Palm to iPhone - the update

A few weeks ago I wrote a summary of my Palm to iPhone conversion.

Time for an update.

This is really a Geek Odyssey, though, as I mentioned before, Missing Sync for iPhone would probably help.

I won't repeat all the extensive links in my earlier post, please go there to get the details. I've even updated that older post with a link to today's Appigo Notebook/ToodleDo migration.

You can see the current state my "iPhone as PDA' above. Those bottom four links should look familiar. They're a close match to the classic four iPhone buttons: Calendar/Date Book, Contacts/Address Book, Tasks/Todo and Memo/Note.

On my Palm I'd substituted a 'digital ink' app for the Note, I used that to scrawl quick notes. On my iPhone the equivalent is Jott. It captures audio snippets which are then transcribed. In some ways better than being able to scrawl an "ink" note, in other ways not as good.

The Calendar and Contacts are Apple apps. They sync with OS X iCal and Address Book. I wish instead they would sync directly with Google Calendar and Contacts. For now I sync my desktop data to Google using Spanning Sync.

Appigo makes both Todo.app and Notebook.app (to the right above the main four). Both sync with Toodledo. I wish Google would buy Toodledo and take that over too. The Appigo products are great. Toodledo tasks are spartan but good enough, Toodledo Notes need a lot of work.

The rest of my primary screen consists only of apps I use ALL the time (oops! Looks like Maps got bumped off. It should be there). Other screens are split info games (a real strength of the iPhone), lesser used apps, etc.

The Appigo apps make the iPhone a better competitor to the 1994 Palm III, but in terms of usability and PDA value the Palm III is still a clear winner. The iPhone is only competitive when you start to do geeky and barely possible things with Google Calendar and the like. Of course the iPhone can do far more things than the Palm III could, not the least of which are Safari, Mail.app and Map.

One more thing. The Palm III had global search. So you could search tasks, notes, address book, etc with one tap. Slow, but global. There's nothing like that for the iPhone. Appigo Task and Note search is very fast but limited to those apps. Calendar has NO search, and Contacts has a feeble search against name alone.

iPhone 2.1 - now with more crashes

The 2.1 update didn't directly fix the miserable "unknown application 0xE800002E" error, but it made a repair possible (see link).

So I'm not ungrateful.

Still, my iPhone is crashier now that it was before the fix. Apple's own Mail.app is particularly unstable.

I'm following the old Windows 98/Mac Classic practice of rebooting after every crash, and, if I can get in the habit, I'd like to reboot every night. If I crash and don't reboot more cashes come. I suspect iPhone apps run pretty close to the kernel.

Apple still has miles to go to get to their baseline vision, but in the meantime the App Store provides some comfort.

Jott Express requires Adobe AIR. That's bad.

Jott Express doesn't say whether it's an OS X or XP app.

That's because it's neither; it's an Adobe AIR app.

Of course that means installing Adobe AIR on OS X*.

I've installed a few Adobe apps on OS X. Near as I can tell, Adobe is determined to destroy Apple. Adobe's installers routinely screw up OS X permissions, scatter files in illegal place, and generally act like drunken football hooligans.

Jott Express is also supposed to sync directly with an iPhone/iTouch. That's really piling the risk on.

I ain't installing AIR until I read some trusted source who's had a really good experience. I'd sooner invite Hell's Angels to dinner than Adobe products to my OS X box.

* In terms of cross-platform portable virtual environments there aren't a lot of great choices. Desktop Java is walking dead, Silverlight is from Microsoft, and ... well ... I think that's it.

Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!)

Why doesn't Toodledo have a $#!#$!$ blog? [Update: A reader gave me the address. It's new, but it exists.]

Can they please join the century of the fruitbat?

I had to visit their web site to learn they've done something that's extremely important to me, one of their paying customers:

Toodledo :: Import To-Do List

This will read in a CSV (comma separated values) file and add the notes to your Toodledo Notebook.

You can use this to import memos from Palm Desktop.

This is what I've been waiting for.

Now I can migrate all my old Palm and Outlook Memos/Notes to Toodledo, and then from Toodledo to Appigo's Notebook.app.

Oh happy day.

Now about that Toodledo blog ...

Incidentally, since I use the double push feature to get to the phone, the "permanent" four column row of my iPhone is now a close match to my old Palm devices. From left to right: Calendar (apple), Contacts (apple), Todo (Appigo) and VoiceRecord (quick notes). I'm probably going to switch VoiceRecord to Jott. Appigo Notebook will be on a secondary screen, as a search resource.

Update: They do have a blog, see comments. Now I have to figure out why I couldn't find it!

I'm still figuring out the best way to manage the memo migration. I couldn't find any help screens from toodledo.

The export file uses this structure:

"TITLE","FOLDER","ADDED","MODIFIED","NOTE"
"Create a New Notebook","Tips & Tricks","2008-09-12","2008-09-12","...."

So that might work for import too. At the moment this data lives in 3 places, each with its own complications:

1. Outlook: best export, but Outlook Memos do not have Titles. So I'd have to parse out the first line of each memo to create a title. I might be able to do that in Access.
2. Palm Desktop: the export is weird. Just weird. I must be missing something - it doesn't look like it could be reasonably imported. Everything is together.
3. Palm handheld: I could probably install Palm desktop on our ancient iBook and sync there to the old Mac Palm Desktop, which was a descendant of a Claris product. It has great notes and export.
   
4. Carriage returns: In every case Memos have embedded carriage returns (paragraphs). CSV import will eliminate those.

So there won't be any great solutions, just less bad ones.

Update 9/29/08: Every year I tell my students that everything I know about applied health informatics I learned from my Palm. My Notes export experience was no exception. In this one case I'm not sure it would even help to buy Missing Sync for iPhone!

I tried several routes to get my Palm Notes into Toodledo. Only one worked, albeit a bit oddly. Here they are:

1. Palm Desktop/PC: I sync'd the Tungsten E|2 to Palm Desktop PC, then tried the CSV export. The result looked odd, and Toodledo's notebook import couldn't manage it at all. Just gibberish.
2. Outlook: Outlook export is pretty good, but Outlook Notes/Memos are very barebones. They don't have a separate title field, the first row of a Note is the title. So you can't export a title field.
3. Palm Desktop/OS X: This is little change from Claris Organizer, so I'll call it "Organizer". In Organizer tasks, calendar items and contacts are linked to memos. Standalone memos are called 'desktop memos'. The export tool does a good job exporting memos in a tab delimited file. Oddly enough, you can't really export ANYTHING else! So you can export tasks, but they will be missing their related Memo. (This, by the way, is why I like FileMaker Bento. I don't think anyone but me gets why that little app matters. But that's another story.)

So I installed the latest version of Palm Desktop/Organizer on my old G3 10.3.9 iBook and exported the Notes as tab delimited. I then imported them into FileMaker Pro 8.

At this point, interestingly, the notes still have embedded carriage returns (PC character set I think).

I then exported from FM Pro as CSV. I first tried UTF-16 encoding but that was gibberish to Toodledo so I tried Macintosh characters. The import worked and the carriage returns were transformed in '|' characters.

So it worked, in the end -- though I did lose the paragraphs.

I'm hoping I made a simple mistake early on, because I don't think any non-geek would ever get this working.

For these kinds of Palm migration problems I normally recommend OS X users buy Missing Sync for Palm (Palm migration is bundled with Missing Sync for iPhone too), but I don't know what the export capabilities of the Missing Sync Notebook are. I looked at the export from their Blackberry Missing Sync Notebook and it wouldn't work at all.

Incidentally, exporting Notes to Evernote was only marginally better.

In the end, notes were harder than anything else. I'd never have guessed.

PS. the Toodledo interface for Notes is only slighly better than nothing at all. On the other hand, Appigo Notebook is very nice and the search is fast.

OS X 10.5.5: CPU pegging with Firefox

Even after five updates it's not clear that 10.5.5 is a better OS for my iMac G5 than 10.4.11. Leopard is probably optimized for the Intel machines, and I suspect the security measures (memory address changes) have their price.

The biggest problem now is it's slow. In particular Firefox routinely pegs the CPU (activity monitor) on 10.5 whereas it didn't on 10.4. The type lag is very annoying. In general it feels about 10% slower for most of what I do.

So if you have a PPC machine on 10.4.11 you might want to wait until you buy a new machine to switch.

Update 9/27/08: I find a few other people noticing this. Some are disabling the memory cache. I'll try the new google toolbar and look for other extensions to remove.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5 bug 5: archive and install cross-user startup (login) item application: "In the course of updating my MacBook and iMac to 10.5 I've previously documented four significant bugs (though the last may, after some fixes, have limited impact):

* LaunchDaemons: cannot login from admin account
* Permissions - apps cannot be updated
* Keychain First Aid 10.2 running on OS X 10.5
* The unknown user and group bugs

Now I can add a fifth bug [1].

The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.

Digital radio - Apple style

Well, that was certainly stealthy.

Suddenly digital radio is upon us - quite unexpectedly.

My first awakening was the excellent Minnnesota Public Radio app for the iPhone -- a joint venture between MPR and CodeMorphic - a Twin Cities Mac dev shop (interesting projects!).

So now I can play digital radio in my car while I drive to work -- through my iPhone. (Yeah, it won't work as well as it does at home, but don't you think Sirius/XM worry about this?)

That reminded me that M has been asking for a radio for the kitchen. There are some excellent radios still on the market, and we'll probably get one, but we also have a pretty nice iTunes/AirTunes/iPhone Remote setup already in place. Didn't iTunes used to play streaming radio?

Turns out they still do, iPhone Remote will find the stations in my playlist, and the choices and quality are better than I remember. Consider CBC Jazz ...

CBC Radio 2 Blog - Tech Q's?: How To Listen To The New R2 New Internet Channels

... Peter kindly walks us through how to listen to R2's new internet radio channels, which include classical, Canadian composers, Canadian songwriters, and jazz.

Over to Dr. Peter:

'Audio on the internet used to be a minor miracle . . . but a really lousy sounding one. Especially for music! Often it still does sound bad. But not when it's coming from CBC Radio 2.

Today we launched our new new Internet Radio Channels and we're pretty proud of the sound quality...

So we've created some 'How to' files to help you make your way.

* How to Listen to CBC Radio 2's New Online Channels
* How to Connect Your Computer to Your Audio System...

The 192kbps Jazz stream sounds as good as my 192 kbps encoded Jazz tunes. In other words, good enough for my ears. There's even a Big Band station I'll try out on my mother.

There's even a "staff picks" list in iTunes now -- new each month.

So now Apple rules digital radio.

Anyone noticing?

Gordon's stuff, now in 35 languages

As if English weren't bad enough, my less unpopular blogs now feature a translation widget. If you try it you can see me in, say, Chinese.

The widget uses Google's statistically based machine translation. It was pretty easy to install and the translation is very quick. Give it a try; ignore the eerie Twilight Zone background music you might imagine.

Yes, more future shock. Not to worry, the translations are probably pretty bad. I suspect to get good results from machine translation you have to use a translation-optimized version of your native language with simple grammar, no homographs, longer words, no abbreviations, less jargon, etc.

I was provoked to experiment when reading of new Google Translator Languages such as "Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian ...Vietnamese". Each can translate to the other, but I read that English is always an intermediary. A double translation is going to be pretty funny, but not terribly useful.

The first part of the embedding process is to go to translate.google.com and visit the tools page. That's where you pick up your JavaScript.

Then go to Blogger Layout and, from the Basic menu, choose the HTML/Javascript widget. Past in your JavaScript and then arrange the widget on you blog template.

I wonder if I'm better in Danish.