One of the small but labourious task that crops up around this time of year is entering the next year's public holidays and memorable dates into my Palm. Whilst there seems to be a plethora of sites that provide such content for US-based Palm users, I have never found a UK equivalent - until now.
This year, Adrian Hennessy who, I note with approval, is webmaster for his local CAMRA group has saved me the hassle by producing two downloadable .dba files and posting them on his Palm Dates Software Page. These .dba files are simply downloaded to the PC where your Palm Desktop resides, from where you can use the Calendar's import function to create untimed events on the relevant days thoughtout the next twelve months. Whilst many of us would be satisfied with that, Adrian has gone one better by adding informative notes to many of the events. For instance, Spring Equinox on 21st March has the brief note: 'The Celtic festival of Ostara. As Spring reaches its midpoint, night and day stand in perfect balance, with daylight on the increase.' However, double-clicking on St.Patrick's Day earlier that week takes you to the following history lesson: 'St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland. He was born probably in Scotland (traditionally at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton) in 387AD as Maewyn Succat and was of Romano-British origin. Pope Celestine I sent him to Ireland as a missionary, and in the summer of 430AD Patrick and his companions landed on the Irish shore. On Easter Sunday, March 26th, 433, Patrick used the shamrock to illustrate the concept of the Holy Trinity - three leaves, yet still one leaf - and Ireland's national symbol was born. He died on March 17th, 464, at age of 77.' Adrian, I raise a pint of Old Stoatwobbler in your (NNEasterly) direction.
Elsewhere on my T3, I have just upgraded to version 1.1 of LauncherX. Launcher X now supports full-screen and landscape modes on the Palm Tungsten T3 and a few more cracking features have been added.
And it doen't end there because in the same zip file is an app called AfterSync. AfterSync lets you define an application that will be launched after a Hotsync. This is something I have always wanted but never knew it. Every time a HotSync finished and you were faced with the red and blue roundel, this is the app you subconciously wanted as it will take you to your chosen app the second the sync finishes. For me, that's my Launcher X 'main' app tab. Finally, a nice touch for the terminally lazy like me is that if you already have Launcher X, there is no need to remove your previous version. Just install version 1.1 over your existing version.
Posted by bignoseduglyguy at December 13, 2003 08:52 PM | TrackBack