Using the Palm Pre as your Peripheral Brain
I’ve had a Palm Pre for about 2 months now and I can declare that the device has seen tremendous improvement with firmware updates (pushed OTA) and a steadily increasing amount of useful applications in the Palm App Catalog and the unofficial Homebrew scene.
How usable is it as an smartphone for doctors? Well I can say it pretty much does replace your old PalmOS device as it is. One of the cool features of the old Palm PDAs is the ability to keep snippets of information in the Memos (Notes) in various categories for instant recall. These notes may be protocols, clinical pearls or practically any bits of information which you want to look up while rounding for instance.
WebOS’ builtin “post-it” type Memos is ok if you are keeping about 10-20 notes but pretty useless if you are talking about 300-500 notes or more.
There are several solutions at hand which overcome this limitation.
1) You could move over to Evernote as your information organiser. Evernote allows you to not only store text information but also PDFs, images etc. It is multi-platform and a free client is available in Palm’s App Catalog. It does however store the information “in the cloud” and you won’t be able to access it without an Internet connection. The latter also slows down access to notes a little. Still, it is a useful option and basic usage is free.
2) If you are using Classic 2.x , you could sync your PalmOS Memos over to Classic using Network Hotsync with the Pre connected via Wifi to your LAN. The disadvantage of course is that you have to use your notes within Classic and it isn’t quite as convenient as a native WebOS app.
3) There is now a native WebOS application which replicates the good old Palm Memos. Enter ClassicNote for WebOS
This is a free application which stores your notes in categories just like PalmOS Memos. The author (see Homepage) has included a desktop utility which allows you to import all (you can opt to skip any category you want during the import process) your old PalmOS Memos if you have them in Palm Desktop 6.2. I ran it in Vista without a hitch and now I have my 300+ memos running in ClassicNote!
Search is an important feature if one were to have lots of notes and the search function is fast. The search function acts as a filter and will display a list of memos which contain your search terms.
In the screenshot below, I searched for “Hydroxyurea” and it displays one item found.
To disable the filter, one just checks the search icon in the bottom right.
Data is important and the author has thoughtfully included instructions on how to back up your data which basically resides in your USB Media/internal partition.
I regularly backup my entire Media/internal partition anyway with Microsoft Synctoy so my ClassicNote data is also backed up whenever I do so.
It would be really nice for a two-way sync with a Desktop application but as it is, I have my peripheral brain back again in my Palm Pre!
ClassicNote is free but the author Sebastian Stöcklein has put a Donation link in his Homepage. I have sent in my little donation as it is a great app worth supporting.
ClassicNote at the moment is a Homebrew app found in Precentral. If you have not installed Homebrew apps before, you should read Precentral’s Guide to Installing Homebrew.
The most important thing is to install Preware on your Palm Pre. This requires WebOS Quick Install to install Preware and the Package Manager Service in your Pre, but once you have Preware installed, everything else is OTA just like the Palm App Catalog. If you have not tried Preware, trust me, you are missing out on a lot of fun! I have two medical apps there OncoPDA and Drugview, still in Preware and not moved on yet to the Palm App Catalog.
|
About the author, Alan: Alan Teh is a Malaysian Physician who specialises in Hematology-Oncology & Stem cell Transplantation. He has been using Palm PDAs since 1997 and is absolutely reliant on them. His current PDA is a Palm Pre and is a strong advocate of the webOS platform, Palm's latest operating system. Caught the blogging bug in 2004 and has been addicted ever since… |
