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Must-Have Pocket PC Software?
MBCook asks: "I just got a new Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 2003 SE on it. I haven't owned a PDA since my old HP 320LX (7 years ago, with Windows CE 1.0!). So since I've been out of the game for a while, I'd like to ask: what PocketPC software (both commercial and free) do you find essential? What little gems can't you live without? Game, productivity, utility, oddity, or other... I'd love to know what Slashdot readers find to be the best software."
PalmOS
That is something I find essential. I rarely use any software which is not part of Debian.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
iPodder on your desktop. And a really big memory stick :). And acrobat reader.
Of the 3rd-party stuff I have on mine, I use VNC the most. Other than that I use the pocket IE that's on there lots, but I'd prefer a version of Opera with decent small-screen rendering like the Symbian Series 60 product.
This game is awesome link
It used to be by hexacto or something, I guess they changed their name.
I found a PocketPC version of Nethack that has helped me kill way too many hours.
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
MiniStumbler. It's Net Stumbler for your PocketPC (free)
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http://www.stumbler.net
PocketLAN. It allows you to connect to network shares, and print to network printers. ($15)
http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=
If you feel like trying to find it, and screwing around with a few hacks, TodayPlus is an abandoned today screen replacement. It was abandoned about a year ago, while it was in beta testing. The beta versions all expired earlier this year, but there is a small but very loyal userbase that has a crack for it. I still haven't found anything that comes close to the features that this program offers, and it's free. Good luck finding a download though.
http://www.jhollin1138.com/todayplus/
Pocket Streets. Take a map with you. The newest version also supports GPS. ($30-$120)
http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint/pocketstreets/d
GSPlayer is my absolut fave program. It is the only free program that i have found that can play internet streaming radio. I also like battery monitor pro. It puts a bunch of stuff on your home screen thats useful. I would also look into video game emulation if your ppc is fast enough. Also look around for aim for your ppc. Some versions off the web are free.
Ive never used/owned one myself but Route planner software sounds handy to me :)
I found the selection of browsers to be depressingly lacking, but the pick of the bunch was ThunderHawk. I believe it uses some funky incarnation of KHTML, and in any case it renders infinitely better than PockteIE and the others built off of that. It also displays pages in landscape form, so you never have to scroll horizontally. It is a commercial product, unfortunately.
PocketMVP is the best among the media players I've tried. If you have add in a gig or larger flash card, it's sweet to watch full length DivX/etc. movies and TV shows on the go.
The AvantGo service lets you download web pages to your PPC for later viewing, in an especially easy manner. It's great for reading the news on the bus, or wherever a wifi network is not available.
There are a few GBA emulators and the like which might be worth looking into, but I've found the games situation to be unfortunately poor. The best of what I've bought is Sim City 2000, which took the porting impressively well. If you're as big a fan of the series as I am, you should definitely check that before any other.
You can never get tired of this game, frustrated yes, tired no.
http://www.nethack.org/
Pocket DVD Studio is the best battery waster out there. Its a xvid encoder for handhelds. I use it on my Tungsten T3 with mmplayer and a coworker's WinCE PDA. Nothing beats watching your favourite movie in the airport without having to haul the laptop out. All you need is a BIG memory card.
If your PPC doesn't have internet access, then get a nice large memory card and put Wikipedia on it. Having Wikipedia so instantly accessible is largely responsible for my loss of long term memory. Other than that, I use the Netfront browser, because of its superior JS/Java support, and Agile Messenger (which is free) to handle all my IM needs. Pocket streets is also good, but they've stuffed up the Melbourne coverage, which finishes 5km south of the city (which is heavily populated), and 30k north (which is mostly empty country). Useful!
Preferably something to flash card. I've run into errors in the PocketPC system from time to time that can only be recovered with a hard reset- and for that, you want a daily backup to flash card.
I use Sprite Software's Sprite Backup, the commercial version of IPAQ backup.
In addition to this, I find AvantGo to be highly usefull, as well as good Bluetooth GPS unit and software (currently using a no-name bluetooth GPS unit and iGuidance, but it's all pretty similar, except for Microsoft Streets and Trips 2004, which for some reason can't keep up with my car and keeps loosing track of the serial port at 65 MPH). You'll also want one of the many freeware task handlers- the task handler that comes with the IPAQ is total crap.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
installing oracle on my ipaq has helped me boost productivity. its comes with XML support and tons of other stuff.. not to forget an apache server.. very handy when your webserver goes down.. database and webserver in one machine.. you can never lose! Oh almost forgot.. I have VS.NET 2003 and the MSDN library installed in 16 256MB compact flash cards.. very very handy stuff.
Pocket Informant is a great PIM.
Fitaly keyboard.
Age of Empires for those long plane flights.
Ephemeris, for finding sunrise and sunset times for photography.
Resco's image viewer or GLass Lantern's Pocket Loupe. For sharing digital photos on the road.
Pocket stars.
I have a palm pilot and I am really hurting to run skype!
I know you probably have a cell phone but it would be pretty awsome. And you can make outgoing calls without worrying about incomming ones.
You need Mic, audio, decent processor, and wifi but if you bought a nice new pocketPC then you should have all of that.
Here's what I have on my Toshiba E805 with Windows Mobile 2003 SE.
Aim Productions Pool Challenge
Microsoft AppLaunch
stumbler.net Ministumbler
Omega One Journal Bar Expansion Pack
Macroedia Flash Player ActiveX
Omega One Journal Bar
Gigabyte Solutions Ltd Animated Today
ZIO Interactive Simcity 2000
Anton Tomov Battery Analyzer
Anton Tomov Pocket Hack Master
IdealTek Pocket Luach
Daniel East's Pocket Quake 2
Nomad Electronics PocketStars
Microsoft Voice Command
JS Ark2
JS Boyan Crystal
JS Turjah
JS Turjah2
Ruksun Telnet Force
Ruksun ScottyFTP
Ruksun Netforce
VL Inc Pocket Gphone
Agfa Monotype Fonts
Conduits TaskSwitcher
Nyditot Virtual Display 3.22
Conduits Peacemaker Pro
Conduits Pocket Spark
Adobe Acrobat Reader 1.0
Aim Productions Trial Halloween
Aim Prouductions Trial Iraqi Track
Game Energy Tic-Tac-Toe
AIM Productions Trial Challenge
SoftWinter StorageTools
LudiGames Rayman
Ansyr Primer (PocketPC)
Toshiba Text to Speech
ArcSoft PhotoBase
MpegTV PocketTV
ScaryBear Software Check Notifications
Glass Lantern PocketLoupe
Zio Interactive Metalion
Amazing Games Chopper Alley
PDAwin TV remote controller
Resco Registry Add-in
Resco Explorer 2003
Resco FTP Add-in
ProCar Racing
Microsoft Activation
ScaryBear Software ClearNotify
Microsoft Power Contacts
Xemi Computers LTD Pocket Explorer MultiIE
PeanutPress Ereader
Microsoft Reader
An ebook reader is a good idea. This way you can carry a virtual library of good books with you anywhere you go. Mobipocket seems alright for this, although many features are now only available on the pro version which isn't free anymore unfortunatley.
Another good application for the PocketPC is emulation. There are quiet a few good emulators if you're into playing classic games (eg. Apple IIe, C64, Spectrum, etc)
I found that Familiar was essential for my PocketPC. Even though the OS that came on my handheld synced with Outlook it didn't always work correctly even though both pieces of software were made by the same company. The original OS was also limited to Microsoft operating systems. Since I'm thinking about getting a Mac i wanted something that could work with a unix system.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
is this: http://www.handhelds.org/
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
ScummVM has a lovely Pocket PC version that is really nice and will play all your old favorite LucasArts (and a few others) games. And since they were all mouse-based, the gameplay translate well to touchscreen and stylus.
Pocket PC Magazine publishes the results of their annual software competition. Among the nominations for best game this year, I really enjoy Bust'em, a complex breakout style game. The GameBox games ( Classics, Gems, and Solitaire ) are also a particularly good value at $10. Finally, don't forget to download Nethack for PPC
Nethack
My opinion? See above.
I'm not sure whether the "WIS Bar" program I'm running is the same as the one mentioned above (the one I have says "modified version by Pelmar"), but I find it extremely handy.
It's an add-on that lets me see a list of currently running programs and switch between them easily, shows me the time, date, memory usage, and battery status in the top, lets me close programs, go to the Today page quickly, and control the speaker volume.
I recommend it highly.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
PocketMusic (audio player) and iGuidance (GPS Navigation).
Here is my list of must-haves for PocketPC/WinCE. I'm not quite what most would consider to be a "normal user," as I've got a lot of Unix leanings. However, I do not use a Zaurus because ... well, the software pretty much sucks. I really like real HWR, which doesn't exist on Linux and does on CE and the Newton. So PocketPC it is. But that doesn't mean you can't have your favorite Unix tools...
:)
First, there are a lot of Unix ports from Rainer. I use his TeX distro for writing papers, Maxima w/ GNUplot and Tcl/tk GUI support for doing maths. I used to use Perl/tk, though Dialect (a really cool pythonish RAD language for CE and dekstop windows) has replaced it when I need to write an app that fits in as a CE app.
The app I spend the most time in is Squeak Smalltalk. It's not quite an application, but a development and application environment. Binary and source portable between oodles of platforms, including but not limited to CE/PPC, desktop windows/x86, linux of all flavors, Mac OS X/classic, Acorn RISC OS, etc etc.
One of the few regular PocketPC apps I use regularily is GowerPoint's uBook ebook reader. It's the best ebook reader I've found for the platform so far, and pretty good. The only thing it lacks that I wished it had was a text-to-speech feature for having books read aloud occasionally. It can read just about any format- txt, pdb/prc (both txt and html inside), html, rtf, and all of those formats zipped- and prolly others. it's nice to put a whole series- say, Peter F. Hamilton's The Night's Dawn series in one zip file with all of the books in the series. I typically buy a LIT and convert it when I have to, though sometimes I get books from fictionWise where you can sometimes get books in unencrypted formats.
Coding and reading... that leaves out the other big thing I do on my PDA (which is my computer): internettin'. (what a horrible word) I really reccomend the NetFront web browser- it's really nice. IE used to be really bad in PPC 2k and 2k2, though I'm told it's improved in 2k3 and 2k3SE, more like the IE that came with Handheld PC 2000 or vanilla WinCE 4.x, which is a very capable browser on the order of IE 5-5.5 or so. Handles most sites well and is pretty fast. However, it doesn't cut the mustard- no tabs, few and not configurable key commands, etc. For that, you need ftxBrowser, which I've bene using for years. Slick. It just embeds the IE control, so it's still IE (a good thing in the case of CE), but you've got a lot of features that are a must for me, a person who can't just do one browser page at a time.
There are a number of SSH clients around there. Some good ones that cost money, but there are some free ones. Rainer has one for free, though it takes a little work to get set up, but it's what I use.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Though I use a PocketPC, I still like to avoid Windows Media. Instead, I use these tools for a nearly perfect experience:
.ty to mpeg-2, and encoding to mpeg-4 takes about 12 minutes on my A64 2800. I don't bother to edit out the ads, since it's very easy to skip them in BetaPlayer. Before I found this, I rarely touched my PDA. This is most certainly the KILLER APP for me.
PocketDivXEncoder is a wonderful tool, using mencoder to encode video to PDA-sized mpeg-4. Lots of options for video (including rotation) and audio, but not enough to be confusing. More importantly, audio and video stays in sync, I can estimate file size before encoding, and it supports multiple resolutions to support more than one platform.
For playback, I use BetaPlayer, a very capable (and GPL!) video player, with excellent mpeg-4 support. Full speed playback on my older 300MHz Toshiba e355 device, and it doesn't even kill my battery. Excellent support on the CoreCodec BetaPlayer Forum.
On a nearly daily basis, I use TyTool to extract last night's Daily Show from my Tivo as a 480x480 mpeg-2, then use PocketDivXEncoder to convert it to a ~64MB 320x240 mpeg4 file. Extraction, converting the
How about SW for PalmOS?
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
Just recently I've picked up ADBIdea, which is a free treenotes organiser. It's quite polished but still has some room for improvement, but yeah, quite good for storing ideas and such.
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
SPB Imageer + large memory card = absolutely essential for wanking in the office bathroom.
I have JourneyPlanner with me when I'm making complicated train journeys in the UK. It gives you routes between stations, and all the stops on the journey you're on. If everything falls apart, as it often does on the UK rail network, at least I know what other trains you might be able to use. I've often been streets ahead of railway staff with my little PDA.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I2E6234C9