Sunday, including PDA thoughts

[cellio]

Today we got together with my parents to celebrate mothers' day, our anniversary, and my father's birthday. We took them to Sunnyledge (I think that's the name of it), which does a very good Sunday brunch. Ironically, while the buffet usually includes a couple kinds of fish that I can eat (along with meat, which I can't eat, and other dishes, which I can), today the ocean-based offerings were shrimp, mussels, swordfish, lobster, and lox. So one out of five. :-)

My father recently got himself a PDA. I was curious to know more, because he has the same vision problems I do. He was constrained in also needing something Mac-compatable, so his choices were more limited than mine would be, but for one data point, his looks pretty good. He has a Tungston E, which has a crisp, legible display that can fit a fair bit of text in fonts I can read. The graffiti interface is also much easier than the last time I used one -- this was "Graffiti 2", and most of the strokes look like letters, rather than semi-thematically-related glyphs (like an upside-down "V" for "A", which I remember encountering before). I was completely unable to write a "k", and my attempts at "u" kept producing "v" instead, but I think a small number of hours of practice would actually fix that. And I could write resaonably quickly too without it getting confused, which had not been true before.

My father carries his in a shirt pocket. Women's shirts don't tend to have that pocket, and even if they did the placement would be, err, suboptimal, so I'd need to find something I could reasonably carry in a back pants pocket. I imagine this has constraints on size, heat-tolerance, and durability. (Or are there belt-based solutions?)

I'd also need to think about how I would end up using it; things like the calendar, address book, and standing grocery list are obvious, but can I use it as a text editor to, say, compose LJ posts or edit a D&D character sheet when I don't have a real computer to hand? I know there's a Hebrew calendar out there somewhere, and someone I know has a siddur for hers, both of which would be handy. I'd want some application that supports a table or database of all my books/CDs, so I stop accidentally buying duplicates; I assume that's straightforward. I'm going to assume that music applications are not feasible.

What do people who have PDAs end up using them for after the first few months? (I know that dglenn also asked this question recently.) What's involved in having web-browsing? (What do you pay in monthly service fees?) My father didn't have a browser on his, so I didn't get a feel for whether most web sites even render on such a small screen.

I'm not going to run right out and buy one, but I'm at least entertaining the idea now, which is a change.

Short takes:

Fun stuff: Anton Chekov's book-signing (and reading) in Union Square. Link from nickjong, who got it from Neil Gaiman.

Non-fun stuff: Soldiers in Iraq losing internet access, just in case they want to ship out more photos from prisons or something. (Link from insomnia; see also this one from tangerinpenguin and others.) Feh. Some of my coworkers are in Iraq right now (civilians, on a base, nowhere near prisons); if we stop hearing from them I guess we'll know why.

Comments

palm pilot foo

[geekosaur]

Web browsing is functional for sites that are mostly text and don't require Flash or Javascript (or Java, VBscript, etc.); graphics are at best spotty but (conveniently) Blazer 2.0's autoscale of weather.com's regional Doppler radar map is barely usable. (For me. For you I suspect it would not be.) I couldn't tell you about cost since my Treo is owned by the department so I never see any bills....

My killer application is DateBk5, which I've configured with custom views for bills, shopping list, and a "quick glance" planner view, among others. Desktop calendaring software is less than useful to me given the number of desktops I use during the course of a day (minimum 3) and the amount of time I spend away from any of them.

Text editors are available but Graffiti (even Graffiti 2/Jot) is not what you want to be using for editing text; buy a portable keyboard if you decide to go that route.

Databases are available; I was underwhelmed but I tend to ask a lot of databases (comes from ten years as a DBA :). There are also canned applications for music and book databases, etc. on sites such as PalmGear and Handango.

Hebrew calendars: I've been using KaLuach; there's also Penticon Luach but it apparently has some limitations on PalmOS 5 devices --- and while you can get it bundled with Penticon's Hebrew Support+, the latter doesn't work on PalmOS 5 at all. (Hebrew PiLoc does, but I haven't been able to evaluate it because it doesn't work with the Graffiti support (RecoEcho) for Treos.)

Music applications: PalmOS 5 devices can in fact run MP3 and Ogg decoders/players, and 3G data appears to be good enough for at least 24kbps streams. (WMA is almost certainly a lost cause, though; Microsoft is unlikely to release specifications to makers of devices which compete with their PocketPC platform.) Since my Treo is PalmOS 3.5, I haven't looked beyond that, but you should be able to find at least two players on one of the aforementioned sites. If composing/experimenting with music is what you're looking for, there's miniMusic NotePad and companion applications.

There's at least one web site selling siddurim for PalmOS, requiring TealDoc to read. You might also want to look at PilotYid for other Hebrew texts (most of which require one of the Hebrew support packages mentioned above) and other Judaism-related software and documents.

Belt pouches, and other carriers, for most of the Palm models are available from various third parties; PalmGear (above) should sell them. I wouldn't plan on carrying it in a back pocket unless you buy one of the hard cases, though; it's far too easy to sit down on it and break the touchscreen.

Re: palm pilot foo

[cellio]

Thanks for all the info! A portable keyboard sounds like a good idea, yes.

Calendars: I use Kaluach on my desktop; I'm not surprised they have a Palm version too.

Do any of the apps you use make use of Hebrew fonts? I'm wondering how well the nikud renders.

I wouldn't plan on carrying it in a back pocket unless you buy one of the hard cases, though; it's far too easy to sit down on it and break the touchscreen.

You're the second person who's commented on the problem of sitting on the contents of back pockets, so now I'm curious: am I a mutant, or is it a gender thing, or what? The bottoms of the back pockets on all my pants end before the seating surface; Dani says this is not true for him and I gather it's not true for you. Now I'm wondering if I'm built funny. :-)

Re: palm pilot foo

[geekosaur]

Sorry for the delay; net access's been a bit limited for me of late and I try to not do too much personal stuff at work.

I have one application which displays Hebrew with nikudot; it uses self-contained Hebrew support, which comes in two font sizes: tiny and flyspeck. I find it sometimes difficult to distinguish seghol from qamatz, but then I have the same problem with some printed documents (which look rather like the Hebrew was photocopied...). In general the nikudot are fairly small, though (dots are single pixels), so it could be a problem.

As for the back pocket problem: it's fairly common among men; I don't know that many women who carry PDAs so I don't know if there's a problem in general. It also wouldn't surprise me greatly if the pockets of women's pants are placed to avoid the gluteus maximus. :)

BTW, I may be finding out about PalmOS 5 support in a few weeks; apparently we're all to be upgraded to Treo600s as part of the new service contract between CMU and Sprint.