Palm to Pocket
I’ve been working on this old school ASP website for work now for about a month. So far everything is going well and I’m about ready for a beta release. Or so I thought. I was asked to develop the site with the assumption that all users would be accessing the site via a Treo 650 or like model. If you’ve ever done any coding; stand alone or web, you know that developing for one specific type of device/user can be bad. However, since this website is designed to compete with a Palm app and I just started the job I didn’t dwell on the matter too much. So after about four weeks of working around all the shortcomings of Palm and limitations of the Blazer browser my boss comes up to me and tells me that we’ll be changing end user devices to Pocket PC. This is a mixed blessing. The good thing is that Pocket PC, or Windows Mobile, has a fairly decent browser and can actually render thing correctly. The bad thing is that my boss wants me to add all the JavaScript features that I had to exclude because Blazer couldn’t hack it back into the website for the beta release. We’ll be discussing the website again on Monday and I’m 99% sure I’ll get him to say that the JavaScript features can be included in the beta 2 release.
One thing that I should point out is a vast difference in emulators. Palm had a couple of version of the Treo 650 emulator, one for each of the cell phone carriers, and they worked OK. I had too many crashes to count when using Blazer. Go to any site with a multiple select drop down list and it would work 75% of the time as opposed to the Pocket PC emulator that hasn’t crashed on me yet. There was also a big difference in size of the emulators. The Treo was 12 Megs zipped and used 150 Megs of memory when I upped the amount of memory to 128 Megs. 20 Megs of overhead give or take. The Pocket PC emulator was a 3 Meg exe, and 130 Megs if you wanted a skin. 80 Megs for the SKD which had to be installed to install the 50 Meg Windows CE Emulator images and skin. The Pocket PC emulator is actually a Virtual PC application though there is no virtual harddrive to save your prefences to. The Treo would at lease save some of your settings that you made while running the emulator in an ini file. Pros and Cons to both but I think I’ll like working with the Pocket PC a little more than the Palm.
