Anyone want to help with an offline Palm OS -Thing?

After one too many booksales where I wasn't able to answer my wife whether we already have a book and/or it's on her wishlist, I decided we needed to make better use of having put everything into LibraryThing.

LT Mobile is cool, of course, but I don't have a phone and she doesn't feel like paying the carrier's exorbitant monthly "data plan" and per-byte charges. So I'm thinking just a plain old PDA.

To start, I'm just doing a classic 68K app, to keep it lean and mean for more devices. Mostly modeled after the ROM Address Book.

I did a proof of concept over the weekend and our entire library fits into an ancient half-dead PalmVx with loads of room to spare for the wishlist, once LT gets around to activating the promised collections feature. A newer, faster, device with the same amount of memory can be had from eBay and closeouts for around the price of a hardback.

Help could be coding or testing or pretty much anything else. If there is enough interest and Tim has no objection, I'll create a group for further discussion.

I have an old Palm V I picked up at a yard sale...it had never been used. I would love to be a tester of your palm app! I have used Readerware Palm version on my now-dead Sony clie and it worked great but have not transferred RW to the next Palm so I have plenty of room. I have a cell phone but it costs me minutes to use it to check LT and I don't have service in my favorite book sale place.

I'm afraid I don't have a Palm, but I've a PocketPC. There's a program called Booklib which has pretty good functionality, but has a horrible import system (and, I don't have the patience for it until I get a paid LT account to add all of my books in). Not to ask if you can code one for another operating system, but just so you know what's been done before. As a fellow PDA user, good luck!

http://coderyder.starke-muegge.de/index.php/Home/Willkommen

Just to be clear, I don't have anything against PocketPC or WinCE / Windows Mobile. They're pretty impressive at the high-end for a complete PDA. Programming a scaled-down Windows isn't any harder than programming an imitation of the classic Mac from the '80's, which is how PalmOS feels. Visual Studio is a good IDE, as is Eclipse (though nothing beats Emacs). Of course, I know people at DEC Digital Compaq HP who have put Linux on iPaq. Heck, I'd even think about a Zaurus if it were a bit better supported in the States (and a bit less otaku).

But right now I'm aiming for the cheapest, lightest weight platform. Almost a standalone LT appliance (though the app will still be a good citizen). I'm not any more convinced about cell phone convergence than about HTPC convergence.

tarpfarmer: Is this a plain Palm V or a Palm Vx? If the former, 2MB should be enough to hold a database your size. But it will likely still be running OS 3.0.1. There is no supported upgrade, just old 4.1 CDs sometimes on eBay. I think I can make 3.0 work, but it will require a bit more testing here that I've compensated for missing 3.5 features. I'm gonna draw the line there, though, and not aim for the really old models, because they just don't have enough memory or processor or battery life.

That will be runtime version checks. Some things will probably require separate builds of the app, like Unicode for polyglot libraries (naturally), which bloats things pretty significantly. And any PNO code; for instance, I imagine even the Z71 has enough oomph to find a barcode in a photo from its crappy builtin camera if it isn't skewed too much, provided there is an API for it. And if Tim doesn't just add some barcode server to this site.

This is just a plain Palm V with all original stuff so I assuming it has the old software...hey at least it is on a cd and not a floppy :-)
I don't mind picking up a copy of the updated software...the Palm only cost me $5. There are a couple of them listed on Ebay right now.
FYI...my plan (dream) in the spring 2007 when my cell phone gets upgraded is to get a Palm Treo with the Palm OS not windows OS. BUT...dreams often get replaced with freezers or dishwashers so I am not expecting too much :-)
I could just get myself a real Palm (and not wait for yardsale season) so if you have a suggestion for one that would be cheap, hold my LT database, my readerware DB which has 1,000 more books than my LT, and be something that would run the OS version that is more up to date please let me know what it is. I am SURE it will be way less than a TREO! I am not hung up on making it work for the old one and all I really want it to do is hold my books.
Thanks!

MMcM, perfectly understandable, and no, I had no expectations for a Pocket PC dedicated system - and I wasn't sure quite what you originally had in mind. I'll keep watching though, if you don't mind.

Concerning barcodes - I tried this out with my laptop's digital camera over the summer. Even if LT doesn't support them directly, if you can get the camera to recognize the ISBN, you're pretty much set.

3.0: Don't give up hope just yet. I've got something that seems to work in the Emulator with a 3.0 ROM. (Thank you, ORA for not removing those old downloads. No thank you, Palm, for doing so from your official developer site.) Things may still go wrong with a real device, of course.

I quite like the idea of getting a $5 yard sale item to do this. It confirms that with the LT website doing all the heavy lifting, you don't need much to take care of portable access when away from the net at bookstores or charity booksales.

Right! I'll hang on then and go ahead and install the software on my computer just in case it might work. The only thing I need to see is if I have a title and whether it is paper or hardcover. My ReaderWare Palm version only allows me to search by author ...would I also be able to search by title or would that be too up hill?
Actually I'll be happy with anything I get :-) and there is plenty of time. My favorite book sale is the end of December.

Have you looked at pilot-db? It's been around for a while and it allows pretty flexible databases to be created and viewed on both the palm and the desktop. There's plenty of ways to import straight from CSV or "tab delimited" (anybody know why that export function returns an .xls file? Openoffice opens it in writer instead of spreadsheet mode -- kinda annoying) straight into a pilot-db database.

In fact, I already had the tab open in my browser to remind me to check it back out once I finish getting my books into LT (just signed up recently) to work up a mechanism to move them into my treo (though for now there's a loophole in T-Mobile's data plan that gets me $5/month unlimited data on the phone--talk about a good deal!)

I packed up the weekend efforts. Have a look here and give it a shot when you have a chance. Don't be put off by the size of the download. The installer needs to include a complete JRE 1.3 that it installs privately for HotSync to use if it isn't already there. The real app is like 50K.

Regarding using a general-purpose database, it's always a tradeoff between a more flexible tool and one targeted to specific tasks. Already myself I've processed the export file within Excel and in purpose built programs / scripts (in Java, Javascript, VBScript, lua, Perl, XSLT, Prolog, and Common Lisp so far — evidently I'm fickle). Neither seems overall superior. Of course, Excel macros and shell + awk + ... kind of blur the distinction.

The tab-delimited export is marked as a .xls file so that it will open in Excel for "hoi polloi". In fact, based on what I know, the current export settings of .xls extension and UTF-16 with BOM are the only ones that will work automatically without any user intervention. Everything else decodes the file incorrectly or brings up at least one dialog with potentially confusing questions, even if the defaults are fine. When you download and save the file, can't you just specify .txt if that's what you'd prefer? I thought when I did something with it under Kubuntu "the right thing" happened, but it's been a while.