Hey PICListers !

Recently I took on a project involving the Palm OS.  I had never even used a
Palm so needless to say, this has been an experience.  All in all,
developing for the Palm is relatively easy if you have C experience, and
Windows programming experience helps.  I bought a Palm IIIx for the project.
With 4Meg of memory and a touch screen, it's a lot of fun to play with.

Best of all, there a free development tools !  I got into it for only the
cost of a Palm IIIx.  3Com supplies a free emulator and SDK and GNU provides
a free C compiler and resource compiler. The reason that I wanted to share
this is because 1) the Palm is really fun to develop for 2) if you ever
wanted to get into Palm development but didn't know where to start, feel
free to ask me. I just went through it all !

Also, there is a new company, HandSpring, developing a Palm clone called the
Visor.  The two most notable features are 1) 8Meg of memory and 2) the Visor
has what they call a Springboard slot.  It provides a means to connect
external accessories to the Visor. The spec for building your own
Springboard module is freely available at HandSpring's site. I can imagine
all kinds of applications. PIC based data collection with 8Meg available
storage and a GUI app on the Visor for analyzing/manipulating the data. Oh
yeah, and it's only $250.00 !

Here are a few links:

www.palm.com
www.handspring.com

If you are interested in developing for the Palm, seriously, drop me an
email.  Saving the people on this list a little time is the least I can do
to repay all the help I've gotten in the past.

Eric Oliver