Replacing the Palm Desktop
Recently I have started yet another pet project - a replacement for the aging Palm Desktop. I finally got sick and tired of the lack of support for it. It took Palm about a year and a half to support Vista - not that I use Vista - just that it’s an indication of how much effort the put into supporting their software.
I find it really annoying that when you are searching for an appointment or task in the past to find out when something happened or get details about it, that you can’t look at the item and then another search result item. You have to re-execute the search again - just like on the Palm itself. Also like just like on the device, the Desktop search mechanism only displays some of the description from the Task, Appointment etc, making it difficult to find the exact one you’re looking for and the display dialog is not re-sizeable. You would think you could search, and filter more extensively on the desktop than on the Palm, but you can’t even select the applications that you want to limit the search to like you can on the device. It’s really frustrating.
If you have ever used a re-occuring ToDo item, like “Take out the Garbage” every week on Wednesday you will no doubt have discovered that if you check off the task as completed, the task doesn’t disappear. The date of the re-occuring task just changes, and even if the task list is sorted by Date & Priority, the list is not updated to reflect the task you just completed. I mistakenly deleted the task thinking the desktop would just remove the task for that week, but it would re-appear for subsequent weeks. It deleted the task without warning that it was a re-occuring task. It’s subtle issues like this that really affect the usability of a product.
The Palm Desktop was built with a single user in mind, concurrent access was not anticipated, but not until the latest Desktop (6.02) did Palm start using a database instead of the proprietary VC serialization file. If Palm really wanted to create an eco system around their hardware a database would have been the ideal way to do it. You could then create Apppointments, Tasks, Contacts and whatever else by simply inserting a database record. It would have enabled smaller businesses to use Palms together with the Palm Desktop to replace software like Outlook which is overkill for many businesses and has an associated cost.
When Access finally decided to save the Palm Desktop records in a database, what did they choose? Access! The database technology which has been deprecated by Microsoft and is known to give very poor performance on a network. Lightweight, small footprint databases are common place now. Why Access chose MS-Access rather than SQLLite, DBIsam, FireBird, MySQL etc I’ll never know. Perhaps they chose the database for it’s name instead of it’s capabilities. This is just another reason I will continue to run v4.14E of the Desktop. An additional reason is that according to Palm, v6.2 of the Desktop is not compatible with my T3. The only thing I can think of would be that the new desktop will only work with the newest PDB formats that appeared on later generation Palm devices.
As a result of all these issues, I have decided to write my own Palm Desktop and conduits so I can sync and share information with other people without putting my data in the cloud. I’m not sure whether anyone else out there is interested, but I am thinking about releasing it when it’s finished. Let me know if you would like to check it out…