Contacts (address book on earlier versions of PalmOS) has the time-saving feature of autocompletion of common values for some fields. Company, city and state come to mind, there may be more. When I write one letter in the Company field, Contacts fills in a company name that starts with that letter that I have used frequently or recently. When I write a second, Contacts revises its guess.
With Graffiti 2 on my T3, I can no longer enter a company name starting with T without pain. When I write the downstroke, it autocompletes with a company starting with L. And worse, when I write the cross stroke it leaves the L there, erases the rest of the company name, and adds a T. Try it. There are other, similar examples.
Graffiti 2 sucks, in part because it breaks programs.
The problem with barcodes is that they have to be scanned. They're passive, and it takes time to stop, grab a scanner, and hit the barcode.
Actually, the bags don't ever stop moving. I worked on the team that put in one of the first automated baggage handling systems at the Pittsburgh Int'l Airport in the early 90's.
They zip by the scanning stations at about 20mph. The scanning station is a ring of six or so laser scanners around the belt, including the bottom. There's a gap of several inches between two rolling belts just so that barcode tags can be scanned from underneath. Farther down the belt, after the ID lookup has had time to succeed, the bag is kicked (quite hard) onto another belt if necessary. Of course, tags can still become damaged to the point that they don't read properly, and at that point they do go to a misread station, where some human will attempt to scan it manually, and replace the tag if necessary (and possible).
Replacing the barcodes with RFID tags seems likely to happen to me, for simple economic reasons. Compared to the cost of putting in the original system, it should be cheap, as you can reuse the belts and kicking apparatus, and probably much of the software. If the statistics are correct, and the read rate really goes from 85% to 99%, the switch will pay for itself in no time. PAWOBs (Passengers Arriving WithOut Bags) cost a major airline many tens of thousands of $s PER DAY.
I travel by plane for several hours each week. Lately I've been downloading stuff from Dr. Dobb's technetcast and loading it into my portable MP3 player for listening on the plane. I've also got one of those cassette adapters that I use in my car.
They have short stuff and long stuff on lots of geeky topics. If you've got a cassette player in your car in addition to your CD player, this is much quicker and simpler than burning a CD.
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Example of broken app: Palm's own Contacts
Contacts (address book on earlier versions of PalmOS) has the time-saving feature of autocompletion of common values for some fields. Company, city and state come to mind, there may be more. When I write one letter in the Company field, Contacts fills in a company name that starts with that letter that I have used frequently or recently. When I write a second, Contacts revises its guess.
With Graffiti 2 on my T3, I can no longer enter a company name starting with T without pain. When I write the downstroke, it autocompletes with a company starting with L. And worse, when I write the cross stroke it leaves the L there, erases the rest of the company name, and adds a T. Try it. There are other, similar examples.
Graffiti 2 sucks, in part because it breaks programs.
The problem with barcodes is that they have to be scanned. They're passive, and it takes time to stop, grab a scanner, and hit the barcode.
Actually, the bags don't ever stop moving. I worked on the team that put in one of the first automated baggage handling systems at the Pittsburgh Int'l Airport in the early 90's.
They zip by the scanning stations at about 20mph. The scanning station is a ring of six or so laser scanners around the belt, including the bottom. There's a gap of several inches between two rolling belts just so that barcode tags can be scanned from underneath. Farther down the belt, after the ID lookup has had time to succeed, the bag is kicked (quite hard) onto another belt if necessary. Of course, tags can still become damaged to the point that they don't read properly, and at that point they do go to a misread station, where some human will attempt to scan it manually, and replace the tag if necessary (and possible).
Replacing the barcodes with RFID tags seems likely to happen to me, for simple economic reasons. Compared to the cost of putting in the original system, it should be cheap, as you can reuse the belts and kicking apparatus, and probably much of the software. If the statistics are correct, and the read rate really goes from 85% to 99%, the switch will pay for itself in no time. PAWOBs (Passengers Arriving WithOut Bags) cost a major airline many tens of thousands of $s PER DAY.
I travel by plane for several hours each week. Lately I've been downloading stuff from Dr. Dobb's technetcast and loading it into my portable MP3 player for listening on the plane. I've also got one of those cassette adapters that I use in my car.
They have short stuff and long stuff on lots of geeky topics. If you've got a cassette player in your car in addition to your CD player, this is much quicker and simpler than burning a CD.