Palm and Treo Hacks

Find Anything

Do you ever have trouble finding something on your PDA that you know is there? There are replacements for the Find tool which provide more flexibility in searching.

When you can’t find what you’re looking for, there are a couple of solutions. One possibility is to always add annotations to everything [Hack #8] . You can add notes to entries in the Date Book, Address Book, and To Do Lists. If you add a note to one of these items and do a search for words in the note, then Find will turn up the note. Then you can just click Done from the note and it will take you back to the related item. However, if you haven’t been adding notes to everything as you go or you can’t remember enough of the notes to search effectively, you need stronger medicine.

There are several replacement Find tools that have more flexibility than the built-in Find tool.

BeiksFind

This application allows you to find a string anywhere within a word, rather than having to match complete words. This can be useful if you remember the last few digits of a phone number, for example. You can find it at http://www.beiks.com.

FindHack

Despite the name, FindHack is a standalone application, not a HackMaster hack. This application allows you to select which databases and applications to search. Also, it does partial matching, supports wildcards, and allows for Boolean searching for complex criteria, as you can see in Figure 1-14. This works on Palm OS versions from 3.3 through 5.x. You can find this hack at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/fpillet.

superFinderHack

superFinderHack provides more flexibility in searching. It remembers the last 128 searches that you’ve done. Also, you can set the order that applications are searched in. Unlike FindHack, this actually is a HackMaster extension [Hack #47] , so you will need to have HackMaster (or a replacement) installed. This hack only works on Palm OS versions from 3.1-4.x. You can find it at http://home.columbus.rr.com/nevai/palm.

Figure 1-14. FindHack

Use Wildcards

The wildcard features in these replacements can be very powerful. For example, you can search for H*Master to find references to HackMaster, HitMaster, or similar strings. You can search for phone numbers with a particular prefix by searching for something like: 555-????. The question marks match a single character—in this case, matching four digits for a phone number.