Palm Pilot Tips & Tricks
Last Modified 1/10/00.

I got a Palm Pilot for Christmas. I don't know how I ever managed to live without one. It's like a phone book, notebook, grocery list and gameboy all in one. One of the best things about my Palm Pilot is that it synchronizes so easily with other popular Mac software. 3Com/Palm Computing lists several utilities for this purpose. I downloaded the demo MultiMail Conduit from Actual Software to synchronize Eudora with the Palm Pilot email program. It works great! Not only can I read my email on the Palm, I can also compose replies that will be sent back to my Eudora outbox the next time I synchronize. That's my idea of useful software. Palmgear.com is another site that I've found contains lots of useful palm additions.

Not all applications synchronize in both directions. The packages by Data Viz that convert Microsoft Word and Excel to documents that can be read on the Palm Pilot don't currently allow you to edit those documents on the Palm, but if the information you want to synchronize can be stored in the Palm Desktop organizer, you can use applescript to synchronize Palm Desktop with whatever other scriptable applications you like.

I've always used Filemaker to keep track of my business because it's so flexible. I have all my company contact information in Filemaker so I can automatically tie that information to records on time spent on projects, invoices, and payments. I like the way Palm Desktop allows me to keep track of my contacts so I decided to use Palm Desktop as the main point of entry for all my contacts and write an applescript that would transfer the contact information to Filemaker if I felt I needed to keep it in my Filemaker system for my business. (I have heard of the FMSync but at the moment they have nothing that I can use.) The applescript creates a new record in Filemaker with all the information from Palm Desktop in just a couple seconds. It will also update the record in Filemaker if it already exists. You can download that editable applescript and the accompanying Read Me here. Also included are applescripts to make a new message in Eudora from a contact's email address, a script to make a new message in Microsoft Outlook Express, and scripts to look up contact URLs with Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Back to the Top