PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide

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Before you fall in love with your little machine, spend a moment marveling that it's actually nothing more than a pile of plastic, silicon, and glass. Most PalmPilot models are 4.7 inches tall, 3.1 inches wide, and 0.6 inches thick (the Palm V is shorter and half as thick; the Palm VII is slightly taller). It weighs between 4 and 6 ounces and has a 160-pixel-square grayscale, touch-sensitive screen. A Motorola 68328 (Dragonball) processor chip inside runs a special operating system called the Palm OS that—talk about optimized!—uses only about 40K of memory. (If you're keeping score at home, that's about one-quarter of 1 percent of the memory required by Windows 9x.)

The PalmPilot has no moving parts and doesn't accept disks of any kind; everything it knows is stored in memory, which helps explain why this machine is so fast and so rugged. Many of the usual encumbrances and trouble spots of actual computers simply don't exist on the PalmPilot. For example, there's no startup delay when you press the power button. Nor is there a Save command; your work in progress is always kept up-to-date automatically. A "launching pad" screen lists all your programs and lets you choose which to work with—but programs load instantaneously, and there's no Quit command. You eventually come to feel as though all your programs are always running.

The PalmPilot has no keyboard, either; to get information into it, you can either "write" on the glass, tap a tiny onscreen keyboard, or transfer stuff from your real computer. These data-input methods will be covered in depth in Chapter 3, and Chapter 6.

Because it has no keyboard and no mouse, you operate the device by tapping its surface with two important pointing devices: (a) the stylus, the inkless pen tucked into a pocket at the edge of the machine, and (b) your finger.

Section 1.1.1.1: The plastic buttons

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Before you fall in love with your little machine, spend a moment marveling that it's actually nothing more than a pile of plastic, silicon, and glass. Most PalmPilot models are 4.7 inches tall, 3.1 inches wide, and 0.6 inches thick (the Palm V is shorter and half as thick; the Palm VII is slightly taller). It weighs between 4 and 6 ounces and has a 160-pixel-square grayscale, touch-sensitive screen. A Motorola 68328 (Dragonball) processor chip inside runs a special operating system called the Palm OS that—talk about optimized!—uses only about 40K of memory. (If you're keeping score at home, that's about one-quarter of 1 percent of the memory required by Windows 9x.)

The PalmPilot has no moving parts and doesn't accept disks of any kind; everything it knows is stored in memory, which helps explain why this machine is so fast and so rugged. Many of the usual encumbrances and trouble spots of actual computers simply don't exist on the PalmPilot. For example, there's no startup delay when you press the power button. Nor is there a Save command; your work in progress is always kept up-to-date automatically. A "launching pad" screen lists all your programs and lets you choose which to work with—but programs load instantaneously, and there's no Quit command. You eventually come to feel as though all your programs are always running.

The PalmPilot has no keyboard, either; to get information into it, you can either "write" on the glass, tap a tiny onscreen keyboard, or transfer stuff from your real computer. These data-input methods will be covered in depth in Chapter 3, and Chapter 6.

Because it has no keyboard and no mouse, you operate the device by tapping its surface with two important pointing devices: (a) the stylus, the inkless pen tucked into a pocket at the edge of the machine, and (b) your finger.

Section 1.1.1.1: The plastic buttons

Using your finger, you can press any of the four round buttons near the bottom of the PalmPilot. These plastic buttons are called the

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The PalmPilot's screen is pressure-sensitive; in other words, it's a touch screen. There's nothing magical about the stylus included with the device—it's not magnetic, or electrostatic, or otherwise gimmicked. The PalmPilot can't tell whether it's being touched by the stylus, or, say, your fingernail (although unless you've got some kind of rare genetic condition, the stylus is probably more precise than your fingernail). In other words, if you lose your stylus, almost anything will do as a replacement, including any of the fancy gold-plated inkless pens sold by Cross and others just for use with handheld computers. (See Appendix B for some replacement stylus possibilities.) Many experienced Palm addicts use an ordinary ball-point pen—with the tip retracted, of course. Ink from a pen or graphite from a pencil can damage the screen.

Generally speaking, the LCD (liquid-crystal display) screen is black-and-white. (Technically, it's grayscale, like a "black-and-white" TV, capable of creating four or sixteen gradations of gray—but few programs make use of this little-known feature. See Chapter 11, and Chapter 14, for some examples.)

Therefore, the PalmPilot screen generally creates its image with tiny, solid black dots against the gray-green background. Still, this characteristic doesn't deal quite as severe a blow to the device's graphics potential as you might think. More on the PalmPilot's graphics skills in Chapter 11.

As on any LCD screen, the clarity of the PalmPilot's display varies dramatically according to the temperature of the device and the angle at which you're viewing it. The screen is actually a sandwich of glass; in the middle, 25,600 tiny individual squares float in a gooey liquid. Each little square, or pixel, is controlled by a minute electric current. When a particular pixel is instructed to do so, it rotates in the gooey fluid so that instead of floating parallel to your line of vision, its full square surface is facing you, blocking the transmission of light. The result: a tiny black square dot.

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If you've owned a PalmPilot for more than a month or so, you've already discovered one of its most delicious features: you simply don't have to worry about power. A pair of AAA batteries lasts many people six weeks or more, and the Palm V's permanent lithium ion battery is charging whenever the palmtop is in its HotSync cradle. There is a quick, easy way to check your current batteries' remaining juice—just tap the Applications button to view a "fuel gauge" of remaining power—but most people don't bother. On the PalmPilot, batteries last so long that the feeling of "battery deadline panic," well known to laptop computer users, simply doesn't exist.

When you do need to change your batteries, look at the back of the machine. You'll see the battery-compartment panel just below the midline (on all models except the Palm V, of course). Press the latch with your thumb, remove the panel, and change the batteries.

How much time do you have? 3Com officially encourages you to put in new batteries within five minutes of removing the old ones. But informal tests show you've actually got longer than that; the built-in capacitor (an electronic component that stores a charge for a long time) actually maintains enough juice to preserve your data—even with no batteries installed—for about 11 minutes. Still, if you're paranoid, always do a HotSync (see Chapter 6), thus backing up your PalmPilot's information, before changing the batteries.

Other than the Palm V's cradle, there's no such thing as an AC power adapter for the PalmPilot. You may, however, have good luck with rechargeable batteries. On one hand, a charge doesn't last nearly as long in the PalmPilot as a pair of disposable alkaline batteries; on the other hand, you don't have to buy new ones until you've recharged yours, say, 500 times. See Chapter 17, for battery-conservation tips and a discussion of specific battery brands.

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The PalmPilot, like any computer, is constantly being reinvented and enhanced. Within the first three years of existence, 12 different models were available from four different companies, and the operating system had been upgraded eight times. As you read this book, and as you go on through life, identifying what model and system software you're using will be increasingly important.

Here's a brief guide to the history of Palm models; for more detail, tips and tricks for individual models, and a list of upgrading options, see Chapter 18.

These original models were the first to capture the world's attention—they proved that, despite the failures of many previous gadgets from other companies, a palmtop could indeed become a mass-market best-seller.

They were boxy and limited by today's standards (see Figure 1.6). They had non-backlit screens, had no email or Internet capability, and the less expensive model had only 128K of RAM. But the HotSync process worked like a charm, the batteries lasted forever, and absolutely nobody felt overwhelmed by the software.

The newly named PalmPilot models debuted in 1997 with backlighting, greatly enhanced built-in programs (part of Palm OS 2.0), and an Expense application. As the manufacturer relaxed about the product's success in the business world, it also wrote four addictive games to include in the package (they're described in Chapter 4).

The Professional model (shown in Figure 1.6) also included TCP/IP capability, so that the device could connect to company networks or the Internet, and a built-in Mail program that could transfer email to and from your desktop computer via HotSync (see Chapter 13, for details). Its generous 1MB of memory made room for all this extra data.

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If you have a lot of programs installed on your PalmPilot, also install SwitchHack. It lets you jump to other programs directly, bypassing the Applications screen. (More on SwitchHack in Appendix A.)
You can scroll the Applications screen by writing the first letter of the program you want on the Graffiti writing area.
You can switch from one "category page" of applications to the next by tapping the Applications silkscreen button repeatedly. (Not available on Pilot and PalmPilot models.)
MenuHack (see Appendix A) lets you pull down menus by tapping at the top of the screen, where you'd expect, instead of tapping the Menu icon at the bottom of the unit.

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Your PalmPilot may be no bigger than a pocket calculator, but it's infinitely more flexible. Read this section with palmtop in hand; in the process, you'll not only get a gentle tour of the interface, but also tailor its operation to your own working style.

The very first time you turn on your palmtop, or after having reset it (see Chapter 17), you're walked through a series of setup steps. On recent models, such as the Palm IIIx, Palm V, and Palm VII, this series of startup screens forms a miniature crash course in using the device. One screen offers instructions for setting up HotSyncing; another gives you a miniature Graffiti handwriting-recognition tutorial.

No matter which model you have, however, an important part of the startup sequence is aligning the digitizer. That's when you're asked to tap three specific spots on your reading, one at a time, as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1: To ensure that your stylus tip is aligned correctly with the touch screen, carefully tap in the center of the targets the PalmPilot offers you.

The screen is actually two superimposed layers: the one you can see, which displays text and graphics, and the clear, pressure-sensitive overlay, which detects your taps and other stylus activity. Because of possible variations on the angle at which you hold the device, the PalmPilot needs to learn how the two layers are assigned at this moment on your particular unit. The "Tap center of target" routine asks you to tap three points in succession; the software notices where you tap, and adjusts its notion of the touch-sensitive layer's position accordingly.

In general, you encounter this screen-alignment business only when you turn the PalmPilot on for the very first time. On rare occasions, however, you may want to summon the screen test manually (for example, if your taps don't all seem to be registering). Tap Applications

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Your PalmPilot may be no bigger than a pocket calculator, but it's infinitely more flexible. Read this section with palmtop in hand; in the process, you'll not only get a gentle tour of the interface, but also tailor its operation to your own working style.

The very first time you turn on your palmtop, or after having reset it (see Chapter 17), you're walked through a series of setup steps. On recent models, such as the Palm IIIx, Palm V, and Palm VII, this series of startup screens forms a miniature crash course in using the device. One screen offers instructions for setting up HotSyncing; another gives you a miniature Graffiti handwriting-recognition tutorial.

No matter which model you have, however, an important part of the startup sequence is aligning the digitizer. That's when you're asked to tap three specific spots on your reading, one at a time, as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1: To ensure that your stylus tip is aligned correctly with the touch screen, carefully tap in the center of the targets the PalmPilot offers you.

The screen is actually two superimposed layers: the one you can see, which displays text and graphics, and the clear, pressure-sensitive overlay, which detects your taps and other stylus activity. Because of possible variations on the angle at which you hold the device, the PalmPilot needs to learn how the two layers are assigned at this moment on your particular unit. The "Tap center of target" routine asks you to tap three points in succession; the software notices where you tap, and adjusts its notion of the touch-sensitive layer's position accordingly.

In general, you encounter this screen-alignment business only when you turn the PalmPilot on for the very first time. On rare occasions, however, you may want to summon the screen test manually (for example, if your taps don't all seem to be registering). Tap Applications

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In Chapter 1, you met the PalmPilot's hardware; in this chapter, you've had a taste of its software. Chapter 4 will walk you through the individual software programs, but if you're like most new PalmPilot owners, you're eager to get going. This section builds on what you know about the PalmPilot's basic operation to illustrate how a typical work session might go.

You're on the phone. Somebody's giving you an important phone number. If this were last week, you might have begun scrambling for paper and pencil; now that you have a PalmPilot, however, you shove the stylus out of the right-side pocket with your thumb. Without even turning the device on, you're ready to receive the information.

Press the Address Book button—the button with the tiny white telephone icon. The device simultaneously turns on and opens up the Address Book program.
Tap the New button. The screen shown in Figure 2.9 appears. For the moment, let's say you don't know how to write using the Graffiti alphabet (because you haven't read Chapter 3 yet). Therefore, you'll have to input your new name and phone number using the keyboard screen.
Tap the dot in the corner of the Graffiti writing area, as shown in Figure 2.9 . When the onscreen keyboard appears, tap out the name Simms. Don't worry about capitalizing the S; the PalmPilot is smart enough to assume that you're inputting a name and to capitalize the word automatically. Tap the onscreen keyboard's Done button when you're finished. (The original Pilot models lack this special dot. Summon the keyboard by tapping Menu → Edit → Keyboard instead.)
Tap the First Name blank.

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If your screen taps sometimes don't seem to register, go to the Applications screen; tap Prefs; and choose Digitizer from the upper-right pop-up menu. You'll be led through the process of realigning the display with its touch screen.
You can turn the PalmPilot's various sounds on or off in the General screen of Preferences.
If you don't often use one of the four plastic buttons at the bottom of the PalmPilot (or the Calculator silkscreen button, or the Palm VII antenna), by all means remap them to launch a program you do use. The Buttons panel of the Preferences command lets you do this remapping.
Draw a line from the Graffiti area straight up onto the screen. That's the Ronomatic stroke—and you can define its effect. The Buttons panel of the Preferences screen lets you set up the power stroke to (a) make the onscreen keyboard appear, (b) summon the Graffiti cheat sheet, (c) turn the backlight on or off, (d) turn off and lock the PalmPilot, or (e) beam the current data (Palm III and later).
Menu commands are easily triggered without actually having to tap them. Instead, learn to use the faster Graffiti menu shortcuts—draw a slash (bottom to top) and then the initial of the command you want.

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The PalmPilot's creators had their first design meetings at a particularly useful point in history—after the debut of the Apple Newton. The Newton was a much larger, much heavier, much more expensive machine, but it, too, lacked a built-in keyboard. To input text, you were supposed to write on its glass screen, just as with the PalmPilot. The Newton was designed to recognize your handwriting and convert it into neatly typed, editable text.

Unfortunately, the original Newton's fledgling handwriting-recognition skills wound up serving as Doonesbury comic-strip fodder. (Man writes: "Does this work?" Newton transcribes his scrawl: "Egg freckles?") There are simply too many different writing styles for one handheld computer to understand.

That's why Palm's designers decided not to train their handheld to understand you; instead, they'd train you to understand it.

To pull this off, they designed a special alphabet called Graffiti. If you learn to write using the letter shapes the PalmPilot expects, it responds with perfect accuracy. Some people grumble at first—isn't technology supposed to serve us?—but after a day or so of practice, the Graffiti alphabet becomes second nature for most people.

The Graffiti system isn't limited to the PalmPilot, by the way; you can also buy it as an add-on for other handheld devices, such as the MagicCap and the Motorola Envoy—even the Apple Newton.

If you examine the charts on the inside covers of this book, you'll discover that almost every letter of the Graffiti alphabet is formed by a single stroke of the pen. That requirement explains the mutant shapes of the A, F, K, T, Q, and number 4, each of which is lacking the traditional finishing stroke. (Strangely enough, in forming the letter X, you're supposed to use two separate strokes. Don't let the inconsistency trouble you—just be glad there's one less mutant character to learn.)

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To pull this off, they designed a special alphabet called Graffiti. If you learn to write using the letter shapes the PalmPilot expects, it responds with perfect accuracy. Some people grumble at first—isn't technology supposed to serve us?—but after a day or so of practice, the Graffiti alphabet becomes second nature for most people.

The Graffiti system isn't limited to the PalmPilot, by the way; you can also buy it as an add-on for other handheld devices, such as the MagicCap and the Motorola Envoy—even the Apple Newton.

If you examine the charts on the inside covers of this book, you'll discover that almost every letter of the Graffiti alphabet is formed by a single stroke of the pen. That requirement explains the mutant shapes of the A, F, K, T, Q, and number 4, each of which is lacking the traditional finishing stroke. (Strangely enough, in forming the letter X, you're supposed to use two separate strokes. Don't let the inconsistency trouble you—just be glad there's one less mutant character to learn.)

The great thing about forming your letters with single strokes is that printing is faster this way. Many PalmPilot-inspired programmers, engineers, and other technical people have actually adopted the Graffiti alphabet for use even when they're not writing on the PalmPilot! Poke your head into a staff meeting, for example, and you may well see a white board or chalkboard with writing like that shown in Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1: Don't be surprised to see writing like this in the boardrooms of corporate America.

Section 3.1.1.1: Letters versus numbers

The PalmPilot makes its own recognition task even easier by requiring you to form your letters on the left side of the drawing area and your numbers on the right. (You can create punctuation in either space.) In your first forays into Graffiti-land, you may sometimes forget this important distinction; but the PalmPilot's attempt at recognition, every bit as nonsensical as those early Newton efforts, will quickly train you to keep your letters and numbers segregated.

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If you're caught on a pay phone during your first month with the PalmPilot and somebody's rattling off a phone number to you, and you just can't remember how to make the parenthesis symbols, it's time to bring up the onscreen keyboard. The klutzy or panicked can tap away on a tiny virtual keyboard instead of using the Graffiti system.

To make your keyboard appear, tap the tiny dot in the lower-left corner of the Graffiti writing area, shown in Figure 3.3. (On original Pilot models, tap Menu → Edit → Keyboard instead.)

Figure 3.3: When Graffiti is just too much to handle, tap the magic dot, shown here, to make the keyboard appear.

Once the keyboard is on the screen, just tap to type; there's even a little Backspace key (marked by the left-pointing arrow) and Tab key (right-pointing arrow). You'll probably find the onscreen keyboard most useful for its collections of symbols and foreign-language diacritical marks, which you can access by tapping one of the three character-set buttons shown in Figure 3.4.

Figure 3.4: The onscreen keyboard offers three different screens full of symbols. Tap one of the three buttons as shown to switch among the panels.

To get rid of the keyboard, tap the Done button.

If your writing often involves the Graffiti alphabet's hard-to-remember symbols, consider installing SymbolHack. (It's described in Appendix A and included on the CD-ROM that comes with this book.) This program works much like the PalmPilot's own pop-up keyboard, except that it places your choice of commonly used symbols onto a palette that you design. Tap a symbol to insert it into your writing.

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As good as Graffiti is, it's not the only 100%-accurate handwriting-recognition system available for the PalmPilot. Software companies have raced to the cause with specially shaped alphabets of their own. Only single-digit percentages of Palm fans use these replacement systems, but what matters is that you have a choice.

The Jot alphabet's claim to fame is that it's the official alphabet of Windows CE palmtops (the PalmPilot's rival). It offers several immediately apparent advantages over the Graffiti alphabet. First, most punctuation marks require only a single penstroke. Second, you can write on the upper portion of the screen, not just in the Graffiti area (although the shareware Palm program ScreenWrite, on this book's CD-ROM, offers the same feature). As you write, the shape of each letter appears on the screen, to provide feedback (as the shareware TealEcho does)—great for refining your letter-making skills. Finally, many of the letter shapes are more "normal-looking" than Graffiti's. As Table 3.2 illustrates, Jot's shapes for A, E, F, K, T, and V are much more recognizable than the corresponding Graffiti shapes. (If your name is Eva Teffakeva, install Jot this minute.)

Jot also has some downsides, however: it costs $40 (from http://www.cic.com), takes up 120K of memory, and doesn't permit you to turn off the "shape-echo" feature when you've outgrown it. Still, it's one of the most ingenious solutions to the making-machines-understand-printing problem; it's worth trying out the demo version included on this book's CD-ROM.

Table 3.2: The Jot alphabet ($40) is, in many ways, more natural than Graffiti. Write lowercase letters on the left half of the screen (or Graffiti area), numbers on the right, and capital letters on the dividing line.

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Graffiti and the onscreen keyboard are adequate for scratching out the occasional name or address. But if you're a novelist or reporter on the road, you're probably craving a more efficient text-entry method. Fortunately, Landware (http://www.landware.com) makes just what you need: the GoType keyboard.

This sleek, lightweight, $80 gadget contains a full typewriter keyboard (without Fkeys or other elements of the "extended" keyset) in the smallest possible shape. (See Figure 3.6.)

Figure 3.6: Graffiti getting you down? Attach a GoType keyboard for a compact, full-speed typing solution.

To use the keyboard, you must first install the included software. Next, open the hard lid that protects the keyboard in transit. Slide out the back-side foot that lends stability. Finally, snap your palmtop onto the HotSync-like connector, which holds it solidly in place—and begin to type away at full speed, in any Palm program.

Special features include six pushbuttons that launch the built-in Palm programs (Memo, Address Book, Mail, Find, and so on); a ShortCut key for triggering your text macros, as described later in this chapter; cursor keys; a Done key that closes most dialog boxes; and protruding cylindrical openings on each end of the keyboard that hold your stylus upright and ready. The keyboard even has Command and Alt keys, so that you can use one of GoType's most useful features: the ability to program keystrokes that launch any number of your favorite Palm programs.

The GoType has been a huge hit with PalmPilot addicts, offering most of a laptop's word processing capabilities at a fraction of the cost and weight. The 1999 models, one of which accommodates the Palm V, can even double as a full HotSync cradle. Your palmtop need never leave its spot.

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If your challenge is reading a lot of text, not writing it, you need a Doc reader. These little Palm applications are text readers, complete with search-and-replace, bookmarking features, a choice of display fonts, and much more generous document lengths than in the built-in Memo Pad program (which limits each page to 4K of text).

Several such programs, including TealDoc, SmartDoc, and AportisDoc, are included on the CD-ROM that comes with this book; see Chapter 10, for a complete discussion of these programs and Palm reading material. Chapter 10 also describes how to make your own Doc-format documents. Once you've begun dumping your email, articles, web page text, and other readable goods into Doc files destined for your PalmPilot, you'll quickly discover two huge advantages to this system: first, you can now indirectly use your computer's keyboard as a fast and familiar text-input device. And second, you'll find that you can make even the most boring business meetings pass more quickly when you can be reading entertaining material on the tiny screen in front of you without risk of detection.

Fonts are getting more attention as the PalmPilot grows up. The Palm III, for example, was the first to offer a choice of three different fonts in each Palm program. Its Palm OS 3.0, meanwhile, offers "hooks" that will make it easy for programmers to add new fonts.

If you have an older model, you can always install FontHack Plus (included on the CD-ROM that accompanies this book); it lets you change the font of any program. And where do these new fonts come from? You can make your own (or adapt existing Mac or Windows ones), for starters. Visit http://www.palmglyph.com/font.htmlfor instructions in making new Palm fonts.

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No matter how you're entering text into the PalmPilot—using Graffiti, the onscreen keyboard, or a GoType keyboard—you can save time and effort by using the ShortCuts feature. ShortCuts automatically expand abbreviations into longer phrases of up to 45 letters and spaces. The PalmPilot comes with several such entries already established: for example, you can type me, which the PalmPilot automatically replaces with the complete word Meeting. This instantaneous expansion can take place anywhere you can use Graffiti: in the Memo Pad or Address Book, for example.

Fortunately for those who might like to use the word me in its more common context, the PalmPilot only treats an abbreviation as a ShortCuts trigger if you precede it with the ShortCut symbol, the cursive lowercase L shape shown in Figure 3.7.

Figure 3.7: The ShortCuts character (left) tells the PalmPilot to be ready for the abbreviation to come. The result: the fully expanded text phrase (right).

The PalmPilot comes with the following built-in ShortCuts expressions:

Abbreviation	Expands to
br	Breakfast
lu	Lunch
di	Dinner
me	Meeting

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Because of its lack of keyboard, the PalmPilot actually makes a fairly lousy word processor. Sure, Graffiti makes brief notes possible. And a few word processing conventions are present: for example, you can drag across text to highlight it (in readiness for cutting, copying, or replacing by "writing over" it).

But otherwise, the PalmPilot's text programming omits nearly all standard word processor niceties.

Fortunately, shareware fills in some of the holes in the PalmPilot's text programming. Consider these add-ons, for example, to make your editing life easier. (All of these programs are included with this book and are described more fully in Appendix A.)

SelectHack: Lets you "double-click" a word to highlight the entire word, just as on your Mac or Windows machine. You can even triple-tap to highlight an entire paragraph.
MiddleCaps: Generates a capital letter when you write on the dividing line between the Graffiti writing areas for letters and numbers exactly as when using the Jot alphabet described earlier. You save one penstroke every time you make a capital letter. (Despite the lack of the word Hack in its title, MiddleCaps requires HackMaster to be installed as described in Appendix A.)
DragAndDrop: Lets you edit by dragging highlighted text into new positions, exactly as you can in "real" word processors.
ScreenWrite: Instead of confining your writing in the Graffiti area, this hack lets you write directly on the screen.

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For best accuracy, make your Graffiti strokes large enough to fill the writing area.
For even more accuracy, put a piece of Scotch tape over the Graffiti area—you get a less slippery, more controlled, more paperlike surface to write on.
To analyze what you're doing wrong (in times of recognition inaccuracy), install TealEcho, which shows you what the PalmPilot is "seeing" you draw for each Graffiti character.
The Graffiti alphabet is easy to learn, but if it's frustrating you, consider teaching it to recognize your own letter shapes using TealScript—or switching to a more natural-looking alphabet, such as Jot.
Consult the inner covers of this book, which reveal over 85 alternative Graffiti shapes. Many are far faster to draw (although less recognizable as letters) than the traditional Graffiti shapes.
Draw your V shape from the right side for perfect accuracy every time.
Store frequently used phrases as ShortCuts. (Tap Applications → Prefs. From the upper-right pop-up menu, choose ShortCuts.) Include a space after each expanded word to save additional time.

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Without a doubt, much of the fun of PalmPiloting is using the kinds of add-on programs included with this book. But for thousands of Palm owners, the four primary built-in programs are enough.

During the machine's development, Palm Computing programmers became obsessed over tap counts . They'd sit around and tally the number of stylus taps—on buttons and other controls—that were necessary to accomplish frequently used tasks, such as recording an appointment.

That attention to detail and streamlining paid off. Palm's Big Four—the programs launched by the four rounded hardware buttons at the bottom of the device—are surprisingly complete, elegant, and efficient.

Although there are thousands of add-on programs for the PalmPilot, few programmers have attempted to write a replacement for the Date Book program. That fact is a testimony to this program's completeness; if you've ever whipped out your PalmPilot, pressed a single button to view your next appointment, and then watched the faces of nearby laptop users who would have required three minutes to start up their machines and retrieve the same information, you know exactly what I mean.

To check your upcoming appointments, press the plastic Date Book button at the lower-left corner of your palmtop. That button turns the machine on, launches the Date Book program, and flips to today's date. The display looks something like Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1: The Date Book shows the day's events in day-at-a-glance format. At right, the time-compression feature at work. (Original Pilot models lack the ability to hide empty lines.)

The Date Book program in Palm OS 2 and later is particularly likable; as shown in Figure 4.1, time slots during the day where nothing is happening can be

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Although there are thousands of add-on programs for the PalmPilot, few programmers have attempted to write a replacement for the Date Book program. That fact is a testimony to this program's completeness; if you've ever whipped out your PalmPilot, pressed a single button to view your next appointment, and then watched the faces of nearby laptop users who would have required three minutes to start up their machines and retrieve the same information, you know exactly what I mean.

To check your upcoming appointments, press the plastic Date Book button at the lower-left corner of your palmtop. That button turns the machine on, launches the Date Book program, and flips to today's date. The display looks something like Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1: The Date Book shows the day's events in day-at-a-glance format. At right, the time-compression feature at work. (Original Pilot models lack the ability to hide empty lines.)

The Date Book program in Palm OS 2 and later is particularly likable; as shown in Figure 4.1, time slots during the day where nothing is happening can be hidden. Your eye goes directly to the time slots where something is actually happening; as a bonus, omitting empty time slots means your PalmPilot can generally fit an entire day's worth of activities onto its small screen. (On the other hand, you can turn this option off if you prefer seeing all hours listed, as shown at left in Figure 4.1. To do so, tap Menu → Options → Display Options, and turn off Compress Day View.)

Palm OS 2 and later also sport tiny vertical bars at the left side of the display; they help you visualize the lengths of your appointments and, because they can overlap, help clarify simultaneous events. You can hide these bars if they get in your way; tap Menu

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The second plastic button at the bottom of a Palm device, marked with a telephone-handset icon, launches the Address Book program. It presents a neat master list of all your contacts, sorted by last name and displaying each person's principal phone number. (See Figure 4.16.)

Figure 4.16: The Address Book starts with a home page of all your phone numbers (left). Tap a name to open its detail view for that name (right).

If your world of acquaintances includes 11 people or less, you can stop reading here: 11 names fit on a single "page" of the screen list.

If the person whose number you're looking up isn't among the first 11 listed, however, begin writing the person's last name in the Graffiti writing area. With each letter you write, the phone-book list scrolls to the name that most closely matches what you've written so far. In other words, even if you have thousands of names in the list, you can home in on a single acquaintance by writing only about three letters of the name. (In Figure 4.16, writing a single letter, N, sufficed to find Jean Noodie's entry.)

Alternatively, you can press the plastic up/down scroll buttons at the bottom of the PalmPilot—or tap the up/down black triangle buttons on the screen—to view the previous or next screens full of names.

And if you still can't find the name you're looking for—for example, if you can't remember some guy's name, but you know that he works at Microsoft—use the Find icon at the lower right of the screen. The Find command, as described earlier in this chapter, can locate text even among the details of an Address Book entry—not just the person's name.

After looking up a phone number by writing a few letters of the desired name on the Look Up line beneath the Address Book list, you don't have to delete what you've written before looking up a second name.

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The To Do List opens when you press the third plastic button from the left. As shown in Figure 4.23, this simple software doodad can be a surprisingly powerful way to get control of your life.

Figure 4.23: Tap a checkbox to "check off" a task you've gotten out of the way (left). To set a priority level, tap the number beside an item (right), and then tap one of the numbers (1 through 5).

The concept is simple: Every time you think of something else you've got to do, tap the New button and write the task down. (In fact, if you've got Palm OS 2 or later, you don't even have To Do that; simply begin writing in the Graffiti area. The PalmPilot creates a new line automatically.) The name of a To Do item can be many lines long—up to about 100 words, in fact.

By tapping the number beside the checkbox, you can rank your To Do items in order of importance—lower numbers increase in urgency, and appear closer to the top of the list. (Don't be alarmed if the item whose priority you just changed seems to disappear. Most likely, it's just jumped into its correct sorted position, which may be off the screen.)

The PalmPilot normally assigns Priority 1 to every new To Do item. However, if your list already contains items of various priorities, here's a timesaving tip: a new To Do item takes on the same priority level of whatever was selected at the time you tapped the New button.

In other words, to add a new Priority 3 item, tap an existing Priority 3 item and then tap New. The new blank line appears automatically in its correct middle-of-the-list position.

(What's more, your new To Do item also inherits the due date and category of the item you originally tapped; see Section 4.3.2 for details on these other characteristics.)

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The plastic hardware button in the lower-right corner of the PalmPilot screen launches the Memo Pad. This program always starts up with a home page that lists the first line of every memo you've already written. Tap a line to open the corresponding memo page, as shown in Figure 4.27. Consult Chapter 3 for tips on word processing without a keyboard.

Figure 4.27: The Memo Pad greets you with an index of first lines (left). Tap one to see the complete page (right).

Many of the Memo Pad program's features are familiar from the other PalmPilot programs. Pilot and PalmPilot models offer two boxed As at the bottom of the memo page, which switch all text (in all memos) between two type sizes; on the Palm III and later models, those boxes have been replaced by a Font command (in the Options menu) that offers a choice of additional fonts. (On such models, you can choose one font for displaying the startup home page index, and a different font for the actual memos.)

The Details button opens up the Preferences screen shown in Figure 4.28, where you can assign a memo to a particular category and mark it as private (see Section 4.1.7 earlier in this chapter). You can also use the Phone Lookup and Find commands, also described in that section.

Figure 4.28: The Memo Pad Details screen is minimalist, offering access to two familiar options: Categories and the Private checkbox.

Except on original Pilot models, you can ignore the New button on the startup index screen. Instead, simply begin writing in the Graffiti area; the PalmPilot automatically opens a new memo and begins taking down what you're writing.

As in other PalmPilot programs, if you've assigned various memos to different categories, you can press the plastic Memo Pad button repeatedly to jump from viewing one category's memos to the next.

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Use the Date Book's Preferences command to control what hours' time slots are displayed in day view. For example, you may prefer to view only the hours from 10 a.m. through 5 p.m.; or you may eliminate all blank time slots from the Date Book's day view by specifying the same hour as the starting and ending times for the day.
Press the Date Book plastic button repeatedly to switch among day, week, and month views. Press the To Do, Memo, or Address Book buttons repeatedly to cycle through your different catagories.
In week view, tap a gray bar to view its label ("lunch with Harry"). Drag a gray bar to reschedule it. (To reschedule it beyond the bounds of the current week, tap it to enter day view; tap Details; and tap the date to open the calendar date-picker.)
In the upper-left corner of any Date Book screen, tap the black tab to see the current time.
In day view, just begin writing numbers to set the time for a new appointment, or words to create a new untimed event.
To create a "banner" across multiple days in the Date Book, create a repeating daily event.
The quickest way to delete an appointment, To Do item, or Memo page is to delete all the text of the item. No menu commands or dialog boxes are required.
Prevent a bygone Date Book appointment from being purged by changing it to a repeating event—one that only repeats every 50 years.
The Find command searches the current application first—remember that when speed is an issue.
If text is highlighted at the moment you tap the Find icon, that text is automatically copied into the Find blank.

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Most PalmPiloteers spend most of their time in the Four Big Kahunas—the Date Book, Address Book, To Do List, and Memo Pad programs. But the second-tier programs are equally elegant, even if not important enough to merit their own plastic buttons. This chapter explores the rarely discussed supporting cast of Palm software: the Calculator, bonus games, Memory and Security programs, and—for owners of all recent models—Expense and Mail.

Except for the Calculator, these programs are accessible only from the Applications launcher screen. To see their icons, tap the Applications icon at the lower left of your screen.

The Calculator is the only built-in program you can operate without a stylus. The buttons are so big that you can tap all the buttons with your fingers (see Figure 5.1). In other words, the Calculator makes the PalmPilot the world's most expensive five-function pocket calculator. (On the other hand, I've seen grown men pull out $5,000 laptop computers to calculate their share of the dinner tip.)

Figure 5.1: The Calculator, on the original Pilot (left) and on later models (right). Can you see the difference? Hint: compare the + buttons.

To launch the Calculator, tap the corresponding icon at the lower-right corner of the screen. There are only two significant differences between this program and an ordinary pocket calculator. First, you can paste a number into this one (copied from another program) and copy a result out of it. (The Copy and Paste commands are in the Edit menu; tap the Menu button to see it.) Sorry, Mac and Windows fans: you can't paste an entire equation, as you can on your computer's very similar Calculator desk accessory.

The second advantage of the software Calculator is that, if you have Palm OS 2 or later, you can review a "paper trail" of your calculation so far. To see this mathematical history, write /I in the Graffiti area (draw the slash from the bottom), or tap Menu

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The Calculator is the only built-in program you can operate without a stylus. The buttons are so big that you can tap all the buttons with your fingers (see Figure 5.1). In other words, the Calculator makes the PalmPilot the world's most expensive five-function pocket calculator. (On the other hand, I've seen grown men pull out $5,000 laptop computers to calculate their share of the dinner tip.)

Figure 5.1: The Calculator, on the original Pilot (left) and on later models (right). Can you see the difference? Hint: compare the + buttons.

To launch the Calculator, tap the corresponding icon at the lower-right corner of the screen. There are only two significant differences between this program and an ordinary pocket calculator. First, you can paste a number into this one (copied from another program) and copy a result out of it. (The Copy and Paste commands are in the Edit menu; tap the Menu button to see it.) Sorry, Mac and Windows fans: you can't paste an entire equation, as you can on your computer's very similar Calculator desk accessory.

The second advantage of the software Calculator is that, if you have Palm OS 2 or later, you can review a "paper trail" of your calculation so far. To see this mathematical history, write /I in the Graffiti area (draw the slash from the bottom), or tap Menu → Options → Recent Calculations. Figure 5.2 shows the result; alas, you can't actually edit any of the numbers in the "tape." If you discover that you made a mistake, all you can do is say "rats" and start over.

Figure 5.2: The Recent Calculations command shows you exactly where you messed up, but it doesn't give you a chance to do anything about it.

Although the PalmPilot's Calculator works just like a regular pocket calculator, not everyone knows

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When you first begin learning the Graffiti alphabet, you may find yourself frustrated. "Doggone that letter K!" you might say, "I can never remember what its symbol is supposed to look like!"

To make Graffiti learning more fun, your PalmPilot comes with the world's tiniest arcade game: Giraffe. If you have Palm OS 2, Giraffe probably came pre-installed. On earlier models and Palm III, you have to install Giraffe from the CD-ROM that came with your package; if you have a recent model, Giraffe is probably sitting in the Add-On folder inside the Palm folder on your hard drive.

Table of Contents

Section 1.1.1.1: The plastic buttons

Section 1.1.1.1: The plastic buttons

Section 3.1.1.1: Letters versus numbers