Llama Llog — a view from the peak

cewhite's picture

Quick tip - for Windows 7 and Palm hotsync

We had a customer this morning get in touch to ask about support for Windows 7 hotsync to Palm.

We were not sure of the answer to that particular configuration combination. So we dove into the question in some detail

What we discovered is that it does work, with a few minor caveats.

It is noteworthy that Palm does not claim that Palm Desktop is compatible with Windows 7 64 bit at all, but it seems to work with Window 7 32 bit, so that seemed promising.

In addition, iUSB does not work with the Palm, Inc. software. Palm has not updated their drivers for USB to work with 64 bit Windows.

So, to do a sync between Life Balance for Palm OS and Life Balance for Windows on Windows 7, 64 bit, you'll need to be careful about a few things in the installation.

First off, be sure you have Life Balance 5.1.2 for Windows installed, and for Palm Desktop, you'll need version 6.2.

In Life Balance, you choose from the Hotsync menu, "Install Palm Software" and change the radio button to say "Just for me."

The All Users conduit option doesn't seem to work under this configuration, however, the Single User option does work.

Once you choose that and click the install button, you can see the settings for the Hotsync Manager and see that that the conduit has been installed.

In addition to that, you have to do a network or bluetooth sync rather than a USB sync. Then you should be all set.

cewhite's picture

Quick tip for iPhone Life Balance - Scheduling an ad hoc appointment associated with a task

We had a customer question this morning that I thought might be useful to pass along to the Life Balance community.

The person was confused about how to set up a task with an associated calendar event where the repeat was not "every Tuesday at noon" but the date and time could vary with each meeting.

The easiest way to schedule the next occurrence of a calendar event is to set it to happen by calendar in the task details.

Each time you have a new ad hoc event to schedule for that task, go to the task details, tap on the little grey arrow next to the "time" and then tap on edit Calendar events... and add in the next occurrence.

The occurrences do not have to be "regular" intervals. Although we support that too.

Hope that is helpful to other folks too.

cewhite's picture

Developer White Paper on how to get the UIDatePicker to work in landscape mode on iPhone

Stuart has posted a new Developer White Paper on how to get the Date Picker to work correctly in landscape mode on the iPhone.

This was something that we researched for our application Life Balance, and just didn't find any good answers out there, so we had to come up with a solution for ourselves.

We hope this article can be useful to other developers and save them some time in creating their applications too.

Enjoy!

cewhite's picture

Untangling... the multi-tasking tangle

The health and wellness section of the Boston Globe posted another excellent article by Tara Ballenger on why the brain is not so good at handling the constant interruptions that multi-tasking generally entails.

Overworking your working memory does not actually work. In computer terms, you are just "thrashing." You run out of ram and have to write to disk, and then the disk space isn't big enough either, you just swap the bits back and forth in a futile way.

Or for those without a system admin background, it's like you are making toast, but you have to pick up the toaster to put down the loaf of bread, grab two slices between your knees, and then pick up the bread again to put the toaster down before hopping on one foot to get the toast into the toaster. It's just silly, and it takes forever, and by the time you've done all this, you are exhausted and the toast is well... toast.

Don't miss the helpful tips in the side bar, and if you are interested, I've posted to their comments section too.