A week on vacation...

I will be at my girlfriend's house in Chieti for a week. She hasn't any internet connection, so there will not be updates, or replies, or so until Friday 3rd November.
Goodbye!

EasyLaunch5 news

I solved a bug for registrations with HotSync ID shorter than 10 characters. In addition, I solved the command-dot bug: it was due to a weird bug with registration of notification (if a notification is unregistered and re-registered while processing the same notification, a new notification about the same event is thrown, resulting in an endless loop).
I'm still waiting for an user for informations to fix the "record" key.

I decided to publish a sort of "daily build" for my group of users wanting to experiment the new features before the others. These could be very buggy, so use them with care. You can find the last build here.

Requests and bugs...

André reported me that command-dot shortcut doesn't work on its Zire and freezes it. I'll work on it.

Mar00k, sended me some suggestions:

1. Add ability to add new shortcut by tapping clock and brightness icons in silk area.
2. Add ability to choose delay between long and very long buttons pressing (1/4, 1/2 or 1 second, for example) (like in qlaunch)
3. Add ability to pop-up pTunes music player console like one of the actions.
4. Add ability to toggle brightness to the selected level (10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80,90,100%) like one of the bindings. This feature exists in myDimmer application in bad variant (you can find this app in palmgear.com).
5. Maybe it is more understandable to do enable-disable by checkbox or pushbutton, but not button? (just like it is in the most applications).

(2) and (4) were already in my todo list for version 1.1, as a "most ever used" application popup list and different skins for each device support (but skins may come later).
(1) and (3) may be added in version 1.0, together with I had already written in a previous post.
I will think on (5).

My Tungsten E2 died for the second time...

Yes, it's now travelling towards palm's assistance for warranty reparation. Let's see how's happened.
The first time, I was HotSync-ing, the handheld froze, when I reset a blinking black line was on palm's logo and nothing happened. I tried any type of reset, there was nothing to do. Replaced with DOA, as I bought it from a couple hours.
The second time I was moving a large file from SD card into main memory. Exactly the same behaviour.
From what I've read, the black blinking bar seems to mean "ROM failure". How did the ROM broke? Perhaps, the application wrote something in memory where it should not. Why this happened? Maybe for UDMH. It has been enabled two times on the handheld, and both times the palm died. Maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe not: many people use UDMH on T|E2 without problems, but anyone I heard to have this problem had UDMH enabled.
As for me, I will never use UDMH again. Moreover, it's pretty useless on T|E2 compared with other handhelds (the same program needs much morefree memory on T|E2 than other handheld: ZDoomZ, for example, should need 8MB but I couldn't play it before freeing 20 MB, of total 26 MB available. After that, the T|E2 died). Maybe UDMH is just not compatible with NVFS.

PalmOS bug?

It's a technical post... Don't read if you're not a programmer. :-)
I wanted to duplicate a string. I used:

StrCat(string, string);

this doesn't work. And let my program corrupt even storage heap, forcing a hard reset. Let's see.
If string is "Andre\0123456789", after the StrCat it becomes "AndreAndreA789", without the null terminator. This is because StrCat wanted to copy it from the source string, but when it did there was already an "A" in its place. This non-terminated string made the program corrupt the storage.
It's a PalmOS bug?

Treo keyboard

It's difficult to develop for it using the Simulator. If anyone can send me a real device, I will be happy to bring you Treo keyboard support for EasyLaunch5. :-) Until then, you can use the command stroke-dot-letter combo, but I know is a little too tricky...

Anyway, if you are a PalmOS programmer wanting to help me, please read here. It's a forum post, nobody replied...

EasyLaunch5 thanks

Since I haven't yet done in documentation, I wish to thank:

• Hynek Syrovatka to let me use his program's name;
  
• anyone who bought EasyLaunch5 or DuelMines;
• David, who suggested the status bar strokes, screen strokes and helped me with some beta-testing;
• Syzygy, for suggesting screen flashing and shorter long hold;
• Johnny, for suggesting Treo keyboard support (a new post will be written about it...);
• Michael, for reporting a bug under older OSes without status bar support (it is present on new OSes even when there is no status bar, like on T|E2);
• André, for reporting a bug (which I think involves a PalmOS bug, a new post coming...).
  

EasyLaunch5 status

As I was saying, this blog has born to follow the development of these products, in particular EasyLaunch5.

The current version of EasyLaunch5 is 0.9, but I'm working on 1.0. It's new features are:

• several optimizations (hope anyone will notice them: this would mean it was already enough fast): dicotomic search of bindings, callback notifications and selective registering of only needed notifications; EasyLaunch5 is disabled during HotSync, allowing to update it;
• new shortcut type: command stroke, then dot, then a letter (or number, or some punctuation symbols);
• ability to make penstrokes from screen into screen (like top-left to bottom-right), but they must be longer than half screen (thanks to David for requesting);
• Application launcher is now shown in the MRU list (thanks to Ammar for requesting);
• new action: Graffiti shortcuts list, pop-up a list with all the Graffiti Shortcuts and lets you insert in the current field;
• new action: Type Graffiti shortcut, inserts a specific shortcut in the current field.

Let's start this blog...

First of all: I'm Ignazio Di Napoli, born on 1st September 1982, from Italy. This is my photo.

I'm an electronic engineer jr., that is a 3-years-long degree available in Italy. If everything goes the right way, I'll be a real engineer by september 2005. I'm a programmer, in particular I developed two shareware programs for PalmOS, for the development of which I started this blog. They are EasyLaunch5, a sort port of Hynek Syrovatka's EasyLaunch under OS5, and DuelMines, an exciting head-to-head version of the classic MineSweeper.