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?"

Comments

Re:Apple's iCal and Address Book or....

[Anonymous Commando]

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?

Re:Apple's iCal and Address Book or....

[xanderwilson]

Okay. Forget Google. Try here.

Alex.

Ecco Pro with Shadow Palm and DateBk5

[Will Sargent]

There was a pretty huge list of PIMs, but the market was exterminated by Microsoft Outlook and never really recovered. In addition, only some of them integration with Palms.

http://john.redmood.com/organizers.html
http://www.ypsolog.com/docs/comp/other/pim.html
http://www.ms.lt/ms/projects/toolkinds/organize.ht ml

The odds are good that you'll find something that works.

I personally use Ecco Pro, Shadow Palm and DateBk5.

But then again, I'm a zealot.

Evolution

[npsimons]

I know a lot of people like to bag on Evolution, but I've found it works quite nicely when synchronizing to my Palm m500 over serial. I'm using Debian stable, and there are a couple of packages that you will need besides evolution. I believe they were evolution, gnome-pilot, and gnome-pilot-conduits (apt should get all the proper dependencies). Although, you still only get one address (business) on the Palm side, I believe this is a limitation with the Palm addressbook software. You can keep multiple addresses in Evolution, but only the business one will show up on the Palm addressbook.

Re:Limitations of the Palm

[Yaztromo]

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.