THE USUAL LONG AND RAMBLING INTRODUCTION STARTING WITH THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PDAS (Skip a bit, brother!)

It was around 1995 when I saw a sysadmin at Sun whip out his newly released palm pilot and check off an item on his todo list after talking to me about some system issue or another.  I said "whoa! hold the phone! what is that?"  He gave me a quick tour of the device, and I immediately went to the palm pilot website.

I knew a zen-cool device when I saw one.

The last time I had seen a zen-cool device was when I had picked up my TRS-80 Model 100.  There was a device that qualified.  You could edit text (using the last bit of code that Bill Gates wrote before he went management - oh how different it could have been!), keep a simple to do list and calendar, write programs in basic, dial into Compuserve and BBS systems at 300 baud (you didn't scroll text, just read it as it came in). Steve Roberts turned a mobile computing device into a technomadic geography independent lifestyle, which I thought was a logical point of mobile computing devices.

That first palm pilot was the next zen-cool device.  Apple had almost done it with the Newton, but the Newton was a bit before its time. It was big, clunky, took way too long for the handwriting recognition to kick in, but Jobs was clearly onto something - just a bit off.

I could only imagine the shades of green at Apple when the Palm took off.

There are one or two lessons that are reinforced over and over when a new device or new hardware comes out - almost a guarantee of success or failure. Its amazing to me how many device manufacturers don't get it, and fail, and how few do and succeed.

1. Its all about the app: making it easy to develop cool apps for your platform is the best way to gain market share.
2. A corollary to the above: the more open you build it, the more they will come: Open SDKs, open data and more...
3. The Zen lesson: the interface is the most beautiful when it disappears: meaning, like Larry Wall says of the Perl programming language, easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible. The interface should allow for obvious intuitive choices, while allowing uberhackers to control what they want.
4. Ironically, it is the maker and seller of hardware that will ultimately make most of the decisions about how 1-3 is implemented.

The TRS-80 understood these lessons as did the Palm.  A whole host of copycat devices did not.

I have been a palm user for nearly 15 years, happily collecting huge stacks of documents, apps, datasets, functions etc. If you know me, you will have heard me say that my palm was half of my brain. I have used it to run key business processes, manage my work and social life, look up train schedules, write poems and other tomes, GPS navigate around the US and the coast of Ireland, read countless ebooks, both modern and classic, crunch numbers, chat and login to or communicate with computers around the world.  The Palm has also been my alarm clock and often a flashlight! Oh and listen to music, COMPOSE music and watch music videos - yes and play games.

One of my favorite memories, was being in a monastery with no electricity on the feast of Transfiguration, processing with the monks to the top of the mountain where there was a little outdoor chapel where the vigil for that feast is served every year. The monks realized that they had forgotten to bring the psalter, so out came the palm with the ebook version of the psalter, whence it was placed on the kliros, and the monks chanted from it.

In most cases, you could call me a power user and a lifehacker.

I synced the palm with Solaris, Linux and Windows. I synced over the network and via cable.  The sync was one of the zen-cool things that made sense (with the more volatile non-cached memory of the early Palm it was ESSENTIAL).  I downloaded, hacked, finessed and tortured my apps data and software, until the palm was really syncing with my brain as much as anything else.

A few years back, I ran into whomever owned the palmOS at the time, at Linux World Expo.  I was excited, because most of PalmOS would finally be open source, multi-threading, and a bunch of needed improvements, as well as running on my favorite operating system: Linux.

I kept waiting for new announcements, but it suddenly got quiet.

It gradually became clear that PalmOS would die before it could get improved, and the Palm PDA would be morphing into a phone-only device with a whole new approach.  By this time, the OS was showing its age and had lost some of its Zen. I started looking into other PDAs to move to - not much out there.

I should explain that I am one of a few folks that does not want the PDA and the phone to merge.  For most people it actually makes a lot of sense to merge them, and some are exhasperated that it took so long for most devices to go there. But I like keeping my phone and PDA seperate. For one thing, I am a cheapskate when it comes to phone service.  I choose mobile phones by service rather than by device. I do a bit of research and find out where I can get the most bang for the buck (currently its Virgin Mobile). I get even more skin-flinty by choosing pay as you go service, thus avoiding contracts and taxes. I am free to change services with the wind, now that it is mandated that you can keep your number. I haven't liked any of the service contracts that have come with the better devices. Besides which, as much as I like to be ubernetworked when in wi-fi range, I also like to take the PDA camping and be totally disconnected from networks. Call me quirky if you want, but I am not alone in this. But us seperators are clearly now a minority - hardly big enough  to drive market share.

My Palm TX started developing symptoms of various illnesses.  I had the top service contract, and I sent it in for repairs, but actually got it replaced - brand new.  I realized that I had a bit of time before having to change platforms, but that I was definitely on my last palm, unless I wanted to go the direction that the PRE is going now.

And so I started to search.  My first inclination was to find as open a device as possible - perhaps running one of the flavors of Linux that had been customized for PDA use.  I still hope that a bunch of folks will get together and create an open hardware kit that can be hacked and customized, but comes mission-critical ready out of the box as well. I saw some small moblin devices and others, but nothing looked like it was going to take off in time for me to make a switch. That is one of the dilemmas of a power user - do you find a device that is so cutting edge that it is experimental and might disappear next year, or do you take the safe road and lose hackability?

I wondered if I should just get one of the new netbooks and use it like a PDA.  But with any larger device, you are not likely to stick it into your shirt pocket and listen to tunes while you walk.

The activity described by that last sentence made me think? Was that really what I wanted to do? Could I give up having the ultimate portable office in exchange for ease of access, lack of boot time and coolness? I decided that if I really wanted to do heads-down work, I should just bring the laptop, and get over it.

About this time, I saw someone's iPod touch for the first time. I was reminded how much of zen-cool is a non-rational impression made by a pretty face. It was the best tiny web experience I had ever seen.

I *loved* what I saw in the iPod, but research started bringing me back to earth: no bluetooth? jailbreaking in order to get the good stuff to work? no external keyboard? NO CUT AND PASTE?

I decided that the iPod looked good, but was not ready for PDA prime-time.  I even wrote Apple and told them so.

Of course now many of those deficiencies have been fixed. There are still a few to go, but when a platform becomes hackable, someone will build what is needed to scratch the itches.

I began to see that my favorite palm apps were moving to iPod/iPhone. I read the blogs of other converts, I made the decision that what I really needed was a full wearable virtual/augmented reality wetware brain-syncable implant PDA, but that since this is still a few years down the road, I might as well get an iPod in the meantime.

When OS3 with its improvements came along, and Skype became available, I decided to take the plunge.

BUT HOW AM I EVER GOING TO MOVE ALL THAT ESSENTIAL DATA?

It has been remarked that syncing is actually something of a hard problem for software engineers. We make it harder by having more stuff to sync in more places. I wanted to move EVERYTHING from the palm to the iPod, have a decent desktop app to sync with, as well as an ERP system and what not - all via open source software please! Oh, and working right out of the box with no long evening hacking sessions to get it working - yeah right!

All of the above is possible thanks to Funambol. I could theoretically sync the palm to the Sunbird to the Open ERP to the iPod to whatever other Google/Cloud apps I wanted. But not out of the box, and not without some hair-pulling debugging and loss of data. Such a project is worth doing, and I am glad knowing that somewhere, someone is doing it.  But I didn't want it to be me.

I discovered that there is software that will do it all called PalmPod - yay! but then not on iPod touch - boo! I read way too many web pages and blogs, trying to find out how my perfect data migration and future sync could happen...ugh!.  I finally read this page...

http://www.sappenin.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=77&sid=ef5e87f2512b4add57321a288a5099c1

....and finally accepted that I would have to actually launch MS Outlook - horrors!

Actually it wasn't TOO bad.  I set up Outlook, switch the palm to sync with it, and then set up the iPod to sync with Outlook. All of the contact in my address book migrated, my many memos became notes, my calendar moved seamlessly.  Other than the loss of categories and folders, it went as well as could be expected - phew!

Ah...except for the tasks - no sync for them built in, and no app either.  There were many to choose from, some of which will sync directly with Outlook (sans Exchange) "real soon now", but nada. The task list is the cornerstone of project management for me, so that became the top priority problem. It just took one more layer: Sync Outlook to Toodledo - a web-based task manager, and then choose one of the relevant iPod apps to sync to Toodledo.  It wasn't quite as easy or seamless as the other items, and some of the to-dos got corrupted on the Toodledo and iPod end, but it could have been worse. As I am cleaning out the massive list of finished or forgotten items, it seems to be working better.

BUT I *NEED* THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ON MY IPOD

But what about those hundreds of palmdocs? I like to keep about half of Project Gutenberg in my shirt pocket at any given time, so I had to do that next - including moving the psalter over in case I had to save the monks again. Fortunately I was already using ereader to read both commercial books and palmdocs, and it was available for the iPod.  On the iPod, there is not really a local sync for personal docs - its all web-based, so I ended up getting all of the Palm PDB files from the palm backup directory, stcking them on a webserver and running the following shell script to make the links:

--------------linkit shell script--------------------------
#! /bin/sh
LIST=`ls *.pdb`
for ITEM in $LIST
    do
    echo "<a href=\"ereader://DOMAIN/docs/$ITEM\">$ITEM</a><br>" >> doc.html
done
------------------------------------------------------------

Then I just opened the resulting web page on the iPod, and downloaded all of the docs to the iPod - yay!

I also updated my web-based palmdoc schlepper, so if you need a text file or web page loaded into ereader on you ipod, widget on the following page now works:

http://strannik.com/square/node/8

I can now get all of the free text I want, plus get ereader books, and I bought my first kindle book from Amazon - book heaven!

It turns out that you can sync with individual apps without the limits of iTunes if you use SyncDocs.  Now there is some useful open source for the iPod!

THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT - NO REALLY, THERE'S AN APP FOR THAT

In less than 24 hours after I picked up my iPod, I had the follwing apps installed:

Advent
No, I'm not being liturgically dilligent. Advent is short for Adventure, as in Collosal Caves Adventure - the Unix text interactive game that used to run on Unix servers and was played on a VT100 terminals in the 70s. If you have to ask, you'll never understand...

Amazon Mobile
Must....have....books

Ancient Faith Radio
An app dedicated to my favorite chant and talk streams found on Ancient Faith Radio

Bible Reader
Olive Tree Software was the first on the Palm - I gotta get the greek texts back.

Binaural Beats
You think I was kidding about using my PDA to hack my brain? Brain entrainment does good things to me.

Caltrain XPress
Gotta know when the train is coming and how late I can hang out and still catch the last one home...

Checkers Free
I'm really off my game when an iPod can beat me!

Chess Classics
So its not Big Blue, how about little chrome?

Chords
Learn new guitar tabs and use these to play twister with your fingers

Craigsphone
Craigslist in iPod form.

Discovery Channel
Gotta find out when I can watch other people struggle to survive from the comfort of my living room.

Documents To Go
Yes, its Office apps in your pocket. Complaint: I could edit everything on the palm, why can't I on the iPod?

DOOM Resurrection
A computing platform cannot be said to be fully mature until it can support a kick-ass first-person shooter.

eReader
My primary app for books and long documents to review.  See my above link about how to grab online text and web pages and turn them into books.

Facebook
This is my primary social life app.  Is it scary that I said that?

Fandango
For movies in the hood.

Fast and Furious - Free Test Version
Just enough car racing for me.

Flashlight
Yes, this turns your iPod into a flashlight.  This turns out to actually be useful, as silly as it sounds.

Free Morse Code
One of these days, I'm going to get ham geeky or need to signal somebody behind enemy lines or...?

Free WiFi Finder
Gotta find the connection in the next town on this road trip of life.

Freecell Pro
One of those essential games

Google Earth
Its too cool that the iPod can do this!

iBART
A tool for navigating the other big train.

iHandy Level Free
Turn your iPod into a carpenters level!  There are other carpenter's tools, but I recommend staying away from iHammer.

iNeko
The little cat chasing your finger yet lives! I had it on the palm, so I must have it here.

iSSH - SSH/VNC Console
The usefulness of this app cannot be underestimated.  It was the first one I searched for - I can login to almost any computer and do almost anything with this.  An essential app in the IT toolbox.

iThoughts
There are very few business and creative processes that I am involved with that I don't use freemind on.  I knew I had to find a freemind compatible mind mapper for the iPod.

Kindle for iPhone
Now I can get all of those lovely ebooks without getting a Kindle!

LinkedIn
More social networking

Low Grav Racer
Ok, I saw it in an ad and it looked cool - and it is! Another game that takes advantage of iVertigo in the iPod.

Mahjong Epic
Another essential game

Math Ref Free
Now where is that formula?

Metronome
ana one ana two...

Midi Player
I use Lilypond to typeset music, which also outputs midi files.  It is useful to be able to pull out the ipod and play them.

Movies by Flixter
A nice app that will let you find movies, load up your Netflix queue or watch trailers

MySpace Mobile
Yet more social networking...

myStarbucks
Ok, I feel a bit hypocritical about having this app, especially since I have created this page about Starbucks, but the fact is, that sometimes you need to find a place to sit, connect, and sip while traveling, and only the green beastie is available.  Besides this, Tar for Bucks is the only place that has a couple of 24 hour branches in the South Bay.  Sometimes you have to sip and work late (although now that Denny's has WiFi, its a perfectly acceptable alternative).

Orthodox Christian Network
I haven't really checked this out yet - I'll download anything that is Geek Orthodox (that is not mispelled).

Pandora
My favorite radio station now!  Listen to my quickmix now!: http://www.pandora.com/people/strannik

Rogue
A text based game that is about one generation ahead of Adventure (see above).

San Jose Rail
"My baby takes the morning train, he checks his iPod app and then, he finds the next one to get on..."

SHOUTcast Radio
For all those other streams I don't have a specific app for

SketchBook MobileX
Did Autodesk really do this killer drawing app and give it away for FREE? better than anything I ever had on the palm - doodle now!

Skype
So much for seperating the phone from the PDA! I can make and take calls on the iPod after all. This now means that all of my phone numbers are totally portable, even without taking a laptop or a seperate WiFi phone.

Solitaire
Klondike - the most essential game of them all!

Starbucks Card Mobile
Yeah, I know, but if I'm going to have the MyStarbucks app...(see above)

Strip - Password Manager
This is not the cheapest password storage app for the iPod, but I'm pretty sure its the best.  I've had a version of this on the palm for years.

TideApp
For those days of fishing and kayak trip planning.  I really wanted something more like Tide Tool for palm - doesn't require a network connection - has all the tide data built in (sort of more handy when you are offshore).

Todo (Apprigo)
This isn't necessarily the last word in a task managing app, but it works for now (see the discussion above).

Tweetdeck for iPhone &
Tweeterific
Yet more social networking - I'm not sure how much of which I'm going to use for what yet.

Units
How many things in a whatzit? This even has an iRuler to measure things smaller than an iPod.

Virtuoso Piano Free
Probably not for concert use, but I often find this type of app useful in rehearsal situations for that measure where somebody is not quite getting the melody.

Wikipedia Mobile
The library of congress, all Gutenberg etexts, and all of Wikipedia in my shirt pocket: that's all that I ask.

World's Smallest Political Quiz
My favorite piece of libertarian propaganda made portable.  I had this on the palm, and gave the test to SF Supervior Ross Mirkarimi, who scored a perfect "left" - as far to the left as the tool would allow.  He looked at it and said "yeah, I guess I am pretty liberal".

Yelp
Read the reviews before you walk in. See all of my reviews at http://strannik.yelp.com.

YPmobile
Let your fingers do the walking....literally.

To be continued.....