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Palm Desktop Replacement?

rueger asks: "Almost from Day One I've found the Palm desktop and handheld software to be sorely lacking. The Address Book only allows you to record one address, not one for home and one for work, and only lets you sort or search by name and company name, not by city for instance. The calendar won't let you link contact names to appointments which again seems an obvious missing feature. I've been looking for a software replacement that would add these features and more, and still sync with my Palm (well, Clie). Outlook is not a possibility for all of the usual reasons. What I've found is that there are some very nice PIMs out there, but most won't hot-sync. Those that do, like Time & Chaos, have no more functionality than the Palm software, and lack some features that I use. What are other handheld users turning to? Is there an Open Source replacement?"

3 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Apple's iCal and Address Book or.... by Anonymous+Commando · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Or first list on a Google search: Palm Desktop Replacement Comparison Chart

    And had you actually clicked through the link you posted and read the article, you would have realized that it was an old article about "Palm-sized PCs" running Windows CE, not Palm® handhelds.

    Am I the only one who is getting sick of the knee-jerk "use google" reactions to "Ask /." questions?

    --
    Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
  2. Re:Limitations of the Palm by Yaztromo · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Also, if you edit data on the palm you might break the "links" that the PC software maintains.

    This should only ever happen if you delete a record on the handheld and re-enter it, causing the new record to receive a different ID value. No properly-written synchronization module should cause any such breakage under normal conditions )ie: editing/modifying the data on the handheld) -- any that do are due purely to buggy code, and not the design of the PalmOS itself.

    Some developers who have written PIMs that weren't designed wih handheld synchronization in mind might try to use one of the fields as the unique record identifier, but this is wrong, and will cause the problem you mention if you change the field being used as the identity field. The proper mechanism for this is to create a mapping between the record ID values and the internal application record identifier.

    Please don't blame the PalmOS for things outside its control.

    Brad BARCLAY
    Lead Developer & Project Adminsitrator,
    The jSyncManager Project.

  3. Re:Evolution by npsimons · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Isn't pilot-link the thing that evolution uses for syncing?

    The short answer: no. The long answer: while they may have shared a code base in the distant past, they definitely don't perform the same now. I'll admit that Evolution isn't perfect, and while I haven't had the severity of problems you listed, I've had some similar ones (duplicate contacts). I mainly use pilot-xfer in backup and restore mode, which does no "synchronizing", just bit for bit copies to or from the Palm.