How I Use My Palm

I have had three Palm OS PDAs, including an old battery-powered Handspring Visor for which I even bought a solar battery charger (too unreliable and slow). Now I have a Palm T|X that I like very much, despite recent Bluetooth troubles. I make use of the following programs quite frequently in the course of my day as an English teacher.

EGP Clipboard (scroll down a bit) lets me keep all my students' grades with me everywhere I go. The desktop companion program, for Mac too, is superb.

CJKOS lets me read Japanese characters on my Palm, which is especially useful for reading and remembering colleagues' names. Inputting them directly to the Palm is, for Japanese, not possible, but if I put them in my Mac then sync them, there the kanji are. Increasingly I rely on the excellent freeware PAdict 0.9.0 for looking up Japanese words, although my backup software often chokes on the larger alternate EDICT database.

Because the original Palm PIM applications are rather limited, I've gone with DateBk5 as the Calendar replacement and TealPhone as the Contacts replacement; both work well with CJKOS. I had been using DateMan and SuperNames from StandAlone, but these two programs are sadly not compatible with the TX, and I just couldn't wait any longer.

For actual work, I frequently write with both DocumentsToGo 8 and WordSmith. I prefer the latter for word processing, but the keyboard driver for the ThinkOutside Bluetooth keyboard doesn't allow as many handy key combinations as both programs can handle, such as Ctrl-left/right arrow to skip text by word. You can really extend the Palm's usefulness for writing with the powerful clipboard replacement Clipper, which even lets you paste in whole memos, contact records, and user-specified and -stored text segments (such as HTML code).

For getting me alive through my one-hour train commutes in Tokyo, Pocket Tunes Deluxe and eReader Pro have been indispensable. I also make good use of QuickNews to download RSS feeds that I then open up in Xiino for later offline reading.

Finally, I make daily use of TinyStocks' programs, WeatherManager to see if I'll need an umbrella and whether it nicer back home in Indiana and StockManager to see how my PALM shares are doing (just splendidly!).

How did I ever manage before Palm?