got loaded as well, such as
- Medstream 360, described as a collection of dynamic medical information channels that keep you up-to-date on a broad range of journal articles, medical news and research studies.
- Medline 360- Skyscape’s free MEDLINE 360 search service, offers you the ability to easily search the extensive and up-to-date PubMed/MEDLINE 360 database from the National Library of Medicine and store that valuable content right on your PDA.
– MedAlert helps ensure you stay up-to-date by automatically delivering the latest medical information and breaking news by specialty directly to your cell phone or mobile device.
(Quotes used above are directly from Skyscape website.)

This will either drive you crazy because of all the elements involved, or really impress you with Skyscape’s dedication to providing service for medical professionals. Which way you go may depend in part on how tight your Palm’s and PC’s resources are. Regardless of how you feel about that part, it does not take long looking at Skyscape’s website to see that they do a nice job. Good graphics and design, well thought-out layouts and offerings make me feel that this is a quality company with solid products.

The actual Palm program whose icon reads PktEMT- is a good offering. It serves as a quick reference for people in the field, replacing the need to carry several reference cards or guides. The e-book includes such useful information as drug references- both those commonly used in the field, and those used by patients, advanced cardiac care charts and tables, information on dealing with a range of pediatric emergencies, common abbreviations, and more all organized in a quick and easy to use hierarchical menu. Many icons on each page allow you to shift levels, link information between other Skyscape offerings, etc.

A key element of any ‘quick reference’ guide is speed. Pocket EMT does well with this. It opens quickly (and seems stable), and with a little practice or study, you can quickly get to any screen you need.

alt="Pocket EMT Menu 1"/>

alt="Pocket EMT Menu 2"/>

alt="Pocket EMT Menu 3"/>

[Pocket EMT Menus. The small '>' icon on the end of some phrases opens a screen showing the full entry name]

I am nowhere near well-enough qualified to gauge the accuracy of most of the materials on this e-book, but I do know the current guidelines for CPR- and the information this ebook provides is outdated as of June 2006. Updating the software did not correct this issue, and considering that accurate CPR is a keystone EMT/Paramedic skill, it seems a rather glaring problem. (It is possible that the title listed on the website, Pocket Reference for ACLSî is an updated version of my Pocket Reference for EMTs and Paramedics. They are the same authors, but this is not addressed anywhere I can find, either. It is not also mentioned as such on Handango, which carries many Skyscape products, but not the ACLS version.) I noticed a couple of typos as well, but could not relocate them when I was looking for them as examples. Figures! It is probably karma making up for my typos.

alt="Pocket EMT Features 1"/>

alt="Pocket EMT Features 2"/>

alt="Pocket EMT Features 3"/>

[Some of the charts and info in Pocket EMT. APGAR Scores are a way to help determine a newborn's health.]

Assuming the CPR info is updated soon, or was updated in a newer version, I would have to say that Skyscape seems to offer a useful line of materials for a wide variety of medical pros. Oh, and they have a cool line of free stuff- like the Archimedes Medical Calculator.

alt="Archimedes"/>

[Archimedes Calculator]

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Skyscape Medical e-Texts – Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on October 9, 2007 at 9:59 pm.

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During the heyday of the Palm OS PDA, we used to talk about ‘laptop killers’- how to turn your Visor, Clie or Palm into a complete laptop-like device. The keystone issue- the ‘make it or break it’ crux of the problem- was live note-taking in a class or meeting.

One problem was input. Thumb boards, on-screen data-entry systems, folding keyboards and more were tried with varying degrees of success. Another problem was which application to use to take these notes in. Notepad has severe limitations, and most other programs had big faults. Slow-loading, incompatibility with various pieces of hardware, expensive, etc. In the end, laptops got cheaper and lighter, and PDAs became less and less the hot technology.

It is really kind of sad, because pNotes Pro from Pennovate is pretty much the laptop killer note-taking app we were looking for!

Pennovate Notes Main Screen

Available in a free pNotes Lite edition or the full $19.95 pNotes Pro editions, the basic idea here is both strong and simple.

Imagine that your Palm’s Notepad could be outfitted with a magnifying glass and a few simple tools. You could write a lot smaller and fit a LOT more on each screen just using the magnifier to see what you are doing or what you have done earlier. That is the basis of Pennoavate Notes.

Using DualView(TM), you see two screens at once- the main screen with smaller lettering, and an enlarged screen that you write on normally. A green rectangle shows where you are on the main screen and allows quick navigation by just noving it with the stylus.

Pennovate Notes DualView(TM) Screen, blank and in use

Another feature, IntelliScroll(TM), allows you the option of putting up a ‘tripwire’ on the writing screen. When you are writing and some part of a letter hits the ‘tripwire’, the writing area will shift to the right, allowing to continue writing uninterruptedly. This takes a minute to get used to, but is slick! There is not an automatic line advance that I can find, but a quick pen flick moves the green target triangle to the new location almost intuitively.

Pennovate Notes features a flexible alarm feature that allows different alarms to be set on different parts of a document- bring up only the featured part of the document when the alarm sounds. A built-in alarm manager offers an easy way to run all of this.

There is a lot more. pNotes offers several writing tools, the ability to lock parts of a document with ‘Templatizing(TM)’, a ton of options to customize the hard buttons and things like colors, and more. It also saves notes as .bmp format which allows notes to be used in other ways.

Various Contest-Sensitive Options Menus

Alarm Settings

Button Settings

The full version of pNotes offers SD card support (and works with Microsoft’s SyncToy Power Toy), and connectivity through e-mail, beaming, or Bluetooth. If you actually want to use the notes, this is the option for you.

This is a solid program that I have real uses for. Most of the weaknesses are more related to my own poor handwriting than problems with the program. I can’t keep up scribbling along with a speaker the way I used to be able to, but it is nice to write those longer notes that you don’t want to fiddle with Graffiti to do. About the only way to make this program better would be to have it translate the chicken scratches to actual letters and words!

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Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Pennovate Notes Pro – Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on September 12, 2007 at 6:23 pm.

Since the advent of the handheld device, the quest for easy input of data while on-the-go was always the Holy Grail of mobile computing.  In my earlier Gadgeteer review, I went down that path, looking at the excellent handwriting recognition software, PhatWare’s Calligrapher.  Calligrapher did a great job of taking my scrawl and translating it into digital form, performing just as advertised.  However, just as there are all kinds of PDAs and handheld platforms today, so too are the means by which developers have devised ways to input your data. 

In looking at those other options available to us, I came up with three more “input methods” besides the recognition software:

1. Software on-screen keyboards like the Microsoft default OS keyboard and software add-ons like Fitaly
    
2. Physically attached keyboards or keyboards via cable/Bluetooth
    
3. PCs with a remote access programs like SOTI’s Pocket Controller Professional 

I tend to use all input types in my day-to-day usage, sometimes based on my needs and sometimes on my mood to do something different.  However for those times that I need to enter short amounts of data, like note-taking, email or web browsing, I have always defaulted back to the on-screen keyboards.  In the last year, I became aware of a product that is really simple in its approach to taking common data strings that you utilize in such tasks, allowing you to program them ahead of time for fast entry.

That brings us to DinarSoft’s TapText, software designed to make it a little easier to enter pre-determined and repetitive text entries on the PDA.
 

How it works…

The concept behind TapText is really simple, it is just a “copy and paste” type of operation.  The program is either started manually by the user or automatically via the options page within the program (will show that later down the page).  Once you open an application like Word, Notes, Email or the Internet Explorer, you place your cursor at the insert point or highlight the text to be replaced, then tap the TapText icon at the top of the screen which brings up a set of menus.  From there, you can select a Menu…Sub-Menu…Item from predefined text input that you have already setup.  That is all there is to it!

Here’s the TapText icon at the top of the today screen, which is movable when in instances like this were other icons may interfere with its mid-screen default placement.

Activating TapText is as easy as this! 
 

Options and Setup

The options portion of TapText is really straightforward and doesn’t take much effort, no manual required.  The hardest part is deciding ahead of time what are the areas in which you repeat a lot of text entries as well as how to categorize them via menus and submenus that make sense.

The screenshot above shows you the default categories/menus that come with TapText.  The boxes to the side allow you to move items up and down, move to menu/sub-menu status, edit, add and delete.  Note here’s where you can designate TapText starting up with the system.

Expanding the menus, you see more categories to select from and finally the “selectable item”. You can see the text associated with the item in the box below the menu items by tapping on that item.  The checkboxes allow one to activate and deactivate items that show up in a menu.

The above screenshot shows where you can edit the “selectable” item.  Those boxes to the side: the first one covering your typical copy/cut/paste commands, the next box is for insertion of special commands like Ctrl-B or Tab and the final two boxes cover date/time and format. 

If you are editing a menu item, this screenshot shows that you are given options of: 1) using the program default, 2) just popping up the menu selected (non-cascading) and of course, 3) cascading.  You’ll see examples of each shortly those menu types shortly.

Here’s an example of pre-defined text that takes actual dates and times from your PDA for input in the applications.  For example you can take notes on a call and at the start or end of the call, use TapText to input the date/time stamps.

Here’s the section with web URLs.

I’m not one to put quotes in the footer of an email but there are many that do (and you know who you are) but this would permit them to swap them out as the mood hits them.

In closing out this section, here’s a screenshot of the second options page where you set the overall defaults for the program.
 

TapText in use

Now that we’ve looked at the options/features, I thought it would be good to see a couple of the uses for TapText which may give you some ideas for its use as well.

Internet Explorer:

URL input – This one is pretty straightforward in its use.  Not really sure it saves more time/stokes as you have to highlight the “address” area and then proceed through the menu’s to your specific URL.  Seems to be just as fast as using IE’s Favorites but this may be more perception on my part.

Mobile Outlook:

Here I’ve opened up a “new” message and already used an email reply to start the message.  The next step is to tap the insertion point where I want to insert the email signature, then tap the email signature itself.

After my signature, I decide to put an inspirational quote to close out the email.

The reason for this screenshot is to show how the menu preference can be changed from the preceding cascading-type of menus we have seen to one that opens up boxes “one at a time”.  Note the bottom of the box menu with the return key to move back up a menu level when in this this style mode.

Ta-da…a completed email in just a few strokes of the pen!

Mobile Word:

It goes without saying, TapText works the same in Mobile Word and any Notes applications.  Just point to the insertion point and go through the TapText motions, in this case the default version of “Reports…Attendance”.
 

Installation and Program Performance

DinarSoft’s TapText installation comes in both EXE and CAB formats, with the EXE format weighing in at just 178kb!  It can be installed on any device storage medium…external memory cards, internal and in my case some stored on some “external” ROM on my JasJar.  It takes up about 150kb of storage once installed and the footprint in your RAM while running is a really small at 39.9KB which was one of the smallest running processes on my device. 

As far as performance, I have put it through its paces and have yet to see it stop or slow down.  Also, it never slowed down or interfered with other running applications but that’s to be expected as I noted with it’s memory footprint. 

Conclusion and Thoughts

I really cannot see any problems with DinarSoft’s TapText input software.  It’s small, does what it says it will do and is really customizable for each user’s specific needs.  It usefulness is up to your own imagination.  As for me, I go through periods where I will use one program and then switch to another as the mood hits.  I primarily really use my JasJar as a PIM and not as much for emails or notes, particularly those that have repetitive text/data entry therefore I don’t have as much use for TapText as some other users own experience might dictate.  That’s not to say I don’t find it useful, I do highly recommend TapText for what it does, just make sure that’s how you use your PDA and you will enjoy it too!

For some additional thoughts on TapText, I’d love to see them include some type of encrypted password protection areas.  I am a big user of eWallet and access that program daily for IDs and Passwords, cutting/pasting into various applications.  If there was a way to combine that functionality within TapText, I can see me using it a lot more!  It’s been over a year  since the developer last updated the program and I saw some user forum comments mentioning password protected/encrypted sections as a “wished for” feature…maybe we’ll see that in the future for this program.

Filed in categories: Windows Mobile related

Tagged: Pocket PC, Software, Utility

DinarSoft TapText – Windows Mobile Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on August 23, 2007 at 5:28 pm.

In my house, I am the Master of the Five Remotes, Not Including the Universal Remote We Rarely Use or the TV Remote That We Don’t Need Because We Can Control It With the TiVo Remote Besides The Batteries In It Are Usually Dead. The massive responsibility lies heavily upon my kingly head. Just keeping track of all of the remotes is bad enough, but since I have kids, none of my remotes have battery covers. (If you have kids, you’ll understand. If you don’t, thank God your batteries are not always in danger of falling out.)

It is a problem, and whenever I have problems, I…
a.) eat (see my review of diabetic logging software) or,
b.) try to use my Palm to solve it (again, see the diabetes logging software review), or
c.) sometimes both.

I have used Palm-based remote software for years, starting with the program OmniRemote from Pacific NeoTek on my old Visor. Historically, it has been OK, but during a succession of various Palm and Sony handhelds, I have not always had the right combination of device specs and infrared beam strength to use them to any real advantage. Sitting around looking at the heap of remotes I have in my life, however, I decided to give it another try. Looking over the options, I decided to upgrade my old NoviiRemote Classic program (This version is soon going to be phased out to make way for a new version called NoviiRemote Lite).

Novii offers a few basic products- a programmable universal remote for Palms, Pocket PCs, and Symbians, as well as ‘Blasters‘- an SD-card based attachment for Treo 650s they seem to be trying to clear out. The Palm version of NoviiRemote Classic is a great program that I have used to good effect for a few years. It allows you to control a TV, VCR, DVD, Cable or Satellite, and, in the newer versions, TiVo. It is easy to program- just load in the right codes or use the ‘learn’ feature and beam another remote at it. It has good signal strength with the TX, and is well-designed overall. I have no quibbles with Classic, other than that the price is higher than the average universal remote, and the pre-loaded codes do not always include all of the functions of the original device remote. In fact, one of the cool things about Classic is that you can program it for multiple devices of the same type. You can load the codes for the TV you use at work for presentations, or the TV at your in-laws, or the DVD player in your bedroom, etc. (This is a feature that really pushes it above most universal remotes!)

The program uses large on-screen buttons for most tasks (although, some, like the channel numbers, are pretty small) and you can program your Palm’s hard buttons to do many common jobs, such as power, mute, volume or channel changing. This is a mixed blessing as it means that while NoviiRemote is running, you cannot use the hard buttons for other jobs.

I told you about NoviiRemote Classic in order to get to this…

NoviiRemote Deluxe Opening Screen and TV Remote Screen

NoviiRemote Deluxe does all of the above with a handful of new features- mostly the ability to customize the look and buttons. Now- you can adjust the screen exactly how you want it- delete unused buttons, move often-used buttons, etc. Even more interestingly, you can use the learning feature to use the device to work ANY InfraRed remote! I have remotes for my alarm clock, our window fan, and my iPod stereo dock. I can control all of these with my Palm now! The program allows you to customize all aspects- what a button does, where the button is, colors, shapes, etc. The process for all of this is straight forward and easy- almost intuitive, but it does become a bit time consuming depending on how much you want to change.

NoviiRemote Deluxe TV Programming Menu

One of the new features is the ability to easily create a ‘macro’ so with one button push, you can accomplish several things at once. This allows you to do something like turn on the entire ‘home entertainment center’ package at once- press one button and turn on the TV, DVD, and stereo, start the DVD, and adjust the volume to preset levels- all with one touch. I must confess that with my rather primitive home stereo system that this feature did not do much for me, but the possibilities are interesting- especially since in theory you could use it to control any InfraRed controlled X-10 type environmental control units.

Novii has a long track record of good products that are well-designed and attractive (although some have described the interfaces as gaudy, I think of them as bright and interesting). In Deluxe, the default screens for various pre-set codes are designed well enough that you might not bother trying to redesign them.

Range with my TX seems to be about 15 feet with either product, but I have seen in other user comments that different Palms respond very differently. Treos seem to be running about 8-10 or 12-15 feet depending on the model, for example. The program for Classic runs about 1.4M in memory and has never caused me a crash or glitch. Deluxe runs a bit higher- the core program is smaller but it uses more files to do the job. Deluxe has not crashed or glitched out on me either. (Considering the Palm problems I have had since Christmas, this is very good news to me!)

The four different screens for TiVo controls

Downsides… a few, but minor. Both editions scatter buttons for each device over multiple screens- usually two screens for Classic and four for Deluxe- mildly annoying when trying to work a device. (Note- you can move the buttons between screens in Deluxe and put them all on one if you really want, but that makes them pretty small!) Another minor point in the Deluxe edition is that the pre-programmed screens grey out unused buttons- but when you go to customize them, they are no longer grayed. You go in to delete them,and I always seem to miss a few!

NoviiRemote Classic is $24.99 and Deluxe is $34.99. Which one to get?

- IF you mostly only want to control a few standard devices in one room,
— THEN get a cheap universal remote or consider NoviiRemote Classic.

- IF you are not big on skins, tinkering, etc. but want to control a variety of devices outside a normal remotes ability,
— THEN Classic is for you!

- IF you want more choices, want to control nontraditional devices (that use IR remotes), and like to tinker with the displays, etc.,
— THEN go for NoviiRemote Deluxe!

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

NoviiRemote Deluxe – Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on August 13, 2007 at 5:29 pm.

Julie asked me a couple weeks ago if I would be interested in reviewing Easy PocketNAV’s OnCourse Navigator GPS software and I didn’t have to be asked twice!  Understand that I am a novice when it comes to GPS and GPS software but the technology behind it just fascinates me.  My previous experiences with GPS were with HP’s Navigation System (the GPS Bluetooth unit and software bundle) that I used with my HP hx4705 IPAQ and after I upgraded to Windows Mobile 5 on that unit, I bought OnCourse Navigator 5 (OCN5).  I have since sold my IPAQ and GPS unit over a year ago and I let the OCN software sit to the side…that is until now.

With the new OnCourse Navigator 6 (OCN6) on its way in the mail, I set about to purchase a new BT GPS unit to work with my JasJar.  After reading hours of research and reviews online, I came up with a neat little unit called the GPSlim240 Bluetooth GPS Receiver from Holux Technology, Inc.  They claim it is the “World’s Small GPS Receiver” and I have to say it is very small indeed.  Based upon the performance specs in reception and battery life, the ability to use the same charger as my JasJar (mini-USB) and the size/price were both small, this was the one to use. 

Size comparisons of the GPSlim 240 GPS Receiver and my Lexar USB Thumb Drive

How did it do?  I work in an office that is referred to as the “cave”.  It is in the middle of a small one story brick building with no outside windows.  Believe or not, it picked up close to a dozen satellites with strong signals!  While this isn’t a review on the GPS hardware, I will say that the Holux GPSlim 240′s reception was fantastic overall during testing and battery life was long.  Now back to the review…  

Easy PocketNAV’s Company History

Easy PocketNAV was established in 2002, creating e-commerce website marketing GPS solutions for business travelers and end users.  There e-commerce site, www.buyGPSnow.com was launched in January 2003.  From there they started another company called OnCourse Navigator and licensed OEM GPS software from NAVIGON to create their first GPS software, OnCourse Navigator GPS software for handhelds.  OnCourse Navigator followed up with another version in 2005 called OCN5 which eventually was Windows Mobile 5 compatible.  During this time, they garnered great industry reviews and high ratings from its end users.

I purchased OCN5 for myself in late Spring 2006.  Around that time, I remembered looking for support modifications/updates on the software and found out via their support forum that the partnership with NAVIGON was apparently coming to an end.  I distinctly remembering that because I was kicking myself for buying a great software package that was soon to be defunct.  It did not help that the company explanations at the time were not the most comforting as to their future direction either.  I eventually sold my IPAQ that summer with the GPS BT receiver and did not touch the OCN5 software again.

Well, I was surprised to learn that in March of this year, Easy PocketNAV announced a new version 6 of their OCN line along with a new partner, NavNGo, makers of the iGo navigation software for mobile devices.  The maps consisted of the latest navigational map software from TeleAtlas for both US and Canada.  Being please with their last product and now offered a chance to try it out for free on my newer PDA, I jumped at the chance to see if it was good as its predecessor.
 

OCN6 Program Features

OnCourse Navigator 6 has an extensive list of features that I think many users of GPS software can appreciate…

• “Plug and Go” – OCN6 provides the software on a micro-SD or mini-SD card with either a mini-SD/SD or SD card adapter for you to plug into your device; no more painful online activations.  They come in 1, 2 and now 4 Gigabyte flavors but more on that in a second.
   
• Intuitive User Menus – Most GPS software/hardware providers state this but I have to say I didn’t need the manual once and when I did, the on-screen help was very detailed and actually helpful!
   
• Visual and Voice Prompts – Nothing out of the ordinary here.  OCN6 provides voices in UK or US English, Spanish or French.  It will also adjust to “day/night” view based on the time at your actual location and the voice volume is dynamic in that it also adjusts up or down based on your rate of speed.
   
• An Extensive List of Points of Interests (POIs) – OCN6 has two versions as mentioned earlier in 1 and 2 GB cards with 3.5 and 12.5 million POIs respectively. You can also use the POIs to pinpoint and popup along your programmed route or just around your current GPS position.
   
• Seamless Coast-to-Coast Navigation – Since all the maps for the U.S. and Canada are loaded on the card, it is ready to use out of the box.  I can remember the old days where you had to load only the states traveled or in some cases, even the counties within the state!
   
• Smart Zoom – An OCN6 feature that will adjust the angle and magnification of the map displayed onscreen based on nearness to a directional change or even your travel rate of speed…more on that in a little bit in the Settings section.
   
• Unique Routing Options – Another OCN6 feature that I discuss in the Settings section with many variables to adjust based on your mode of transportation and how fast/slow/economical you want to get to your destination.

There are many more features listed on the company’s website but I think this give you a general flavor of what to expect from OCN6.

Installation

OnCourse Navigator’s Software Delivery System Combo: a micro-SD card (inside the mini-SD card adapter), mini-SD card adapter and SD adapter

This time around, Easy PocketNAV changed things around dramatically.  OnCourse Navigator 6 now comes complete with program and maps for either the U.S./Canada or Western Europe loaded onto a micro or mini-SD card with a micro-SD/SD card adapter.  There are two versions to choose from: a 1GB size called the Deluxe Edition and a 2GB size card called the Premium Edition.  The latter 2GB card version has more Points of Interests or POIs, 12.5 million versus 3.5 million for the 1GB card.  OCN has also released a 4GB Premium Edition version but that is only for North America and comes in a full-sized SD-only card format.

To start installation, you just pop the card into your PDA’s SD/mini-SD/micro-SD slot.  It will automatically begin the installation process if it has not been installed yet.  While we will get into the OCN system specs later, know that you will need almost 4MB of Storage RAM space on your device and a minimum of 9MB of Running Program RAM (12MB recommended) free to run.

Once you get past the obligatory EULA there are some additional pre-installation questions in which to set the program’s settings, like preferred written language, language spoken for directions, measurements, etc.  Finally it installs several files on your PDA’s main memory under My Documents for iGo (route data) and OnCourse (another database) both which are under 100k at least right now.  Lastly, it installs the executables under the Programs directory with the iGo executable and DLL’s coming in at just over 3.7MB. 

On a side note, I noticed there was no listing of the OCN6 program in the Uninstall Programs app on my PDA.  It does put an uninstall OCN program icon under the Programs tab in which to remove these files and seems to accomplish the same function.  Not sure why this occurs but no harm, no foul.

I know what you might be thinking at this point…I can just copy the OCN6 program onto my own larger 4GB SD card and not have to swap the cards out each time I want to use it.  Well, that doesn’t work and from what I gather on the OCN forums, it will disable the program as the license resides only on the card!

The good news with this method of copy protection is that you don’t have to go through the online activation hassle as other GPS software and what OCN used to do as well.  You can move it from device to device or do hard resets on those devices, never having to reactivate it again.  The downside is that when using the Windows Mobile device, you cannot be accessing other programs that rely on the storage card for its data source.  I used to use my device for both GPS and MP3 playing at the same time but unless I free up enough room to store the music, it can’t be done now.
 

Starting Up OCN6

The OCN Today Screen Plug-in and initial program splash screen as you load the program

Upon the completion of the installation process, OCN6 installs a Today Screen plug-in and the program will start up, loading maps and other data.  At this point, depending upon the version of OCN6 you obtain, it will or will not automatically load contacts from your Contacts.  In my case, I had an early version of the software in which the program would automatically search my contacts and load them as personal Points of Interest (POIs) for easy retrieval.  It warns you that it can slow down the program while running and I think that has to be a real understatement…I am talking DOG SLOW!! 

During my initial loading and review of the program, I had over 425 contacts and this slowed the reaction of the program to a point where I could tap the screen and it would literally take up to 30 seconds or longer to respond.  I was concerned this was going to be a bad review because while my JasJar was not the newest on the market, it had more than enough power to run most anything I’ve thrown at it. Next step, I went to the OCN forum for some answers. 

What I initially found on the OCN support forum concerned me.  It recommended all those users with large contacts lists, including one user with a couple thousand contacts, to leave it running overnight to import all those contacts!  In about 15 minutes more reading, I finally found that the initial release of the program had the loading of contacts upon startup as a default setting and it could be changed by modifying the settings.txt file to shut that feature off.

The screenshots above shows the latest version that I found on the OCN site and the second image is the new skin loaded upon startup. 

In my latter searches on the forum, I found that there was an update release to the program late this Spring of 2007 called OCN6 Plus. This added some fixes to the program, including shutting off the auto-load of Contacts to POIs default, a new skin shown above and some other tweaks.  I couldn’t find a full list of the changes to be had other than comments to read the forum for those changes. 

Undaunted with the help of my trusty card reader (and good instructions), I easily copied the “old” program in its entirety from the SD card to my PC as a backup, removed the program from my PDA, and unzipped the “new” version downloaded into the same directory on the SD card.  Upon re-installation with the new version, it ran like a CHAMP!  It was now very responsive.  No contact pre-loading to deal with and performance at a level that I had come to expect from a good piece of software. 

Important Note:  While I haven’t looked into this issue much deeper, there are evidently some issues remaining with the importation of contacts into the program.  It has to do with the parsing of the data from the Contacts DB where a comma or other like formatting issue can still throw off that process.  There were some suggestions from the company and users on particular workarounds including how to manually modify your contacts to be accepted by this parsing engine but it sounded like too much work .  Besides, it really wasn’t that important for me anyway.  If that’s a big issue for you, I’d suggest searching the OCN forums for the latest information in this area.

Looking Under The Hood…OCN6 Settings

Now I am armed with my brand new GPS BT receiver and loaded the OCN6 software into the SD slot of my trusty JasJar…truly a geek moment that I know many of you can relate! 

First, I decided to look at the OCN6 settings.  That’s one of my favorite parts in reviewing software.  It lets me see the detail of the programs, how granular the developers have taken it and my own ability to customize it to my own use.  In this case, OCN has done a very thorough job.  There are many settings in this program that you would expect for GPS software but I wanted to show you a few that I found of interest.

The first screen shows you the general “Settings” page.  This contains all the usual settings that you would expect in a GPS program, at least in my limited experience for such software.  However, the next two screenshots were of particular interest in what they offered.

In the Routing Parameters settings page, this has to be the most important of the Settings pages and has a few items to note.  The first is the “Method” slider which allows you to set how fast you want speed of the route calculation to be with the farthest to the right being the route that is most accurate.  Since OCN6 seems to be very fast, the only reason to use this would be for long routes.

The next item of interest on this page is the Route with the choice of: Shortest, Fastest and Economical.  I never really thought about it but the Shortest route is preferred by walkers, slow vehicles like trucks and cyclists according to the help section; guess that makes perfect sense.  Obviously, Fastest is just that when taking into account speed limits on the routes available. The last one, Economical, is a combination of the two and looks for ways to possibly save fuel.  Evidently, when Economical is selected, OCN6 will consider another route if it takes a little more time yet will cut the distance traveled.  In my personal testing, all my test trips have been 10 miles or less so this didn’t make sense, at least yet. 

Next is the Vehicle selection.  I don’t remember seeing such a setting on other GPS programs but seems a logical addition.  Here you can choose from Cars, Taxis, Buses, Bicycles, Emergency Vehicles and Pedestrians.  Based on the destination, it will look at the routes types and any restrictions on those routes.  In the U.S., pedestrians and bicycles are not allowed to be on the Interstate, hence that is not a path to be considered if pedestrians were selected in this option.  Also the 6 remaining buttons also add more/less restrictions that can be used to for the route calculations.

The last Settings page shown above was particularly interesting to me because of the Smart Zoom feature.  Smart Zoom is not just an automatic zoom you see with other GPS software but one in which it does so based on a couple different parameters.  In one case, if you are navigating a route and approaching a turn, it will not only zoom in but also raise the angle of the view and then with the next turn at a distance, it will zoom out and flatten the view to see more of the road ahead.  Another interesting twist is that the Smart Zoom will zoom in if you are driving slowly (like you are looking at the signs or for a specific address) and then zoom out when you start driving at a higher speed.  Again, I’m not an expert user of GPS software but I thought this aspect of viewing the road map on a handheld device was well thought out.

Time To Put OCN6 To Work…Literally!

Okay, lets try a local trip.  I thought I would see how well OCN6 maps a visit to my work office.  I’m currently driving around the neighborhood so I decide to stop a second (don’t want to run over someone) and I pull up the Find function on the map.  I could have hit the Work key at this point and it would have input my pre-entered work address as the destination but I wanted to put OCN6 through some additional work. 

Starting out, hitting the Address key brings up the Recent Cities list.  It takes note of my current city location and I tap on it.

The next 4 screen shots show you the “predictive” keyboard.  Based on the input, it will start to look in the map database and limit the available outputs based on that input.  In this case, as I start to type out “Court”.  Note how it shows to the right side the number of possible “search solutions” until it shows the actual Search Results.  Tapping on the “E Court Ave”, I receive the screen to input the address and then hit Done.  It’s that simple.

The following two screenshots show you the “Detailed Instructions” associated with the route from my home area (since I didn’t start right at my house) to my work office.  Next is the actual GPS Data screen that can be pulled up at any time to show you the various satellite tracking signals and associated data on my actual position and speed. 

The final two screens in this section are the actual routes shown.  The first screenshot is in the map mode with no route planned.  It simply shows my position on the map pulled to the side of my neighborhood road earlier in the day.  The next screen shows you the typical route map with directions displayed at the top and various travel distance/time at the bottom as found in other GPS programs.  Note the use of Smart Zoom that I mentioned earlier.  Here it has pulled out while slow/stopped and when “in-route”, it zooms in as I am nearing a turn close to the office.

Next Trip…Find The Grocery Store!

From my office, I decided to put the Points of Interest DB to work.  I had it look up a grocery store (Meijer’s) on the other side of town that I sometimes visit and one in which I could compare the routes in which I would normally travel.  Again, I hit the menu key on the map screen and to access the POI screen.  From there, I select Shopping, then Other Shopping (versus Malls & Shopping Centers).

Instead of paging through all 28 pages, I hit the Search key and again go use the predictive keyboard until I see the number of potential matches get low, then I hit the Done key. From there it gives me the list of all Meijer’s in the area and proximity to my current position.  I tap on the one that I want and I’m on my way.

The next four screens shows my travels from the office to Meijer’s Grocery Store.  The first view is what I would consider your typical GPS view while the second one is in “fly-over” mode where it puts the route in what I call a “5,000 foot view” that fits in the screen.  The third screen again shows my car is now closer to the destination and the Smart Zoom feature does its thing.  The last shot is the destination map once I’ve reached the site and having put it back in map mode to show the area in which I’m parked. 

Another nice feature shown on the next screenshot is display of nearby POIs.  I can tap on the screen at my location and it will give out addresses as well as other POIs like banks, restaurants and other establishments.  That would come in handy if I needed to get a phone number to see if a restaurant’s wait is long or not!

Now…For A Longer Trip

I decided to take a longer trip with OCN6 of 450 miles roundtrip to my sister-in-law’s home in Champaign, IL.  I live just outside of Louisville, KY, just across the river in Jeffersonville, IN and just a 1/2 mile from I-65.  As with the shorter trips, I input the address of my destination in Illinois just as pictured/described above in my local trips.  It took my trusty JasJar about 15 seconds to generate a route for me.  Having set the trip parameters to the “fastest” versus “economical” route, it had me on Interstate Highways all the way up through Indianapolis and over to Champaign/Urbana.  From the Interstate in Illinois, it did give me an alternative route which I don’t normally take because of stoplights but either the “stoplight gods” were smiling on me or just plain luck but it did cut a couple minutes off the route.

I found that the OCN6 system was continually updating the route and showing quick response to the GPS unit of my actual location on the highway along with the local overpasses and exchanges.  It’s funny but when you install the OCN6 software, it has a disclaimer about operating the unit and a vehicle at the same time for safety reasons and I can see why.  I was looking at the screen to compare with the surroundings, making my wife VERY nervous in the process to the point I needed to put it down for an hour or so! 

Some additional observations:  1) It did a very good job of point out the POIs for me including a local Mexican restaurant around the corner from where we were staying as well as some of the shopping areas when we needed to get something for the baby.  2) Just in case you were wondering, on the return trip to Indiana, I did play with the “economical” setting for route planning.  It really couldn’t find a better way since both endpoints were literally a few miles off the Interstate so your usage will vary based on your own destinations.  3) We took a side-trip to a relatives home not more than 30 miles from our home and 5 miles off the Interstate.  Instead of programming that into our travel itinerary, I choose to let it think we were off the planned route.  It kept nagging me to make a U-Turn (which can be modified in the settings) until I got to a point on a secondary state highway that parallels the Interstate.  From there, it then computed a new route in about 5-7 seconds on that highway until it got me back to the next Interstate exchange about 5 miles up the road.

Installation and Program Performance

Normally in this section, I would cover the installation package but I have already covered that aspect of the program in great detail. Again, I would make sure you have at least 4MB of Program Storage RAM and a good 12MB+ of available Running Program RAM.  It goes without saying that unless you need Contacts including in your personal POIs in the initial setup, don’t do it if you are in a hurry!  It really slowed down the entire device to a literal crawl.  If you do need them, then I would try the “leave it on overnight” approach to see how many Contacts can get through the parsing. 

If you are interested in the OCN6 program and curious if your mobile device can run it, OCN has provided a detailed spec list along with an extensive list of “compatible” devices in which this software should work.

Conclusion and Thoughts

While it may have been a little bumpy at first with the installation of the OCN6 software and its default handling of Contact importation to POIs, I have to say that once I got beyond that, it worked just like I expected.  There was a small booklet of a dozen or so pages that accompanied the program card but I never needed it beyond a brief scan of the installation process.  The screens and menu placement on this program are very intuitive.  When I needed help in the Settings section of the program, the built-in help screens were very detailed and actually very, very useful.  I did download the full OCN6 manual and “getting started” manual but I never needed them to operate the program.

My test trips have been short so far.  The travel was around my hometown and even if some might not think that’s enough to test a GPS program, I would argue that being a born native of the area with 45 years experience, I know about every which way to get somewhere and how long it should take.  Based on that, OCN6 navigated both the shortest and fastest routes with ease.  When I’d try to throw it off by deliberately missing turns, it would recalculate directions within 3-5 seconds at the most, prompting me with corrective driving directions to my original destination.

I didn’t get the opportunity to see how well OCN6 calculated an “Economical” route selection since that really calls for a much longer trip than my town trips.  I am planning a 600+ mile trip later this coming month and will give that a shot.  If it performs as well as the rest of the OnCourse Navigator 6 program has to date and if its of interest or adds to the discussion, I’ll do an addendum to this review.

I also liked the Points of Interest utilization in the GPS program.  The search function was very easy and again, intuitive in its use.  I obviously haven’t had the opportunity to go through all 12.5 million POIs but the selections I did over a couple days period seemed very extensive and actually up-to-date for locations built within the last couple years.  Now if OCN6 could only give me lodging, movie and restaurant reviews!

The only downside that I had with OCN6 was the SD card method of delivering the software and subsequent activation.  In the past, I would load the maps and software on my own 4GB SD card along with the rest of my applications, games and MP3/MPEG files.  If I want to multi-task by running some other programs now, I had to stop the GPS program and input my own SD storage card or make room on the PDA itself.

However on second thought, the OCN6 method of installation/running does save on activation hassles and moving it from one device to another easily, makings it a true “plug and go” software application.  Since I don’t travel long distances as I used to do, this really is not a big deal and I think I will ultimately like the ease in which the OCN6 system now works.  If I did have a problem, I guess I would just have to buy their 4GB SD card version now wouldn’t I!

Overall, it seems that even with the changes that Easy PocketNAV has had in partnerships with GPS OEM software providers recently, OCN continues to provide a high quality product in OCN6 that should fit any persons need for GPS software on their Windows Mobile device.  I would not be surprised if it didn’t garner all those same industry awards for this product that they did for the OCN5 product.  All in all, I found very little to not like about OnCourse Navigator 6 and would highly recommend it with confidence!

Price:  $129.95 OCN6 for North America Deluxe Edition (1GB & 3.5 million POIs)
         $145.00 OCN6 for North America Premium Edition (2GB & 12.5 million POIs)
         $159.00 OCN6 for Western Europe (2GB version)
         $169.00 OCN6 for North America Premium Edition (4GB version in SD format only and 12.5 million POIs)

Version Tested:  OCN6 Plus (last updated on 3/26/07)

Tested on: Imate JasJar, PocketPC Phone Edition, WM5.0

Filed in categories: GPS, Windows Mobile related

Tagged: Pocket PC, Software, Utility

Easy PocketNAV’s OnCourse Navigator 6 GPS Software – Windows Mobile Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on August 1, 2007 at 5:03 pm.

I’ve just been diagnosed with diabetes. I am a bit overwhelmed with the flood of information- both that I need to learn, and that I need to now learn to track. I have already learned a few things.

A. Diabetes is sometimes called the “data disease” because the more you understand it and track it, and know what it is doing, the better you can manage it.
B. It is really depressing to be a diabetic.
C. If ya gotta deal with the data involved, ya may as well make it work for you.

I tried several programs that I found through Google, Handango, and PalmGear. Some were too expensive for what they offered, others were mostly single-task programs that were good food databases or good logbooks. Some were awkward, several did not even launch right, and a few I just plain did not like to use. I shan’t name any here- just because I did not like them does not mean you won’t.

Diabetes Pilot

Diabetes Pilot is a simple, but useful program. It combines a logbook for your blood sugar readings, medications, insulin, foods, BP, exercise, and more along with a good database of food values and a good report module. It also offers a desktop version that can sync with the Palm or Pocket PC version.

Diabetes Pilot main screen and recording blood glucose levels screen.

Recording Carbs… which you can do with the Food Database utility.

Entering data in the Pilot is fairly simple and intuitive- radio buttons, check boxes, blanks to fill in… it feels like a traditional Palm program. This program is designed to run an almost any Palm or Handspring ever made, so it does not use some of the cosmetic features of newer software. No color coding, no sound effects, no whiz, no bang- nonetheless, it seems reliable and familiar. (This is not to say that some well placed color coding or something would not be a bad idea- in fact, some elements literally cry out for a make-over!)

Because it is a solid, reliable performer, this is in my eyes sort of the standard by which other diabetes programs were measured. I could wish that the foods database was a bit easier to navigate… perhaps with a search function, but otherwise this was a trooper. It installed well, runs well, does not seem unstable, does not strain resources, and just plain does the job.

The desktop version of Diabetes Pilot compliments it nicely. Some jobs are easier in the desktop (such as bulk data entry if you fall behind in it), and it does use color. If they offered both programs at a lower price, it would be a slam dunk! As it is, the desktop version is $39.99 and the handheld is $29.99. The combined $69.98 is pretty high in my eyes for what can be done with a paper log and a calculator.

If you DO purchase both, the biggest benefit I have found is the ability to use the Palm as a remote data logger- capturing info on the run, and letting the desktop manage and present the info. In fact, this has become a primary factor in my choosing software for this!

Price: $39.99 desktop version, $29.99 handheld version

Pros:
- Familiar, comfortable interface
- Good reports and tracking tools
- Desktop conduit
- Easy to configure and use

Cons:
- Pricing is a little steep, especially with desktop version as well
- Finding food values in the database can be tedious

Logbook DM

Logbook DM is most quickly described as ‘Diabetes Pilot Lite’. It does not have a food database, does not track as many values, has a slightly clunkier looking interface, and is no longer actively supported (last update was 2004). At least some features do not work on newer devices, such as the Treo. On the other hand, it is inexpensive, has a good reporting feature, easy to use, and just plain works well. The author, Ryan Bruner, deserves kudos for this software and for what, when it was written, were very advanced features. For $12, it is worth a look!

Price: $12.00

Pros:
- Cheap
- Simple
- One-screen data entry

Cons:
- None

UTS Diabetes

UTS Diabetes is what I would consider sort of the ‘next generation’ of Diabetes Pilot. It is a slightly different structure in that the main program, Universal Tracker System (UTS) must be installed first, and the Diabetes element is a plug-in module. It does offer several other modules, both free and commercial, as well as a desktop version, the UTSPC Companion… although it will still export to Microsoft Excel without the desktop component.

UTS Diabetes is in color and offers a few more features, such as the ability to e-mail your records to your doctor. You can get UTS and the Diabetes plug in bundled for $29.90, and the full desktop for $39.95- a total of $69.85- more features for a slightly lower price, but it also does not run on older Palms and takes more resources. I would also add that the website for UTS is not quite as user friendly.

UTS Diabetes Plug-In and entering blood sugar levels.

Entering carbs.

Price: $29.90 UTS with the Diabetes plug in bundle, $39.95 Desktop version

Pros:
- Colorful, visually pleasant
- Easy data entry
- Better reporting
- Modular design allows customizing and upgrading

Cons:
- Still rather costly
- Does not run well on older units

Data Reporting is one big part of why you buy any diabetes software. Here are the data screens from all three products:

DiabetesPilot

LogbookDM

UTS-Diabetes Charts

(A note of apology: due to technical problems that had nothing to do with the softwares being tested, I could only show a VERY limited data set on two of the programs. Hopefully my PDA will be fully operational again soon!)

Bottom Line

These are all good programs, but what I really want is a way to just capture raw data during the day, then have it upload and chart out for me as seamlessly as possible on my laptop. I have heard tell of some Excel spreadsheets that come close to this which would work nicely with Docs to Go, but I have not found them yet. I may have to learn Excel and make my own.

In the meantime, LogbookDM will be my tool of choice- quick, easy, one screen to enter stuff on, and a decent report. Diabetes Pilot is a near second- except that I don’t really want to pay the price for the whole package program. I LOVE the look, charts, and data entry of UTS, but am just not as thrilled about it overall as I am Diabetes Pilot- pure personal preference!

Filed in categories: Uncategorized

Tagged: Palm, Palm OS related, Software, Utility

Diabetes Log Software – Palm OS Utility originally appeared on The Gadgeteer on June 7, 2007 at 10:00 am.