Hi, I'm Evil Dave. Some of you may remember me from flamewars such as "Template Toolkit doesn't seperate presentation from logic" and "Anti-virus vendors are as bad as spammers".

There was a discussion today on the #london.pm IRC channel about making Openguides data available on PDAs. I think this is a Jolly Good Idea. Being able to consult a database in my pocket for restaurant and pub reviews would be most useful. Yes, there's Vindigo, but its pub coverage is dire, and in any case, you need to be running Windows or Linux to get it working, and all the cool kids these days are drinking the OS X Kool-Aid.

So, I propose that I write a Palm application which encapsulates the more important bits of Openguides functionality and which can be fed a database, updated at regular intervals. I can start work on this once I finish writing some phone stuff for the Palm which I've been sitting on doing nothing for months.

There are plenty of other PDAs. However, Palm OS is the most common, has the cheapest devices, and is also the most primitive. Therefore I suggest targetting that platform first, and then writing front-ends for other platforms if they are thought necessary, using the same database. The format of Palm databases is well-documented and there are libraries available for many platforms. Taking some other route would not work, as Palm OS is so primitive that it *only* understands its own database format. It does NOT play well with others.

Do we have any experienced Palm and/or C developers here? C is my language is choice for working on Palm OS, mostly because perl isn't available, the mini Java VMs are as buggy as very buggy things, and Python - well, it's Python. Other languages available are BASIC, Lisp and Forth. Forth isn't really suitable, my Lisp-fu isn't strong enough, and BASIC sucks arse.

C also has the advantage that the tools are available for free. I use a gcc m68k cross-compiler, and a bunch of free tools for building the GUI front-end and linking everything right. The Palm OS Emulator is available for free from Palm, and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and probably others. And it has the exceptionally nifty feature of talking with gdb.

Such a project would require that the main Openguides project can supply data, with a nice stable structure. It also requires that Openguides people decide what functionality is important for such a tool and what isn't. bear in mind the constraint that plenty of Palm devices only have 4Mb of storage or less. This is used both for the running application's heap and long-term storage of apps and data. We should aim for a total size of no more than half a meg, and anything more than a meg is Right Out.

So, errm, any thoughts?