T. H. Newman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> types:
> I've been playing around for a few weeks with my Palm under Linux and
> one thing I haven't found alot of are applications that work with Palm
> data. For example Landsware has a great application called Pocket
> Quicken that shares data with Quicken under Windows. I have not been
> able to find a simlar program for GnuCash.
Is GnuCash actually usable? Last time I looked at it, it crashed on
startup. And yes, that's a serious question - more in a minute.
> This is not just a Linux problem, but IMHO there are very few desktop
> applications that work well with Palm programs outside of the standards
> (Datebook, Addressbook etc.) It seems that developers don't focus
> nearly as much on the desktop part of the equation as they do the Palm
> OS side. In my opinon, a Palm OS device should be an extension of the
> desktop, not just a stand alone device.
The standard applications have published standards for interacting
with them, and are on every Palm. As such, it's possible and usefull
to do Linux desktop integrations.
That's not true for other applications. The information required to
write the application may not even be available. The application
authors are pretty much the only ones who can do a Linux version,
though there are exceptions. To get those to appear, you have to
convince them that a Linux/Unix version would repay the port - and
it's not clear it would, which makes it a hard sell.
For example, I use PMT. It has it's own desktop app, but I can't use
it. Nuts - I can't even reasonably use the HTML documentation, because
the author assumed that file name case would be insignificant. I've
thought about investigating whether a connection between it and a Unix
accounting program could be done, but - well, what that's a lot of
work for not much benefit.
> Has anyone thought about doing
> something like ThinkdB that could work with an database program like
> mySQL along with a user interface that would run in Java on a browser?
Actually, I have. I was going to use different tools, but the same
technology. I'm not sure what you mean by browser, unless you mean a
WWW browser, in which case I'm not sure why would want it to run there
rather than on your desktop.
In particular, I was going to use db (a GNU-licensed palm database)
and PostgreSQL (because it's what I run). I'm just not sure what it
would look like, but I'm starting to get some ideas.
> Have I missed a good resource somewhere for desktop applications that
> take advantage of conduits or plugins for J-pilot?
Well, there's supposed to be an ELF (that's the VistaSource
application builder language) package that talks to palms, and helps
integrate it into ApplixWare Office, but I've not been able to find a
copy.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.
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