Writing Amiga <-> PDA software

Hello all. I've finally gotten my development environment working again, after overhauling it. And was continuing with a project I had started last year. I figured I'd ask for any suggestions with it before I continue much further, as I've gotten the basic skeleton down, and am now just slapping the meat on it. (apologies for the rather macabre metaphor, haven't had enough coffee yet...)

Its a program designed to convert PalmOS .pdb file into various formats supported by the Amiga. (The spitfire package looks nice and all, but I already have applications that handle everything it does, except for the to-do list)

I originally started it because I own a Sony Cli?, and am attending school. I use it to maintain my class schedule, homework assignments, job searches, and several video games to "spice up" the occasional incredibly boring lecture.

After manually entering the same information into the Cli?'s datebook, address book, memo pad, the URL manager, etc.. and equivalent Amiga applications (limpidclock, YAM, Ibrowse password manager, etc....), I was growing frustrated. I have USB capability on the Amiga, and the hotsync function works wonders. Basically, the pda class in Chris Hodges ingenius USB stack launches an amigados script containing the CLI applications for backing up the device. Which is great, if I'm using the Amiga as nothing more than a place to dump files.

However, I have the data on my computer, and want it displayed on my pretty little Limpidclock desktop calendar, which I couldn't do (and stil can't, pending a final "GCC pdatools.c -o c:pdatools" command).

Anyway, as I've mentioned before I started rambling, I've finally gotten the program to load the pdb data in a manner that can be easily re-arranged to various formats as needed, granted just using printf() to test the concept. My biggest questions are:

How many Amiga users use PalmOS PDAs?

How many of these users are OS4 users? (I can E-Mail the source code to my brother, who has an A-1 if needed)

What Palm Apps. are commonly used by Amiga users? (The basic ones, being datebook, to-do list, memopad, and the addressbook are being addressed.)

What Equivalant apps are used on Amiga? (I'm initially developing it to convert datebook to limpidclock, addressbook to YAM's address book, while memopad and to-do lists will probably end up as Amigaguide or HTML formats)

Are there any specific "needs" any Amiga user with a PalmOS PDA has?

The method I'm using to convert files is developing a scripting method triggered by the pdb files creator/type tags, and will support multiple conversions (eg. datebook can convert to either yam, DFA (if anyone even uses that anymore), simplemail, etc.. formats). While this doesn't really "synchronize" the data, a merging routing also applying a script might work, too. (If needed)
I'm probably not going to develop a GUI for it, as I'm not quite that skilled in ways of the source yet (plus it is designed to be integrated into a script). But I plan on getting MUI stuff working. (I've tried writing MUI GUI apps, which has resulted in flashing red boxes on my TV, compiler errors, drop-kicked programming manuals (I have a 600-page C++ reference manual that's particularly therepeutic with this method), shouted profanities in every language I've bothered to learn them in, desires to take a foreign language course to learn more profanities, grey thinning hair, ulcers, etc...)
Anyway, any suggestions for this thing? (I might start a new thread with the same title, only with "lite" in the title to avoid the lengthy reading.. )

@kvasir
Probably hardly any more Palm users here than there are Psion users... (I'm ex-Psion, although I was once planning for Psion to replace my Amiga, before Psion died, and Amiga refused to die!)

@ChrisH

yeah, I didn't think too many Palm users would be about. (Though there are some Palm cellphones, that might be interesting) However, if this might be useful to someone I figured I'd give it a shot. I've not used any psion stuff, though. I'll have to look for one sometime. (A thrift store probably, considering the vintage) And yes, Amiga refuses to die. (luckily enough, as I would probably join an Amish community if it weren't for my 1200)
Anyway, I've gotten it to the point it can decode the record and database attributes. (All bit-encoded, was over-thinking how to handle it. A simple bitmask and power-of-2 loop was all that was needed, though) Just trying to settle on which method to convert stuff now.

@kvasir

sounds like a great idea! I have a Palm Treo 680 & would love to able to sync it to my Amiga; however, I use a database program called HandBase for work on a daily basis and I must be able to backup the info in this program as well.

anyhow I'm sure there are many PalmOS users out there (lik myself) that would appreciate even a basic sync program to their Amiga systems

@328gts

I'll try to dig that one up, though it does sound familiar. Would HandBase lend itself well with an AmigaGuide conversion, or would a specific database proggy be better?

Just to mention, the sync software I'm using is just PDAtransfer 1.1 (came with the poseidan USB stack), I'm just writing somthing to make the database files themselves easier to deal with. (There's about a million ways to get the .pdb files to the Amiga, most of which I've explored before breaking down and getting the SubWay card that sparked this whole thing. )

EDIT: Thanks to google, digging that up wasn't too big an issue. I'll try to kick up a demo version or sample database to go digging about in. Also, one thing thats probably going to take longer than banging out the code (It is a rather simple proggy, after all) is the documentation. The conversion modules are nothing more than ascii files, a dedicated geek could reverse-engineer them if they wanted. But I'm trying to document what I'm doing in a Amigaguide format so that won't be terribly necessary, as well as add a few "developer" cli arguments to reveal the structure of whatever .pdb file you want to tinker with.

@kvasir

I used to have a Palm some five years ago but the thing is gone now. Smartphones have taken over

@kvasir

I use an Acer S60 that is running Palm OS 4.1 coincidently My A1 is also running OS 4.1 update 1.
I use SBase4 Pro off CU Amiga CD-Rom 22 mainly because I have records dating back to 1993.
It would be great if your software could link the two.

Rex

@trixie

uhh the Palm Treo is a smart phone and so is the Palm Pre

@ChrisH

I doubt that as palm makes some pretty nice smart phones as noted above

@Rex

I think I have a copy of sbase. I also downloaded a HanDbase database from here. looks like the method I'm using might need some revision. Anyway, I'm currently printing off the source code, so I have something to go through while awaiting Windows Vista to install on my school computer. (A+ certs.... fun fun...) I could put it on the PDA, but that much reading will require squinting...

@kvasir

Quote:

Hey, add one here
I use old trusty zire21 here. Best 100 bucks I spent on electronic equipment (price/preformance-wise).
And I use AOS4 (fixed A1XE).
I use addressbook, schedule app, notepad, memopad. And some 3-rd-party studd like isilo viewer and a dictionary. I'm very interested in bringing support for usb palm devices to AOS4.

Jack

@kvasir

I had an older Palm Centro smart phone (from before they switched it to Win CE).

But I've gone over to Android recently with a Samsung Moment. How hard would it be to adapt your existing coding for use with Android? I would think the Android user base would be quite a bit larger.

Paul

@Paul

I'm not sure. How proprietary are androids files? The biggest prob. with PalmOS stuff is the weird way it allocates records and such. (Its actually quite compact and efficient, looking at it) It's very "database record" based, I imagine it looks kinda like an AmigaGuide document after being compressed, if such a thing was ever done. Luckily, the format was well-documented (including the fact that PalmOS time is measured in seconds from January 1st, 1904... Did you know there are 2,082,844,800 seconds between that date and January 1st, 1970? I'd like to find the developer who had THAT idea and ask him how well a Palm M130 works as an anal probe...) It is rather limited, in that you're limited to $FFFFFF (16,777,216) records, and the attributes structure is very PalmOS centered.Though if some of Palm's devs. (are there any hiding in here?) worked on it, it might be a similar format. Also, if I had an Android-enabled device, it might help (I really just wanted to sync my datebook and addressbooks, along with a few 3rd party apps, and decided to write a translator for the files themselves, I imagine with Android stuff the biggest prob would be getting the stuff to the Amiga itself.) Anyway, right now I've hit something of a brick wall on how I'm doing the actual conversion. (Flexible enough to handle several different file types, modular enough to expand to new files, easy enough to write/document that I won't have to go blind staring at a hex editor every time a new popular file type comes to light.. Emphasis on the easy to document part)
Anyway, getting my ADD addled-brain back one subject, I'll take a peek at Android's stuff too one of these days.


Edit: Googles Android dev. site has some sample code, looks like its all JAVA based with XML formatted data, so it should be pretty easy to write Palm <-> Android conversion stuff. (If I can get the AddressBook into Amigaguide format, I should be able to do that, too! )

@kvasir

Quote:

Ahhh. . . you beat me to it. I was going to mention that it's all open source for Android. Glad to hear it might not be so hard. With all of the major phone companies (USA anyway - Sprint, AT&T, Verizon) offering versions of Android phones, this kind of software/capability could become a drawing point for Amiga.

Paul

@Paul

The only drawback to doing things this way, is using PalmOS as a central language for converting Amiga stuff to Android, a separate converter would probably be better for this, and would be alot easier to manage as well. (XML is alot more intuitive than PDB stuff...)

Anyway, I've also set up a web site for this little project. (Even have a UtilityBase site set up for it, though I'm not sure I see the point of that). I put my contact stuff on the bottom, including a direct link to this thread. The mailto is a javascript onclick event that parses my email address from several string, for the sole purpose of avoiding discount viagra ads. I have a twitter and yahoo link in there, to.

The reason I went with writing the html stuff is because I tracked down a memory leak to the date conversion stuff, and have been going blind trying to fix it. Wound up playing heretic for an hour, and after blowing stuff up for a bit, I was too tired to stare at C code. I'll got at it a bit more today, though.

Edit: screwed up the url on the utilbase link
Edit2: finally activated my Charter web account, got rid of herobo, changed URL

Finally came upon some free time to continue with this. Still tracking down a memory leak, causing some html output to get garbled...

@kvasir

I don't need any new Smartphone. I would be happy to sync my Zire with any Amiga application via USB. The tool that CH provided sadly never worked for me although we both have the same Palm device. Good luck for your work.

@Sprocki

If I recall, there was a namechange involved in the software pdatransfer uses, palm didn't like somebody naming a library "palmlink.library" or .device or something like that, so you needed to manually change the binary with a hexeditor. (from palmlink.library to pdalink.library, just add hex 00 at the end for the extra character). Then just configure poseiden to fire off a script that dumps all the palm files to whatever directory you prefer.
That being done, you now have a ton of PDA files that you can't really use. That what this proggy is supposed to fix.

@kvasir

That's what I did many years ago. I more think you are talking about Spitfire which made those changes necessary. AFAIR the tools that CH introduced several years later did not need this namechange but anyhow they did not work for me. I asked CH about it that time but he could not help.

@kvasir
Well, I would NOT vote for Palm OS, as I use a Winmobile Device, and I would love to sync the stuff with my Amiga... plus I donnot think Palm is the future. Go for iPhone and Winmobile, maybe Symbian or Android... But I guess, its not what you wan't to do is it ?

greetings Gerograph

@gerograph

I might write something along those lines too, if I ever get ahold of a cell that costs more than $20US. (I'm still in school, so discount pre-paid junk is what I use cell-wise) This is just a project to get my personal equipment (being a 68k os3.9 Amiga and a Sony PDA) talking together. Which they already do that, but the Amiga can't read the pda's files. Hence the translation proggy. Though the general concept should hold as far as other data models, like the previous post(s) about Android would suggest. XML seems rather popular for that kind of thing, and would be easy to implement in a macro type conversion system (which is similar to what I'm working on). Might have to tweak it a bit when I get ahold of such data.

The real challenge with phones, pda's, etc.. is getting the data into the Amiga. Before I had USB in this thing, I had to synchronize my PDA with my ailing windows machine (that eventually became so frustrationg performance-wise that I wiped XP and installed Ubuntu), and drag whatever files I needed on the 1200 over via SMBFS and a network share on the XP box. I'm not sure how Android or Windows stuff would be recognized on the Amigas USB stacks, though I might look into writing actual transfer software too if the existing systems aren't working well.

Though right now, I'm at an impasse.. The memory glitch thats scrambling file output seems elusive, though a compiler for Ubuntu seems to complain about some integer casting, thinking that might be the problem. Which is a pretty lame, beginner level screw up.... I should really drink coffee for an hour or so before firing up a compiler.