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?
--
David Cantrell |
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
Perl may be the best solution for processing a text
file, but asking a group of Perl Mongers clearly isn't
-- aef, in #london.pm