Meeting #15

General

Highlights

Impressions: new meeting venue
Free-for-all discussions
Travel software

This month, we had 7 members at the Wednesday meeting and 6 members at the Saturday meeting. Two new members join us at the Wednesday meeting.

Wednesday	Saturday
Al-Noor Alladin	Rob Bowen
Pat Cooper	Sean D. Evans
John Cosentini	Steve Mandula
Scott Currie	Sam Peralta
Sean D. Evans	Russell Scheer
Bryan Glaholm	Karen Thompson
Dave Harvey
Bruce McKay
Kim Waddell

As usual, discussions started off at many levels, and the following gives a flavour of the varied topics.

Sean showed off the Star Trek hack on his Palm, which gives you a choice of different sounds to play when actions occur on your Palm (like alarms) covering Tricorder, phasers, and other related gadgets!

Palm OS 3.5 was discussed. There is a neat picture of this OS, which supports 8-bit colour, on PalmStation. Apparently this was showed off at the recent PalmSource developers conference, and people are now designing applications for this!

Microsoft is due to release a new version of Windows CE, code-named Rapier. However, market share for the PalmOS continues to be strong, and advance screenings of Rapier by developers is very negative.

Datebook+ was discussed, which is a complement to the regular on-board application, giving you various icons, extended date view capabilities, and other powerful functions.

The Singapore Palm User Group (SPUG) has been able to get a "Join Singapore PUG" sticker on the box of every Palm organizer sold in Singapore. This was probably due to their very close ties to the Palm organization in Singapore. We wondered whether this was possible in Canada.

Palm Computing will likely be spinning off from 3Com early next year. Watch for it!

Travel Software

Worldmate is a useful travel software with a variety of features. It offers five separate clocks that the user can set to different cities, a clothing size converter as well as a currencies converter. Common Sense Software are the developers, and this software carried good reviews at ZDNet as well as a Golden Palm award.

Time Traveller, by Class Action, is a powerful and popular software application. It displays different timelines, and supplements the standard datebook function on your Palm. It has good reviews from Cnet and has been a PalmGear Gear's Choice and on PalmCentral's popular software lists.

ITIL Tourmate provides an English-to-foreign language translation software which is very unique in that it gives you a chance to enter and learn translations phonetically! It is available for French, German, Hindi, Italian and Japanese, at $10 per language module.

Gulliver, by Landware provides a complete solution for anyone's travel needs. It organizes the travel itinerary, the airline and vendor list, car and hotel itinerary, and provides a wealth of information at your fingertips. This software comes very highly recommended.

Prizes

Prizes are one of the many ways we encourage active participation at meetings.

If you want to learn about others’ experiences – trade information, tips and tricks, find about new software, and even get a first-hand look at new hardware before buying, how best to obtain service, and so on – this is the place to go. Prizes are a plus.

Having said that…..

The prizes were determined by means of a blind draw from the garlic bread basket.

Wednesday	Prize	Saturday	Prize
Al-Noor Alladin	WorldMate	Rob Bowen	TourMate: Japanese
Pat Cooper	WorldMate	Sean D. Evans
John Cosentini	TourMate	Steve Mandula	TourMate: Spanish
Scott Currie	WorldMate	Sam Peralta	WorldMate
Sean D. Evans		Russell Scheer	WorldMate
Bryan Glaholm	Time Traveler	Karen Thompson	ThinkingBytes
Dave Harvey	WorldMate
Bruce McKay	WorldMate
Kim Waddell	WorldMate

Rob Bowen, Page Compiler, Canada's Premier PUG
Sam Peralta, Scribe, Canada's Premier PUG
Sean D. Evans, President, Canada’s Premier PUG