Palm and Treo Hacks

Write Your Own Programs

Writing programs for your Palm is not as hard as you might think. You can write programs on the desktop and download them to your Palm device. You can also write small programs directly on your Palm device itself.

There are many different development environments for Palm OS devices. You can get Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for your desktop machine which let you build programs to download to your Palm device. You can also get some interesting applications that let you develop programs (or scripts) directly on your Palm device. Of the development environments covered in this hack, the Palm OS Developer Suite, NS Basic, and Pocket Smalltalk are desktop environments. DragonForth and Pippy both run directly on a Palm device. Even if your development environment runs on a Palm, you can still write your programs at your desktop by running the Palm OS Emulator or Simulator. You can find additional development environments. Two good resources are the Palm OS developer site ( http://www.palmsource.com) and an independent page that covers lots of resources at http://www.winikoff.net/palm/dev.html.

Palm OS Developer Suite

The newest development environment for Palm OS 5 and Palm OS 6 is Eclipse. The good news is that Eclipse is open source. The bad new is that Palm’s customized version of Eclipse only runs on Windows XP. Eclipse itself is cross-platform, but the extensions for Palm development only run under Windows. Eclipse is an Integrated Development ...