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Pilot Software Development

Editor’s Note: This file and all associated resources were created from the oldest available snapshot (January 13, 1997) of http://massena.com/darrin/pilot/index.html at the Internet Archive. The original HTML markup was converted to Markdown, which will result in formatting differences, but except for the rare spelling error, none of the original text has been altered, at least not intentionally. Also, where possible, broken links will be updated to refer to local copies if the original files can be located.


Pilot Software Development

Developing software for a flexible computer that fits in the palm of your hand can be lots of fun. This page is devoted to the development of quality software for the USRobotics Pilot. I try to update it often and you can contribute too by sending your Pilot development discoveries, tools, apps, tips and tricks to me (darrin@massena.com). I’ll organize and post them so everyone can share your brilliant insights.

News

1 Jan 97 - PDA Developers magazine is renamed to Handheld Systems Journal

Handheld Systems is a bimonthly printed magazine targeted at developers of (surprise!) handheld systems like Windows CE, Newton, GEOS, Magic Cap, and most importantly, the Pilot. Every one of the last several issues has at least one Pilot programming article which puts it ahead of any other magazine I know of. Excerpts from Handheld Systems are available online including these articles of particular interest to Pilot developers: Unix and Pilots by Kevin Flynn, Hacking the Pilot by Edward Keyes, WorldTime - A Pilot World Clock by Steve Mann, Pilot Programming Primer by Steve Mann, and Palm Ups the Ante with Pilot by Steve Mann.

1 Jan 97 - Solutions 0.1 (a shared library mechanism) released by Russell Y. Webb

Given the limited amount of memory each Pilot has you’d think the PalmOS designers would have given priority to devising a means by which common code (aside from the OS itself) could be shared by several applications to save memory. Another advantage of shared libraries is that they can be upgraded independently from the applications that use them (though this certainly has its pitfalls). USRobotics wasn’t able to get such a feature into PalmOS 1.0 so along comes Russell Webb to fill the hole. Russ is proposing a solution to become the standard mechanism by which Pilot applications bind to and call shared library functions. Please read his proposal and let him know what you think – a good solution to the shared library problem will benefit Pilot developers and users alike.

1 Jan 97 - Metrowerks SDK + Pilot 5000 Bundle

Barry Berman of Metrowerks informed me that Metrowerks is still providing a deal for Pilot developers. For US$299 you get a Pilot 5000, CodeWarrior for Pilot (only runs on a Mac!), the Conduit SDK, Pilot Desktop for the Mac, a debugger cable, and they toss on a t-shirt too! This is a pretty good deal if you want the SDK and is actually US$11 cheaper than buying the SDK without the Pilot 5000 (seems strange to me too). Think of it as buying the SDK for $299 and having a Pilot 5000 and a t-shirt thrown in for free. Follow this link for details.

Now if only they could get CodeWarrior and the Pilot SDK running on the PC…

1 Jan 97 - Happy New Year!

Wow, 1996 was a lot of fun. Two big events for me were getting a Pilot and starting this Web site. The Pilot has been a blast and although USRobotics’ offerings for software developers have been severely limited that just provided more opportunities for some fun hacking and creating my own tools. Other hackers have taken up the cause and there are now free Java, C, and assembler tools for developing and debugging Pilot software on PCs.

Putting this site together has also been a kick. Pilot Software Development first came on-line June 27th, 1996. In early September I bought some software (IIS Assistant) to help me track usage statistics for my site. Back then I was averaging ~300 "users" a day (IISA counts each unique IP address hitting the site that day as a "user" – not entirely accurate but closer than most measurements). The week of December 15 daily usage averaged 672 users and on December 30th a record 962 users visited this site! Looks like quite a few people found Pilots under the Christmas tree this year!

Here’s a chart that shows the number of users per day since September to the present. I don’t really know what the main factors contributing to the growth are (usage has more than doubled in just over two months) but I’d guess it’s a combination of the increasing number of Pilot owners overlapping with the increasing number of Internet users.

Chart

Now that the new year has begun I just want to say I’ve enjoyed interacting with many of you over the past few months. It’s been fun hearing about your Pilot development efforts and I especially appreciate the contributions of other developers to improve the state of the tools we all use to create Pilot software. So, thanks for stopping by and I wish you all a very happy new year.

14 Dec 96 - Newsgroup for Jump (Java for Pilot) available

I’ve added another newsgroup to those already hosted on news.massena.com. This one provides a forum for Jump users to ask questions, provide answers, and share their experiences with other Jump enthusiasts. Come join the discussion in pilot.programmer.jump.

You can read these newsgroups with your favorite news reader or most Web browsers (Netscape 2.0 or newer, Internet Explorer 3.0 or newer). With a browser, follow these links:

12 Dec 96 - Jump (Java for Pilot) released by Greg Hewgill!

Another breakthrough from Greg Hewgill, author of Copilot (the Pilot Emulator)! Here’s the scoop direct from Greg: “Jump is a developer’s tool that lets you write Java applications for the Pilot. This has nothing to do with the Internet, HTTP, or the World Wide Web, and in particular will not allow you to run or write Java ‘applets’. It does allow you to use a well-designed, easy to learn language to write applications for the Pilot.

Jump works by translating compiled Java class files into 68000 assembly language, which is then run through Pila (the Pilot Assembler) to generate standalone prc files. No extra Java runtime support is required on the Pilot.”

Wow! For many people Jump will be the easiest and most accessible way to write Pilot applications. You’ll find the latest details about Jump on Greg’s Jump home page.

12 Dec 96 - GCC Win32 Port for Pilot released by J. J. Lehett!

It’s been a long time coming (I’ve been receiving email on this topic since I published my first Pilot article) but it’s finally here. Now you can write Pilot applications in C, on your Windows PC – for free! J. J. Lehett has built on Jeff Dione’s effort to create tools for writing Pilot applications under UNIX and brought the whole package to Windows. Benchmarks haven’t been run yet but there’s reason to believe the GCC compiler might generate smaller, faster Pilot code than the Metrowerks compiler! Anyone up to writing a test to find out?

NOTE: J.J.’s GCC port is not for the faint of heart. The ZIP file of the required Gnu toolchain is ~6.5 megs, the installation process can be…challenging, and the documentation is…thin, but hey, that’s what’s hacking is all about. Combine these tools, your wits, and some sweat and eventually the Pilot will be singing your tune.

For the latest info on this GCC port, head on over to the GCC Win32 Port for Pilot home page. For other GCC/Pilot news and discussion check out the pilot.programmer.gcc newsgroup (news://news.massena.com/pilot.programmer.gcc) hosted on my site.

12 Dec 96 - Article: Extending Your Desktop with the Pilot by Stu Slack

Shame on me. A couple months ago Stu Slack pointed me to his (then) new article on writing Pilot Conduits using the Conduit SDK. I dropped the ball and never passed on a pointer to his article. Better late than never, right? If you want to know what Conduits are for, how they work and how to create one for yourself, go read Stu’s article. It includes the source to a PC app, a Pilot app, and a Conduit to link them together. Great stuff.

10 Nov 96 - ASDK 1.0 Alpha 1 released by Darrin Massena!

The Alternative Software Development Kit (view documentation, download (mirror)) bundles together the tools, headers, support files, samples and documentation necessary to develop Pilot applications on a PC running Windows 95 or NT. Some highlights of the SDK include:

There’s still a lot of work left to build a complete Pilot software development environment but this first release of the ASDK is quite a milestone and provides fully functional tools for creating Pilot applications. Many, many thanks to everyone who contributed to the ASDK, especially Wes Cherry, Greg Hewgill, Matt Peterson, Bill Hunt, and Scott Ludwig. Thanks also to Shannon Haworth and Potomac Interactive Corporation for providing a high-bandwidth site for ASDK distribution.

9 Nov 96 - Pilot Software Development survives ISP’s incompetence

Have you had any problems accessing this web page or the pilot.programmer newsgroups recently? My site has periodically been unreachable the last couple of weeks usually sometime between the hours of 9:00am-5:00pm PST due to various problems my Internet Service Provider has been having maintaining their service. I think they finally have the problems fixed and we’ll be back to enjoying reliable service (fingers crossed).

9 Nov 96 - Oops, a few Pilot News notices have accidentally been lost!

I’m trying to recover them…

9 Nov 96 - Pilot Software Development discussion groups available

New newsgroups for discussing Pilot software development topics are now hosted on Pilot Software Development (news.massena.com). Please join us! You can read these newsgroups with your favorite news reader or most Web browsers (Netscape 2.0 or newer, Internet Explorer 3.0 or newer). With a browser, follow these links:

5 Oct 96 - Pila, the Pilot Assembler, Beta 2 released by Darrin Massena

Here it is! The first public release of a PC-hosted programming language for creating Pilot applications. With Pila, the accompanying tools, and some 68000 assembly language experience you can create complete Pilot applications on your PC. This version of Pila has too many new features to list here so see the Pila News page for details or read the Pila documentation on line.

5 Oct 96 - PilRC v0.8 and PilRCUI released by Wes Cherry

Wes has updated his Pilot Resource Compiler and added a new utility, PilRCUI, to provide a graphical preview of your Pilot form resources.

5 Oct 96 - Updated: Hardware & Stuff by Luiz Coutinho

Luiz is continually updating his in-depth report on the Pilot hardware. If you haven’t checked it out lately you’re missing out on some cool hardware hacking.

1 Oct 96 - Copilot released by Greg Hewgill

This one is going to blow you away when you see it. Greg Hewgill has implemented a complete Pilot emulator running under Windows 95/NT! This is not a flakey half-baked emulator. It looks like a Pilot, sounds like a Pilot, and runs all your favorite Pilot apps at full speed. Better yet, Copilot has a symbolic debugger built in and symbols for all the Pilot APIs and internal routines! What fun! Take a hop over to Greg’s web site at http://userzweb.lightspeed.net/~gregh/pilot/copilot/ to see the latest Copilot news.

Old News

11 Sep 96 - Pilot Software Development mirrors USRobotics SDK FTP

I have received a few messages from people who have been having trouble downloading USRobotics’ SDK documentation from their FTP site at ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/pa/palm. The problems include an inability to connect, partial downloads, and very slow downloads. Until they take care of these problems I’m going to duplicate the contents of their os_sdk and cond_sdk directories on a faster site http://www.wolfenet.com/~darrinm/pilot.

11 Sep 96 - Pila, the Pilot Assembler, enters Beta test phase

Pila now comes bundled with PilRC, for creating user interface resources, and PilDis, for disassembling existing Pilot applications. If you have assembly language programming experience and would like to contribute to the Beta test, please send me mail.

11 Sep 96 - PilDis released by Bill Hunt

With PilDis you can take a peek at the assembly code of any available Pilot application. It’s a great learning tool for both beginning and experienced assembly language programmers.

11 Sep 96 - prc2bmp released by Scott Ludwig

This was actually released a couple weeks ago but I spaced it. prc2bmp is a Windows tool that extracts the icon image from a PRC file and writes it out as a Windows .BMP file for easy editing. More interesting to the average Pilot programmer is that the source code is included and provides a simple example of how to read a PRC file and extract a desired resource from it.

3 Sep 96 - Pilot Software Development has moved!

It should be completely transparent to you (I kept the old address) but I’ve finally found a permanent host for this site! We have more bandwidth now so if I can restrain myself from loading up on GIFs, JPEGs, WAV files, AVIs, VRML, RealAudio streams, Java applets, ActiveX controls, cookie processing, and complex scripts (it won’t be easy!) you should notice improved performance.

The site is now housed at my home, running on my fabulous Gateway 486/66 and exercising the full 32-bit power of Windows NT 4.0. Nothing can stop me now! Expect more frequent updates and new features. As you’ll see, I took the opportunity to update the News with some recent happenings you may have missed.

And many, many thanks to Phil Wherry for playing the temporary host for P.S.D!

2 Sep 96 - Article: Hardware & Stuff by Luiz Coutinho

Want to know what’s inside your Pilot? Don’t want to void your warranty? Well after everything he’s done to his Pilot Luiz Coutinho’s warranty is long, long gone but you can reap the benefits as Luiz spills his guts on the Pilot’s guts. Lots of great pictures, check it out.

28 Aug 96 - PilRC v0.6 released by Wes Cherry

Resources provide the user interface fire for Pilot applications but without tools to create them PC-based Pilot developers have been rubbing sticks together and getting nowhere fast. Wes Cherry delivers the Bic lighter we’ve been needing in the form of PilRC, the Pilot Resource Compiler. PilRC is a Windows NT/95 application that reads a textual description of your resources and spits out Pilot format binary resources for easy inclusion in your app.

Now who’s going to write the GUI resource flamethrower?

23 Aug 96 - PocketChess released by Scott Ludwig

Another fine application written with the ASDK. Go to Scott Ludwig’s Pilot Software site to check out his latest.

22 Aug 96 - PilotMark released by Darrin Massena

The only difference between a Pilot 1000, 5000 and a Pilot upgraded to 1 meg of memory is how much memory they have, right? Wrong! While hacking the hardware Luiz Coutinho discovered the 1 meg Pilot has twice the RAM bandwidth (16/32-bit memory reads and writes take half as long) of a standard 1000 or 5000. I wrote PilotMark to verify this. Run PilotMark on your own Pilot and compare the timings to those I’ve found on other Pilots. Read the included note for details.

7 Aug 96 - Pila, a Pilot Assembler, is ready for Alpha testing

I’m putting the finishing touches on a Windows 95/NT-based assembler for the Pilot called ‘Pila’. If you have 68000 assembly language programming experience and would like to try your hand at creating Pilot applications please send me mail.

30 Jul 96 - Alarm Hack source code released by Wes Cherry

Alarm Hack demonstrates a way to patch PalmOS APIs and keep the patch in memory after the patching application is removed. The patch resides in Storage RAM and consumes none of Pilot’s precious Dynamic memory. This is a great example to follow if you’re thinking about writing a TSR-like application.

12 Jul 96 - Pilot Hack 1.01 released by Darrin Massena

A very minor revision. Fixes a bug in the ‘x’ command (used to backup ranges of Pilot memory to your PC) and adds a new ‘v’ command to display the Pilot’s ROM version and Product ID. Thanks to Luiz Coutinho in Brazil for reporting the ‘x’ bug! At this point if you’re having problems producing ROMDump.prc files it’s probably because you’re low on memory or at one time you installed a copy of Pilot Money that somehow hoses hotsync backups (I’d like to know that trick!). Either can be fixed by cold-resetting (memory wipe) your Pilot and then loading Pilot Hack.

10 Jul 96 - prc2bin released by Darrin Massena

For hackers only, here’s a simple Win32 utility for extracting resources from PRC files.

9 Jul 96 - Debugger Patcher-o-matic released by Flip Phillips

This cool hack changes the Mac Pilot debugger to use the printer port instead of the modem port.

2 Jul 96 - Article: Writing Pilot Applications Under Windows by Darrin Massena

Although it isn’t simple or graceful and it may not even be affordable, writing Pilot applications on a PC under Windows is possible. The tools you need are Microsoft’s Visual C++ Cross-Development Edition for Macintosh, exe2prc (a program to convert a Win32 EXE to a PRC file), and the know-how to put it all together. The result is for hackers only and certainly isn’t close to the complete set of tools that comes with the USRobotics/CodeWarrior Pilot SDK. But if you already have VC++ Mac or qualify for Microsoft’s competitive upgrade it can be a lot cheaper than buying a Macintosh.

30 Jun 96 - Article: Pilot Hack Tutorial by Darrin Massena

I take you on a trip down Pilot’s memory lane with Pilot Hack.

28 Jun 96 - Graffiti Help released by Scott Ludwig (a.k.a. PilotHacker)

Another application by Scott Ludwig. Graffiti Help gives you Graffiti online help without putting a squeeze on your Pilot’s memory.

28 Jun 96 - Article: Writing Space Invaders for Pilot v1.0 on a PC by Scott Ludwig (a.k.a. PilotHacker)

Scott tells how he wrote Space Invaders for the Pilot using only his wits and a few crude tools.

27 Jun 96 - Pilot Hack released by Darrin Massena

Pilot Hack is my first Pilot application. I wrote it before I received an SDK from USRobotics, before USRobotics released their API documentation on the Internet. Maybe I went off the deep end but I couldn’t wait for USRobotics to get their act together so I started hacking. Pilot Hack is the first result, a tool used to help create itself. More details in Cool Stuff below.

27 Jun 96 - Pilot Software Development site up!

Everything has finally come together so I can now provide this resource for people interested in creating applications for the Pilot. Many thanks to Phil Wherry for playing host for this site and for setting up the software, dealing with InterNIC, etc. - making it all work!

26 Jun 96 - USRobotics SDK arrives!

It’s here! If only I had a Mac to run it on. Well, the headers will be very useful anyway and the SDK CD makes a fine coaster.

25 Jun 96 - Invaders released by Scott Ludwig (a.k.a. PilotHacker)

A talented friend used my PC-based SDK to create this excellent rendition of the arcade game classic Space Invaders. More details on the Pilot development tools and articles page.


Pilot Software Development is by Darrin Massena