Palm Computer - my development

What do I have on mine? wish or idea list Why I love my Palm & Palm vs Pocket PCs old & maybe out-of-date links messing with graffiti

I've messed with development on palm for a while now. This is for my fun & education mostly - it could be fun for you too! :) forth pocketc hack

_Real_ applications really have to be developed with cross compilers on a host workstation (unix or linux or windows). Some tools for palm allow application compile on palm but I think (with what I've looked at) they will all have to limit access to the OS or else be quite large. Anyway gcc prc-tools are quite good. I'm using the prc-tools under Cygwin on windows mostly. Not the best solution (the best would be under linux), Cygwin combined with windows can behave a little flaky sometimes. But I like it. See more notes on development environment and what I'm developing later.

Warning! Beta test software! This may somehow explode your palm. Source will appear hopefully soon.


Forth

On and off played with Forth for palm. Fun (for geek-masochists). example:
\ music-atwr
needs music
( Tom Petty, All the wrong reasons chords c f q c Trouble Blew in on a cold dark wind )

eighth F G quarter A Bb C half dot Bb half A dot G A quarter rest
eighth F G quarter A Bb C half dot Bb half A dot G F quarter rest
half dot A Bb quarter rest A half dot G A quarter rest
half dot A Bb quarter rest A half dot G F quarter rest
( oh ) 2 o quarter C  F half C eighth rest half D quarter rest
1 o half C 0 o G half dot A quarter rest 1 o
half dot A Bb quarter rest A half dot G A quarter rest
( oh ) quarter C eighth F half C eighth rest quarter D eighth C half G eighth rest
half dot A Bb quarter rest A half dot G F quarter rest

: ver1 eighth F G quarter A Bb C half dot Bb half A dot G ;
: ver2 half dot A Bb quarter rest A half dot G ;
: Aqr A quarter rest ;
: Fqr F quarter rest ;
ver1 Aqr ver1 Fqr
ver2 Aqr ver1 Fqr
( oh ) 2 o quarter C  F half C eighth rest half D quarter rest
1 o half C 0 o G half dot A quarter rest 1 o
ver2 Aqr
( oh ) quarter C eighth F half C eighth rest quarter D eighth C half G eighth rest
ver2 Fqr

PocketC

I've played alot with PocketC ... it's very limiting and slow but full development can be done in spare time just on palm ... so anywhere. This is a big advantage. I have various bits to play music, plot some graphs. As something for geeks to play with I think it is good. You could even learn programming on it I think. However PocketC is not C ... no pointers & quite difficult to track down compile-time syntax errors sometimes. Here is an example
// Sierpinski Triangle
//give up on getting compiler to try and do this macro
//#define midpoint(x,y,x1,y1,x2,y2) x=x1+(x2-x1)/2; y=y1+(y2-y1)/2;

main() {
   int x,y;
   int tx[3],ty[3]; //triangle apexes
   int i,r,e;

   tx[1]=3;ty[1]=12; //init apex
   tx[2]=3;ty[2]=150;
   tx[0]=150;ty[0]=150;

   graph_on();
   title("Sierpinski Triangle");

   x=tx[1]; y=ty[1];
   while(1){
   for(i=0;i<200;i++){
      line(1,x,y,x,y);
      r=random(3);
      x=x+(tx[r]-x)/2;  // midpoint
      y=y+(ty[r]-y)/2;
   }
   e = event(1);
   }
   graph_off();
}

hack

Looking at the inside of palm applications is much fun. Learn about PalmOS & memory, motorola dragonball CPU. Tools on palm and off palm. Tools: Palm DisAsm, Insider, PilotHack
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