PalmGear is back!
PalmGear is back and it already has way more apps than the app store! I never knew why the store went away. Even if the Palm was not as popular as it once was I didn’t see how revenue for the store would increase by creating a confusing mashup with PocketGear. I wasted a lot of hours searching for apps there and now can look forward to doing that some time soon to find rare gems. Everything seems pretty much as it was when it left but we are notified that it is now under new management. I found out about this on a post over at Palmaddicts. I wonder if all my links to software recommendations I made here in the past still work? If you are a Palm User this is certainly big news as one of the biggest strengths of the Palm is the library of third party software.
Here is a nice intuitive little program I found on the site for NS Basic (a palm development platform). It was one of the apps featured to show you what is possible using it as a development environment. I really like it. Anything that put any kind of alphabet structure on the Palm is good in my book. It fills a missing gap in my opinion when it comes to searching on the Palm. I absolutely adore the Quick look up feature in Contacts. This program as you can see allows you to organize all your memos through alpha tabs. Scroll through or tap a letter and all memos whose title start with that letter are listed right there for you. Better than graffiti look up, palm find or sometimes even categories. Now if only someone could duplicate Palm’s Quick Look Up feature in their application. If you don’t know what I am taking about check out my comparison 
Palm has a great instant search feature but it is not where you’d think it would be. I find the Quick Look Up feature of the contact/address book a very powerful search utility. It is something I even thought should be used for outliners like Bonsai. With one hand you are able to find a specific item and select it with just a few navigator clicks. There are many possible uses for it especially when you consider that you have 15 categories. All you need to do is save one for the address book and you can create 14 different types of search databases. I welcome your suggestions in the comments. I’ll start off with one useful database.
Let me start off by saying this application was made primarily for Palm OS 4. I wouldn’t normally profile a Palm program this old but it is too good to skip over. This little gem is only $10 and if you run Palm OS 4 this is your lucky day. It claims to work on Palm OS 5 & if you can get it to work you’ll be just as lucky. Inbox works almost like Slap but the difference between them is major. Slap provides you with a memo area where you can input text. Once entered this text can be transfered as a contact, address, task, memo, or even some third party applications like Daynotez. How is Inbox different and what does it do? It allows you to highlight text from any application on your palm and do the same thing intuitively. You can also use this to help you create emails including the to, subject & body sections and all in one transfer.
One of the great things about Palm’s huge software library is that because of its size, the freeware section is also quite large in size too. There is a Palm freeware site that has been around for a while but the pop ups, swat this fly, or name the obvious type quiz banners that are really quite annoying. I found an alternative that is very neat & clean. They also seem to be up to date with social networking options including delicious, digg and feedburner rss feeds. You can even subscribe to a mailing list and get free Palm software offerings delivered to your inbox. The ironic thing is that the only difference between this site and the one I mentioned earlier is a missing dash in freeware-palm. You want the site with the dash. I’ll post the link at the end of this post. They also have sister sites for smartphones, pocketpc, and even a palm blog. For free software and more this seems to be a wonderful resource for the palm enthusiast. Visit the site by 
I don’t work for Palmgear. Palmgear doesn’t give me a check for posting this here. I wouldn’t refuse it if they did. However, at the risk of being seen as someone who promotes Palmgear for some selfish reason I will post their special offer here. It definitely is Palm related and some of you who have been meaning to pick up some programs can save a couple of bucks. If you didn’t know, now you do and now you too can be a savvy shopper. The coupon code is March20. Enjoy.
