Palm and Treo Hacks

Extend Your Palm

HackMaster isn’t just the name of an RPG, but is a collection of system extensions (hacks) for your Palm device.

HackMaster (and its later replacements) manages third-party extensions (hacks) to the Palm OS. Over time, some of the more popular hacks have been incorporated into the operating system itself. For example, new Palm devices support tapping in the title area of an application to bring up the menu. Older Palm devices didn’t support this, so someone wrote MenuHack. MenuHack provided this functionality before it was available in the OS itself.

Other hacks include superFindHack [Hack #7] for improving the built-in Find and various hacks related to entering text, such as CapsHack and MidCapsHack.

There are some limitations to hacks and HackMaster, however. Starting with Palm OS v5.0, HackMaster no longer works. Hacks and HackMaster itself have been so popular that they have spawned several other extension managers or replacement tool sets, such as Teal Master (http://www.tealpoint.com) and pToolSet (http://www.paulcomputing.com).

Tip

To find out what version of Palm OS you are running, go to the launcher and select Info from the Application menu. From the Info form, tap the Version button and you will see the Palm OS version number at the top of the form.

An extension manager handles extensions (hacks) that conform to a common interface. The most common interface for Palm OS extensions is the HackMaster interface. Extension managers allow you to install, delete, ...