[clug] lightweight tool for creating PDA-style Apps

James Polley clug at zhasper.com
Tue Jul 28 23:19:00 MDT 2009


On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 11:48 AM, steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au>wrote:

> For years I had a PSION 3. Used it so much, I wore the printing off the
> keycaps. I even *typed* docs on it when travelling... At least one
> person wrote a book on one.
>
> Then I got a PSION 5 and it didn't click for me. Battery life too short.
> (AA's. Rechargeables were worse)
> The specs were great & it did nice things like 'voice recorder' without
> buttons.
>
> PSIONs lost the PDA market and morphed into Symbian.
>
> Which led me to getting a Palm TX - again nice specs, but didn't work
> for me...
>
> I've looked at Symbian mobiles, Nokia smartphones and the iTouch and
> they lack the things that really made the PSION great for me:
>  - multitasking
>  - database engine
>  - scripting language (OPL) integrated with the windowing system
>
> For a 30Mhz processor with limited memory, these gizmos did a heck of a
> lot...
>
> With the advent of cheap/small netbooks - especially with the Google
> announcement & ARM processors - I'm thinking I can recreate what I loved
> about the PSION :-)
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> My Question:
>  Do you know of any lightweight tools suitable for creating PDA-style
> Apps (good UI tools) on low-powered netbooks??
> -----------------------------------------------
>
>
> TCL/Tk could do it, but I've always found the reverse-polish style of
> TCL unintuitive.
> Haven't used Lua, but it doesn't come with UI support.
>
> PERL/Python/Ruby - not sure...
>
> I've never been a fan of JAVA - big footprint to both develop & run.
>
> Maybe I need to investigate Javascript & pick up some DB libraries
> (Tridge's TDB?)
>
> Suggestions?
>
>
>
>
> One of the meta-functions necessary is 2-way syncing for Scheduler,
> Contacts, (email?) ... between 'base' and the portable device.
>
> 'rsync' is a partial solution, but only if all changes are restricted to
>  separate files in each environment.
>
> Perhaps I should look at Google Gears... IIRC, they solve the off-line
> sync problem.


No. Gears(/HTML5) solves the "offline storage" problem; syncing your offline
datastore with Teh InterCloudz is still something you have to solve
yourself.

I think the generic solution to this is SyncML, but it's not something
I've ever looked at.

Have you looked at Maemo at all?


>
>
> TIA
> steve
>
> --
> Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
> PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
>
> sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
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