A proud papa

Me and my baby

It's like, the coolest thing. And if you were one of those people, thanks. Again. >:-}

ANYways, what makes the Pilot cool is that it does the things its inventor set out to do: 1) Fits in your shirt pocket, 2) Has really good built-in applications, 3) Is really easy to hook-up and "sync" with your PC (or Mac) Desktop.

And that's it. i mean, that's what made it popular with uh, "normal" people.

What made it popular with geeks like me, is that it has so much dang cool third-party software written for it. And so much of it is freeware, public domain, and shareware, and it's all available for a download from the web.

Anyways, just a brief run-down on the add-on stuff that i consider "essential" on a Pilot:

• LaunchPad - replaces your Applications program with a configurable "launch pad" that lets you categorize your applications with folder tabs. Has other nice shortcuts as well.
• MoneyManager - checkbook and credit card balance keeper. Saves me from overdrawing my bank account, which is a bad bad thing.
• BugMe! - Think of Post-It Notes(tm) that you can attach alarms to.
• AportisDoc - a reader for big text documents. There's lots of pre-converted documents, but there's also utilities that let you convert your own, or better yet, convert web pages to Doc format. It's great for converting those articles from a newspaper's site, or suck.com, or salonmagazine.com, or whatever, for later perusal.
• Dinky Pad or TealPaint - sketch pad/drawing programs. They let you (and your friends) doodle. Like this
• Spec - a viewer for images. It reads images in the ImageViewer format, but it's got a much smaller memory footprint and has a neater UI, imho. Like Doc, there are utilities available to convert your GIFs and JPGs to the ImageViewer format. It's a geeky alternative to carrying photos of your girlfriend in your wallet.
• AlarmHack - lets you change the alarm sound. Mine sounds like an annoying cricket.
• HackMaster - a program that lets clever programmers hack OS-type of things on the Pilot, like:
  • FindHack - enhances the Find function of the Pilot. A lot.
  • HushHack - shuts up the Pilot when syncing.
  • MenuHack - lets you tap on the menu bar (a la Mac or Windows) instead of using the Menu button.
  • PowerHack - allows Check-In (see below) to automatically lock and hide secret records upon power off.
  • SelectHack - allows you Unix-like selecting of text. Two-taps selects a word. Three taps selects a paragraph.
• Check-In - utility to change the initial start-up screen, and to automatically lock and hid secret records after a prescribed period of time.
• Tricorder - utility to allow you to impress your geek friends.
• Datebk3 - powerful replacement to the built-in Date Book application, features different views (Weekly, Yearly), as well as fancier ways to enter appointments and whatnot.

Yeah, i'll get links eventually, but in the meantime, just look for them at PilotGear.