*scottstuff*

Engadget is running a rumor about PalmOne’s next handheld–the Tungsten T4.

The basic specs look promising–802.11g, bluetooth, 320x480 display, faster CPU, more RAM, yadda yadda. The are a couple little issues with the rumor, though. First, it’s claiming a 450 MHz CPU. I thought that Intel’s newest CPUs are 624/520/416/312 MHz. I don’t know where 450 MHz comes from–an underclocked 520 in an attempt to save power? Also, the rumor calls for 96 MB of RAM, which is unusual. Memory sizes in handhelds are usually a power of 2, so I’d expect either 64 MB or 128 MB. There’s a chance that there’s really 128 MB in the thing, with 32 MB reserved for something else–Sony and Handspring have both done similar things in the past.

Finally, the T4 is supposed to run PalmOS 6/Cobalt. It was announced months ago, but none of the (rapidly shrinking) pool of PalmOS manufacturers has yet produced a handheld that uses it.

All in all, this sounds exactly like the device that PalmOne needs to replace the T3, but it’s still a little short of the next round of PocketPCs. HP has a couple 640x480/128MB/612 MHz models due for release soon, and Toshiba and ASUS already have similar models on the market.

Which brings up another question–since PalmOS and PocketPC handhelds are now using almost exactly the same hardware, is there any chance that someone will start using the same hardware platform for both OSes? ASUS in particular could easily produce a PalmOS version of their handheld without really surprising anyone.

Finally, what about the Tungsten C family? The handheld that I really want is the Tungsten C2–a cross of the T4 with the current Tungsten C. I’m really slow with graffiti, and a keyboard would be great, even though it adds a couple inches to the height of the thing.

I upgraded to 10.3.3 over lunch today, and everything seemed to go well. The network browsing support in the Finder is nice, and things seem slightly zippier across the board.

It took me a couple hours to notice the first problem: I can no longer sync my palm (Sony Clie T615c) via the cradle. Something, somewhere is missing, and the palm times out without connecting to the sync software on the computer. Google is nice, but it’s worthless when you’re looking for problems in software that’s only 2 hours old.

Fortunately, the cradle problem isn’t fatal–my PowerBook is old enough that it still has an IR port, so I can use it for syncing. It’s slower, but it works well enough, and I’ve done it before, when I’ve forgotten to drag the cradle home from work. It’s aggravating, though.

At this point, I’m just counting the days until Palm introduces something exciting enough to get me to replace this old Sony. What I want is a union of the Tungsten C and the Tungsten T3. Bluetooth and 802.11, a big screen and a keyboard, and the fast CPU and big RAM that the two share.

My poor, overworked palm (actually a Sony Clie, but it runs PalmOS) lost its memory overnight one night last week; I think something in my pocket was hitting the power button and ran the battery dead. With Palms (and Pocket PCs), one the battery goes, everything in memory goes too, and you basically have to re-install from a backup before you can use it again. Fortunately, syncing your palm performs a backup, but it isn’t 100% reliable, and it doesn’t actually back up everything; when I restored the palm, it lost a few changes that I’d made late in the day before my last sync. Sony ships their Clies with a backup tool that can back up to a memory stick, but it’s slow and you have to run it by hand. And everyone knows that backup that require manual intervention never really happen.

So I did a bit of searching, and found that BackupBuddyVFS is almost universally recommended for Palm backups. It’s faster then Sony’s backup solution, and it can run automatically at a fixed time every night.

My palm is now amazingly well backed up. Every couple hours a script on my PowerBook copies the Palm hotsync backup files into a subversion tree and commits the changes. So, I have a running history of all of the packages that I’ve installed onto my palm as well as a record of what I deleted and when it happened.

Getting the deletes right was a bit of a pain–I’m using rsync and parsing the output of ‘rsync –delete’, and then feeding that into ‘svn delete’.

All of this is then synced over the net to one of my systems at home. So, even if I lost my Palm and my laptop, I’d still be able to recover the contents of my palm. Yes, that’s total overkill, but it’s worth it just for the record of what is changing over time on the palm.

I’ve finally settled on a set of Palm-based organization programs. As mentioned before, I’m using Life Balance for managing my to-do lists. It’s kind of an odd program, and it still needs some work, but the basic concept is wonderfully simple. You use its outline view to define goals (“earn a living,” “spend time with family and friends”) and then fill in details under the goals. For example, I have a number of ongoing and upcoming projects at work, plus infrastructure things like “fill out timesheet.” Each branch of this tree has an importance attached to it, so you can say things like “this sub-tree is very important to its parent” or “this sub-tree isn’t very important at all.” The cool part is that Life Balance can then take this outline and sort it into a simple linear to-do list, showing the most important things at the top. It’s not 100% perfect, but with a small bit of tuning, it’s usefully close. It knows how to handle deadlines, so tasks bubble up the list as the deadline gets closer, and it can handle recurring to-do items. Rather uniquely, it tries to balance the priorities of your different goals, so if you’re getting tons of items completed on your work list, it can bump up the priority of non-work items in an attempt to remind you to be a more balanced person, if that’s what you desire.

The story behind Life Balance is kind of interesting–apparently the author was a VAX sysadmin, and wrote the program in an attempt to regain control of her life while on-call for work. I can certainly sympathize. Apparently I’m not the only one–there have been several positive reviews of Life Balance released recently.

Life Balance runs on Windows and the Mac, as well as on the Palm. Each piece is licensed separately. It seems to sync well on the Mac. There are rumors of a PocketPC version appearing at some point.

For managing my calendar, I’ve replaced the Palm’s DateBook with Agendus. It’s a comprehensive calendar/to-do/contact-management app that is aimed more towards sales types then programmers, but it does a really nice job of displaying upcoming events. I used to lust after the PocketPC “Today” screen, but Agendus more then fills that gap with a zillion different ways to view calendar and to-do items. You can view days one at a time, one or two weeks at a time in a grid, list, or graphical free/busy block view, a month at a time, quarterly, view lists of upcoming events 1/2/7/14/30 days in the future, view isolated lists of to-do items or have them integrated into the calendar view, plus a few others that I’m missing. It supports small fonts at least on PalmOS 5 and Clies running PalmOS 4. I really like the way it looks, and the ability to use small fonts means that you can see a lot of detail on the screen at a time.

Plus, since Life Balance can sync its sorted to-do list with the Palm’s native to-do database, you can view Life Balance items with deadlines on Agendus’s calendar and mark them complete directly from Agendus. The two programs integrate beautifully together.

I’m happy with the two programs, but I have a couple things that I’d like to see improved, mostly in Life Balance. First and foremost, it really needs to be updated with the ability to use smaller fonts on the Palm. It’s hard to tell what’s going on in the outline view because the text is so big that you can only see a handful of lines at a time. Entertainingly, the Mac desktop version suffers from the same basic problem–it has so much window-dressing that it’s hard to see your whole outline at once. Both of these need to be fixed soon.

All in all, though, I’m happy with both programs and bought both of them.

Okay, so I posted yesterday that I’ve decided that a PDA without top-notch desktop sync support is worthless, and that Palms are the only PDAs that sync right with OS X. Great timing–according to Brighthand, PalmSource isn’t going to produce an OS X sync program for “Cobalt,” their new name for PalmOS 6.

It’s not really the end of the world–it’s unclear if the basic sync protocol has changed, although the formats used by the native PIM applications is different. So, there’s a chance that Palm Desktop 4 will work along with a small update to iSync (which replaces the native PIM conduits in Palm Desktop). Failing that, Mark/Space has committed to producing an OS X sync solution, and they’ve been pretty good in the past.

Basteges.

As those who know me know, I’m not exactly the world’s most organized person. It’s not uncommon for me to over-organize a few small things while large swaths of my life sit in disorder for way too long. Sometimes it bothers me, some times it doesn’t. It tends to go in cycles of two or three years–the disorder will start to bother me for one reason or another, so I’ll start some new way of organizing things, only to drop it after I’ve made enough of a dent in things so the disorder doesn’t bother me anymore.

I’m currently in the middle of one of those cycles. I’ve had too many things piling up at home and at work recently, and I feel like I was losing track of most of the things that I needed to be doing. Every time something new added itself to my plate, something else fell off.

I started by trying to keep a simple to-do list in iCal and syncing it onto my phone, but that just doesn’t cut it. I need to be able to break big tasks down into smaller pieces in order to manage them, but if I do that, then I end up with a huge long linear list that is too big to be manageable. So I avoid putting little things onto the list, so they don’t obscure the big things, except now I’m losing track of things again.

I’m currently in the middle of phase two: I’m trying out better software for managing to-do lists. I’m kind of excited about Life Balance, which is kind of new-age sounding, but seems to do what I want. You lay out your life as a series of goals and projects in a big hierarchy. Leaf nodes in the tree are essentially to-do items. Each node has a priority and an effort metric associated with it, along with an optional to-do date, location, and some other settings. Life Balance then tries to produce a simple, linear to-do list of what you need to be working on right now. It’s actually quite a bit more powerful then that sounds, because it can gauge the importance of different projects and sub-projects against each other, and then try to balance them using the feedback that you provide.

Life Balance runs on Macs, Windows PCs, and Palms. The Palm and desktop versions sync with each other, and the Palm version can sync its version of the to-do list with the system to-do list. I’m currently testing Life Balance out along with Agendus on a Clie that I’ve had sitting around for a couple years. I’m still tuning the way I use the two programs, but they seem to interact almost perfectly. I’ll write up a longer review when I decide to buy them.