PalmFocus Palmcast - September 12, 2005

Hello. Today is Monday, September 12, 2005, and you're listening to the Palm Focus Palmcast.

My name is Lance Waring. I'm your web servant at palmfocus.com, and I'll be your host.

I wanted to share with you a great example of an open source application in the Palm community called CryptoPad.

For those not familiar with it, it's basically an application designed for the Palm OS,

and it's designed to act as a replacement for the built-in memo application,

which provides a quick means of entering and managing your text notes.

And just to clarify, it's not a replacement for Notepad,

which allows you to enter handwritten notes on a lot of the popular Palm devices.

The built-in memo application that this replaces just allows you to enter text notes,

and that's really all that CryptoPad allows you to do.

However, there are...

There are some other features that it adds.

One of the big ones is encryption.

Basically, it allows you to encrypt the notes that you enter into your Palm using the Blowfish encryption algorithm.

CryptoPad comes in two versions.

The one that most people will probably use is version 4.10.

It runs on Palm OS 3.1 and higher.

It's a color version, so it allows you to do some things with the colors and fonts.

It allows you to do some things with the colors and fonts of the different notes that you have.

There's also a grayscale version, version 3.65,

and it's available, and it goes back and supports version 2.2 of the Palm OS.

So if you have an old device out there and you want to use CryptoPad,

you can do that downloading version 3.65.

Again, CryptoPad version 4.1 supports Palm OS 3.0.

There's also the Palm OS 3.1 and higher, and that will probably be the most popular one that people use,

which does support color and some other features of the newer devices.

Now the reason I mention it is not because it's a great application,

which it is a great application.

I mention CryptoPad because I had a story to tell

that kind of highlights the advantages of open source software even in the Palm community.

As most of you know, most software, whether freeware or even shareware,

is written by an author or a company.

company. And it's made available for us to download and use. If we have anything that

we want to change, we contact that person or persons and let them know what we'd like

to see. And then they basically determine if they want to take that idea or the fix

and implement it into their software or not. And this is great for a majority of the users

because most people don't know how to develop on the platform and many people don't want

to know. They just want to add certain things to the software or they have something that

doesn't work and they want to get it fixed. Well, the great thing about the open source

community is that anybody can get involved in the project and be part of the development

team for that software, such as CryptoPad. And that's just kind of what happened lately

with CryptoPad version 4.10 that was just released. Jim Bauman, which is a long-time

user of CryptoPad.

The CryptoPad application that he used on his Palm 3C just so happened to purchase a

Trio 650. And unfortunately if you look at the compatibility list that are out there

for the Trio 650, this application did not work properly. When you encrypted a note,

it would crash and soft reset the Trio 650. So anybody that did use CryptoPad and really

relied on it to enter memos and encrypt them, they were able to do that. And they were able

to encrypt the notes.

The second component here, is the Tria 650, was pretty much out of luck until it got one

of the newer devices.

I think this happened on the Tungsten E2 and Tungsten T5 and probably the LifeDrive because

of the new memory configuration of those devices.

But anyway, he figured out that it did not work so he kind of took matters in his own

hands. He hunted down a source code and looked at the different versions that were available.

Contacted him.

Contacted some of the original developers for the project.

And he better than me. He was still working as a filmmaker. I don't understand the long-term

experience of having to solve my own problems with the machine, but that's not the reason

Basically looked at, downloaded the source, made his modifications that fixed the crash,

and he submitted those to the project admins for CryptoPad.

And I guess it got approved and submitted,

and now it's available for anybody to download the new versions,

which fix the problems that were inherent on the Trio 650 and the other newer devices out by Palm.

So, if you have somebody motivated and anxious enough,

they can go out there and make changes and submit those changes for everybody to benefit from.

So, I just wanted to kind of share this story.

I thought it was a great example, again, of how the open source community can benefit even the users of Palm devices.

Because in this instance, Jim Bauman, which has only been with the project since August the 15th,

or at least by his user profile that's out there on the developer list,

shows that someone can come.

Come in outside the original scope of the project, look at it, make the changes that they want to,

submit it, and have those changes available for anybody else to download.

So, if you want to go check out CryptoPad for yourself, you can go to cryptopad.sourceforge.net.

I'll have that in my show notes on the website.

You can go check those out if you'd like.

Again, I appreciate you listening to the Palm Focus Palmcast.

Thank you.

And have a great day.