My first Palm Program

I wanted to write a program for PalmOS, so I downloaded the Palm emulator POSE & the Palm SDK & installed them on my trusty Linux box, bought a couple of Palm books, & started hacking.

It's easier for me to write a program if it's going to be useful & I had just gotten my hands on a Sony digital camera. Now, I'm no newbie to photography - I got serious amateur with some Nikon equipment in the late 70's & into the 80's 'til I figured out I knew the technology but my compositional skills stank like fresh skunk. Didn't help that I had this great friend & cousin who is an A-1 expert at it. I mean, he did his best to mentor me, but...well...let's just say I just better stick to software engineering for my day job!

Anyways, back to the Sony - it has lots of little buttons & knobs with cute little icons & I needed help remembering just what they all meant. So, I wrote a Palm program to do just that.

I put the program on PalmGear & got a couple of 4-star reviews & some notes of appreciation. That's enough to puff the ol' chest out!

Now, I'm so pleased with myself that I tell my friend about it & she sez "Hey, I gots this new Kodak DX3900..." I downloaded an electronic copy of its manual & conjured up a version of my program for it. So now I have 2 Palm programs; really, one program & 2 custom fonts & 2 files of explanatory text.

As for PalmOS, "they" almost got it right. Apparently they didn't make bitmaps one of the supported database types. That would have made these programs unnecessary - I could have done it in a snap with Pilot-DB [which I highly recommend, btw]. Second, what's with these "resource" files - sounds like some old-timey Mac types trying to infiltrate the world from another direction!!! Arrggghhhhh!

This program identifies, using words, the symbols that appear on the Sony DSC-S75 Digital Camera's buttons & knobs. It gives brief instructions &/or information about the settings represented by the symbols. It is sufficient for someone who has read & understood the manual. All of the information comes from my electronic copy of the manual which I downloaded from www.sony.com. This program is not a replacement for the camera's manual.

About the first thing that happened after I acquired my DSC-S75 was lose my paper copy of the manual. I did not want spend the energy to obtain a replacement. Fortunately for me I found an electronic copy of the manual on Sony's web site. I didn't really want to print it out and I am not a great memorizer, so I created this program to be my electronic rememberer.

I hope my program is useful to other owners of this camera.

Compliments - send them to me.

Suggestions - send them to me.

Criticism - ok, if you really have to...send them to me.

Donations - ok, if you want to, send them to me. Hey, I'm unemployed right now & I can really use some money. Or pizza. Or beer. I'm good at software but not at being interviewed; what can I say?

Flames - blow them out the bottom of your back!

CONDITIONS

Copyright 2002 Robert Geer

This program is free for personal use.

Any corporate sale or use of this program requires a license from me.

I pretty much believe in the GPL principle. I don't include the source code but you may have it, for personal use, if you really want it.

This is my first Palm program. I use Linux, Emacs, PalmOS SDK3.5, prc-tools 2.0, PilRC 2.9, & POSE 3.0a6. I very much appreciate all the people who have contributed to this software.

I have tested this program on a Palm Vx & a Handspring Prism.

CONTACT

        Robert Geer
        1327 Camino Ecuestre NW
        Albuquerque, NM USA 87107
        bgeer@xmission.com
        bgeer@thuntek.net
        www.xmission.com/~bgeer
        www.thuntek.net/~bgeer

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