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Past Meetings: November 8, 2001
| Date: | Thursday, November 8, 2001 |
| Time: | 7:00 PM |
| Location: | Kensington Community Church |
| Attendees: | 24 |
Some general topics:
- Palm will be releasing version 4.1 of their operating system. This is considered a minor upgrade, mainly bug fixes. It will be free to users with OS 4.0.
- We added a "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page to our web site. This will hopefully answer everything you've ever wondered about DPUG, and it's founders. If there is still something you'd like to know about us, please ask, and we'll add it to our FAQs page.
- DPUG Member Ella Modell of Lake Orion High School has offered her school up as a meeting location for our April and May meetings. This is about 5 miles north of the Palace, which we realize makes it a pretty far drive for some of you. If you have a place that meets all our needs, please let me know.
- On a final financial note, as you probably know, DPUG is a nonprofit company, and we charge no membership dues or fees for our meetings. Scott and I pay for the web hosting out of our own pocket, and donate a lot of our time to keep the web site up to date, and plan meetings. You can help support us financially by simply clicking on links to on-lines stores from our site. The page you end up at is the same page you would have gotten by typing the URL in yourself, but by clicking on the link from our site and then making a purchase, we get a small referral fee. Every bit helps! This can be for any order; it doesn't have to be related to PDA's. For a full list of on-line companies with whom we are affiliated, check out our "Links" page. Thanks for your support!
Agenda
- Review of Palm Software Development Environment by DPUG Founder Scott Dreslinski
- Review of iTemp by DPUG Founder Scott Dreslinski.
- Review of Lumos by DPUG Founder Tracy Dreslinski
- Review of HanDBase
by DPUG Member Michael Heintz
Many people like to track things, and are always looking on PalmGear or asking questions on USENET newsgroups looking for software that, for example, tracks their daily commute time, or there mileage/fuel consumption, or ttracks their temperature for fertility planning, or tracks their exercising, etc.. Rather than buy several different specialized packages,or try to write your own, you can use HanDBase to create your own databases of the items you want to track. HanDBase has a limit of only 32 fields allowed, which is it's only downside. You can sort by fields, calculate within fields (eg keep a running total) and link databases. HanDBase sells for $24.99.
This month we had a bit of a specialized subject, which we realize may not have appealed to everyone. We took an in-depth look at the various tools that are out there for developing your own Palm application. Ever since we got our first Palms back in 1998 we've wanted to write something. It's hard to even come up with an idea that hasn't already been done. Scott walked us through the various packages available and what kind of programming experience you need to have for each package, as well as other pros and cons about each package. View Scott's PowerPoint slides and notes.
Let us first acknowledge that Scott and I are weather and temperature dorks. We love to know the temperature of anything and everything. How cold is our refrigerator? How cold does it get in the baby's room at night? How cold is my lunch staying in my insulated lunch box?
A year ago or so, Scott found out about these cool little temperature recorders called Thermochrons. Thermochrons are iButtons, made by Dallas Semiconductor. They are small and rugged and have a little CPU inside of them. We keep one in our lake at our cottage to see how long it takes the water to warm up during the summer months. Dallas Semiconductor provides free PC software that allows you to program and read the data stored in the Thermochron. Scott got tired of lugging his laptop up to the cottage so we could read and plot the water temperature history, and with that he finally had an idea for his first Palm application. Scott took the PC software and made a Palm version of it, called iTemp. It was primarily written for our use, but we went ahead and decided to put it out on PalmGear and see if anyone else was interested. We've been contacted by members of the Food Industry (great way to monitor the thermal experience of food products like fish that must be kept below a certain temperature for freshness), Oceanographers, and more. We made a consumer version that sells for $12.50, and we made an Enterprise Edition that we quote on a per company basis.
iTemp is Scott's baby, and I guess you can say Lumos is mine. Lumos is a Harry Potter trivia game, for people who have read any or all of the Harry Potter books. I got the idea this past July 31 (Harry Potter's birthday) after taking my oldest daughter, Katie, to a Harry Potter birthday party at Barnes & Noble. Hundreds of kids were there, and more lined up out the door to get in. I came home and told Scott we need to do something on the Palm about Harry Potter because there are a lot of HP fans out there. So with that, we came up with the trivia game. It was a fun family project that Katie helped out on; she was our technical consultant and helped us not only with the correct answers, but with giving us some great incorrect answers to make it more challenging. Katie gets 10% of all sales revenues, and amazingly her ability to calculate 10% of any given number has improved dramatically!
Lumos has questions from all four books; you can select the book(s) you want to be quizzed on which is nice if you haven't made it all the way through all of them yet. There can be up to eight games ongoing at any time so that you can always come back where you left off, even if someone else wants to play. Lumos is shareware and sells for $5.
Give aways:
- A copy of iTemp to anyone who wanted one, compliments of DigitSense
- A copy of Lumos to anyone who wanted one, compliments of DigitSense
- Two copies of HanDBase, compliments of DDH Software, won by Glen Leckie and Mike Gurzell.