Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Tuesday night, xpioti gave me my first PDA, an old Handspring Visor. When I heard about palmtop devices, I thought the idea sounded interesting but worried about how much computing power one could fit there, and the user interace. When my friends started getting them, I thought they looked potentially useful, with both advantages and disadvangtages compared to my paper DayRunner, and had no idea whether I would find such a thing useful, whether the UI would drive me crazy, whether it would replace my DayRunner or augment it ... it was an "I'll have to try one for a week or a month someday" thing.

Now I've got my hands on one. I'm adapting to Graffiti (the stylus-stroke text entry system) much more quickly than I expected to (though the stroke for '9' is so different from how I write a nine that I still have to stop and think, I'm not making my gestures large enough[1], and I still have to look up most of the punctuation). But despite the poor contrast (especially compared to black ink on white paper), the slower handwriting, and not being able to see as much of what I'd written earlier at a time, I do find I'm reaching for the smaller device that I don't have to physically flip open to the right page to use before I reach for my familiar DayRunner.

Last night I sent the following to a general-discussion mailing list (so a bunch of my LJ friends will have seen it already):

Subject: Tell me what to do with my Visor

I was just given a used Handspring Visor Platinum. It's running PalmOS 3.5.2H1. What does the Elbows hive mind consider essential downloads (starting with free ones) to install, and why? And are there better sites (in terms of selection and/or site useability and organization) to look for downloads than www.handspring.com and www.palm.com?

I've seen such devices in friends' hands, but I'm only just now holding one and starting to get ideas for how it might be useful to me. I'm still at the stage of figuring out what questions I should be asking/Googling.

After spending a day entering calendar events, writing down the stuff I usually record during the day in my DayRunner, and even downloading a book reader and a copy of Free Culture, which John has been telling me I absolutely must read, and then reading the responses so far to my request for suggestions, my impression is this:

This device is really pretty much a Toy out of the box (though as has been pointed out to me, for some people the built-in calendar/addressbook/to-do list are enough to be useful), but it seems that if I install the right combination of third-party software, it'll turn into a powerful and extremely personally customized Serious Tool with a bunch of toys tacked on.

So now I need to spend a while surfing the sites folks have pointed me at, looking for the components that'll make this toy my tool, find the tools I'll need to write my own programs for it, and then spend a week or two asking myself what else I wish it would do. In a couple of months we'll see whether it has become a prosthetic brain crucial to life support, or simply a more powerful toy with some convenient tools folded in. Very early data suggest the former, but the jury is out. That it will at least be useful seems a pretty safe bet.

And since I've got two cradles (a serial one and a USB one), and like to be able to do most things from both the office (where the Windows machines are) and the bedroom (Mac), I need to find out whether hotsyncing to two different computers will completely bollix things up. (I should be able to set up both desktop hotsync apps to store things in the same directory on my fileserver ... unless they keep some of the info in the Windows registry or someplace in the System folder on the Mac.)

Now to look for music tools (an ABC reader perhaps?) and either a spreadsheet or a database where I get to define the records.

[1] When I was in Montessori, I liked to write small. Some of my classmates and I would have contests to see who could write (legibly) the smallest. We got so small that we had to sharpen the pencil again every few letters lest the thickness of the line grow larger than the shapes of the letters. (I'm not exaggerating for effect here -- that's literally what we did. I think we got into an argument once over whether it still counted as legible if a magnifying glass was needed.) We only wrote a few words at a time that small, for our little competitions, but my handwriting in general started tending toward the small size. Then in seventh grade I had a math teacher who couldn't read my handwriting because it was too small, and she insisted that I write larger. The quality of my handwriting started its decline at that point, and I'm disinclined to think that's mere coincidence (not only because of the timing, but also because I later noticed that when I write smaller I write more neatly, even if I'm writing at similar speed). In college I was briefly able to get ahold of narrow-ruled notebooks, and sometimes put two lines of notes per line on the paper when sitting in note-intensive lectures (such as Theatre History, a core requirement that I enjoyed far more than I expected to, enough so that I went back for the second semester of it as an elective). I used to put three lines of handwritten notes per line of normal-ruled paper. Nowadays the smallest I can find is college-ruled, which is noticeably larger. I miss narrow-rule. But I digress. Anyhow, when I'm writing on the Visor, I'm thinking "precision" because a dumb device has to be able to recognize my strokes ... and so I automatically make my motions smaller, which is the opposite of what the Visor wants. So I've got to re-train myself like I did in seventh grade, all over again.

Oddly enough, my taste for very sharp pencils and very fine lines eventually left me frustrated with a device I had to sharpen so bloody often to keep it comfortable (and back then the 0.1 mm mechanical pencils weren't around, at least not any that I ever saw), so I switched to ball point pens because they never needed sharpening, and just adjusted to never having a really fine line, but never having it get any worse. This raised eyebrows when I got to college and people noticed that while most students liked pens, all but one of the math majors preferred pencils, and I was the oddball in the math department.

But my wishes for precision and control and a comfortable feel, evenness of line and reliability, do leave me picky about my pens. I use cheap disposables most of the time (though I've got a Cross in my DayRunner), but I definitely have my favourite brands and detested brands. I've not yet found the perfect pen (can I have something that makes a perfectly even, extremely fine line like a Rapidograph and feels like one as it does so, but writes at any angle to the paper, as a felt-tip does, with ink that dries so quickly that I never need to worry about the dreaded southpaw smudge, and a barrel custom fit exactly to my hand?), but I'm always picking up unfamiliar pens and trying them out when I see a display.

Fountain pens are a whole 'nuther thing, and probably warrant their own journal entry (even though it'll be shorter than this footnote).