Front Matter

Introduction

The Palm OS platform is an incredibly powerful personal productivity and effectiveness aid. It is a tool for everyday tasks: remembering directions to a location, figuring out the things you want to accomplish today and tracking your progress in accomplishing them, remembering ideas or events so you can think about them later when you are free to do so. It is a notebook, in a sense, but an active one: not only can it record your appointment schedule for the day, it can remind you at the appropriate time to go to the appointment.

It is also a computer, and through HotSync can transfer its data to your desktop or laptop computer. Not only is it a notebook, in a sense, it is a notebook your computer can read. You do not need to keyboard your notes to get them into your computer: once you HotSync your Palm OS device, your notes are already there.

Palm OS devices are portable in the extreme: they generally fit into shirt pockets. They can be used even on a crowded bus or airplane, in a waiting room, or anywhere your hands are free and you have a spare moment.

Although it is in some sense irrelevant, you may find it revealing that this site’s entire text content was written on a Palm OS device in spare minutes: while waiting in airports and doctor’s waiting rooms, while watching television, while relaxing in bed before sleep, and so forth. Only proofing and HTML markup was done on a PC.

Steve Jobs, one of the inventors of the Apple computer, read an article comparing the efficiency of animals in moving. The unaided human being was neither particularly efficient nor inefficient in converting energy into motion. But a human being aided by a bicycle is far more efficient than any other animal. This was the seed that grew into Jobs’s vision of the computer as a “bicycle for the mind”: a tool to make human intelligence more efficient. Much of the real power of a Palm OS device comes from how you choose to use it. You can treat it as little more than a toy, in which case the benefit you get from it will be similar to that of a toy. Or you can use it as an intellectual tool, as a bicycle for the mind, and find your everyday life transformed in little ways with surprisingly large benefit.

This web site attempts to show you techniques and tools you can use to let your Palm OS device help you be more productive and effective in typical day-to-day life balancing work, family, recreation, and personal development.

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Front Matter

Introduction

Brian’s PalmOS Device Corner