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Past Meetings: September 13, 2001

This was our first meeting after taking the summer off. We had a great summer, and hope everyone else did too. Our meeting was also just two days after the shocking attacks by terrorists in New York City, Washington D.C, and Pennsylvania, and perhaps attendance was down due to that. In fact, our guest speaker from Wizcomtech, which is based out of Boston, was unable to make it here for her scheduled review of the QuickLink scanner pen. We have rescheduled Wizcomtech for our February 2002 meeting.

Some business topics:

• We fell short in our Royal Oak Office Depot promotion announced at our June meeting. If Office Depot sold 15 palms in a certain time period, they would win a free Palm m500 which they were going to donate to DPUG for give away. Thanks to those of you who purchased Palms and Palm accessories from the Royal Oak Office Depot
• Still haven't heard yet from AvantGo regarding their AvantGo Money Madness contest. The contest ended in July, and we'll let everyone know as soon as we hear.
• We reviewed the preliminary agendas for upcoming meetings, and requested suggestions from DPUG members for topics, and even volunteers. If there is an application you are particularly fond of and want to give a short presentation about it, please contact us. We'd love to schedule you for an upcoming meeting, and we'll take care of trying to secure give aways of the product. Someone suggested that we put the schedule for upcoming meetings on our web site, which has been done (under the Meetings page).

For our reviews,

1. DPUG Coordinator Tracy Dreslinski demonstrated and reviewed the Stowaway folding keyboard made by ThinkOutside. Some interesting notes:
   • More than 1 million keyboards sold in the first year of shipping, making the Stowaway keyboard the most successful new product for handheld computing
   • The keyboard is included in the Permanent Design Collection of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York
   • Winner of nearly all major new product awards including Best Design for a computer product from PC Magazine and Best of Show at CES (Consumer Electronics Show).
     
   • This is one of Tracy's favorite Palm accessories. It is perfect for taking notes at meetings, when sometimes it's too hard to keep up with Graffiti, and you don't feel like lugging a notebook computer. The keyboard is also great when traveling out of town for composing long emails.
   • There really is no excuse for taking notes longhand and then manually entering them into your Palm (or keying them into your desktop. With a keyboard, you can do it once and have an electronic copy available immediately.
     
     
2. Doug Gordon, developer of GedStar genealogy viewer (formerly GedPalm) showed us his very popular genealogy product
   • Doug has been interested in genealogy for years, and used to lug reams of printouts with him while on vacation. When he got his first Palm handheld, he realized that being able to view your genealogy database on your Palm would be a perfect handheld application
   • GedStar was originally called GedPalm until Palm's lawyers contacted him and requested that he remove "Palm" from the name.
   • GedStar uses GEDCOM format which is popular on PC products like Family Tree Maker.
   • GedStar comes with a Windows desktop application called GPConvert that converts a GEDCOM file to a PDB file (Palm database file).
   • GedStar uses color coded names to indicate descendants, spouses, etc.
   • You can't edit your database in GedStar but you can export it to Memo Pad, edit in Memo Pad, then sync that to your PC and input the new database into Family Tree Maker.
   • GedStar has a nice search mechanism; supports Soundex (names that sound alike but have many different spellings like Shafer/Shaeffer/Schafer, etc)
   • GedStar uses only 100 bytes per person in file due to compression techniques
   • GedStar now supports SD cards (removable media supported by Palm m500 and Palm m505)
     
     
3. DPUG member Glen Leckie, a handspring owner and a golfer, used the Intelligolf Springboard module numerous times over the summer.
   • The best part is you can download scorecards from 7500 courses worldwide for free from Karrier Communications web site. All the local courses that Glen played were available for download.
   • Glen uses a Handspring Prism, and on bright sunny days it was very difficult if not impossible to read the screen to input data.
   • The IntelliGolf module keeps track of much more than score; you can enter every stroke you hit, what club you used, how far you hit each club, count your total number of putts for the round, keep track of wagers, and even time your round.
   • See Glen's powerpoint presentation for all of his comments (link coming soon).

Our give aways were:

• 2 Palm Keyboards compliments of Think Outside
• Copies of GedStar to anyone interested in geneaology compliments of GHCS Software
• 2 Intelligolf modules compliments of Karrier Communication (one went to Glen Leckie for being kind enough to review this product for us).

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