Calculator on iPod and Palm

One thing I was very pleased to see on the iPod Calculator was the fact that if you entered, e.g., 2 + 3, the + button would have an "illuminated" border around it after being pressed. I like having an indicator that shows if the last button you pressed was an arithmetic operator. This may be more important to me since I normally set the iPod to not make any sound when I tap a key, so I get no auditory confirmation. Along with that, Apple chose to not let multiple consecutive presses of the same arithmetic operator change the running total. If you were entering, e.g., 5 + 5, on the iPod, you could never do inadvertent additions by hitting the + key more than once in a row (e.g., if you couldn't remember whether you had last pressed 5 or +, you might press + a second time), as would occur in the Palm Calc application.

In Palm's defense, if you hide the Graffiti section of the screen, you can see a display of entries like you might see on an adding machine, which could help you prevent inadvertently changing your running total (I just learned this now, as I am leaving the Palm platform!). As far as I can remember, in all my years of (periodic) usage of the Palm Calc application, I always had the Graffiti section of the screen visible, because I normally had it visible when doing other things, so it remained visible when I invoked Calc. Perhaps Palm should have hidden the Graffiti section of the screen by default when the Calc application was started. What user is going to prefer to use Graffiti software to enter digits when Calc already gives you nice big buttons for each?

The iPod Calculator's "clear" button's label is AC initially (All Clear, i.e., reset running total to zero), which is the same function as C on the Palm. After you enter a number, it changes to C (clear entry), which is done by the CE button on the Palm. It changes back to AC after you press C. After mistyping a digit on a multi-digit number which was not the first in a sequence of numbers I was adding, I was briefly put out when, looking at the C button, I mistakenly thought there was no clear entry functionality -- I hadn't noticed that that same button was labeled AC at the start.

Note also that after entering a sequence like 6 + 7 + 8, if you press C to clear the entry of 8, the + sign remains illuminated as a helpful indicator about what you've pressed. So in that case, your running total of 13 is still active, although 0 is displayed because it's waiting for you to enter the next addend.

The iPod Calculator has an m- (memory minus) button which Palm lacks, which might be useful. It will probably be more useful than the % and √ (square root) keys the Palm has but which the iPod lacks.

Winner: iPod.

The Android calculator apparently shows math operations horizontally in the display, e.g., 1+2+3 shows exactly like that, not just as 1, then 2, then 3, as would be the case on iPod or Palm. Press = to see the total. Presumably it follows My Dear Aunt Sally's rule of Multiplication & Division operations first, then Addition & Subtraction operations, if there were a mix of the two types.

iPod is a dream device for practicing Chinese

For years I have kept notes of assorted Chinese vocabulary to which I have been exposed and which I seek to remember. Most of those notes are on paper, but occasionally they are in electronic form, like in Palm Note Pad, which allowed drawing of anything, e.g., Chinese characters, as graphics.

With the iPod, I finally have a take-everywhere combined reference and repository to lookup (via dictionary apps, such as these) and record (using Notespark) things. I am manually transferring some of my Palm Note Pad Chinese vocabulary to the iPod, and perhaps will similarly transfer some of my old paper entries.

Within Notespark, I have a 中文 生詞 (Chinese vocabulary) Tag. Each note labeled with that tag typically gets the "triplet" of English + Chinese character + Pinyin, e.g.:

paper clip 迴紋針 huíwénzhēn

Limiting a note to a single vocabulary item allows me to see a list of the items I've entered for easy review, even if the entire triplet (which becomes the note's title), is not immediately visible. If I want to record a date or some other piece of information with a vocabulary note (e.g., because it helps me think of associated circumstances), I put it on the first line, which makes it the note's title instead. The triplet still shows up underneath the title, in a smaller font size, and in gray instead of in black.

Originally I labeled these vocabulary notes with a 中文 (Chinese) Tag, but I now use that Tag strictly for notes which contain Chinese but are not intended as vocabulary records.

Since the iPod supports entering Chinese characters via strokes, I am able to practice my character writing skills, instead of just exercising my phonetic memory of words to generate characters using Pinyin, the typical computer method. Using Chinese this way in notes, e-mail, and blog posts is fun with the iPod!

Converting Palm Calendar to iPod

4/8/11: Stop the blog presses, I eventually concluded there were too many problems and other issues with the data conversion I tried (some details below). I exported the partially messed-up data I had from Google Calendar, then imported that into a different Google account. Next I deleted the (original) linked iPod-Google Calendar from each end, and remade my Google Calendar from scratch, using selective Windows Copy and Paste operations between the two Google Calendar accounts using different browsers (and occasionally copying text from Palm Desktop), doing various modifications along the way. The result is a much cleaner set of events, without historical event record baggage (and any associated performance hit when syncing).

If you have a need to keep your historical events and/or you sync more than just your own calendar, good luck -- based on my experience, you are going to need it, if you hope to have your data "properly" converted.
5/20/11: It turns out you may need good luck even to sync your own calendar (see below), although my problem with deleting events may have been fixed with my upgrade from iOS 4.2.1 to 4.3.5. Some pre-4.3.5 version higher than 4.2.1 may have fixed it, but I have no idea which one, if so.

I UNDID WHAT I COULD FROM THE ***DATA CONVERSION*** DESCRIBED BELOW:

After reviewing this thread http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=2952265980c1b13d&hl=en (82 replies to original query as of 4/3/11) and http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=138740 (read all tabs on that page, currently Setup/Sync Calendars/Known Issues), I used PdbConverter (http://www.shredzone.org/projects/pdbconverter/wiki), whose author kindly made it available for free. The process involves converting your Palm DateBook.mdb file to an iCalendar file, then uploading that to a Google Calendar account and synching that with your iPod's Calendar app.

Years ago I synched my Palm Calendar with PC MeetingMaker, but after multiple instances of data corruption (some apparently related to Daylight Saving Time), I gave up that synching. My Palm Calendar data has long been maintained and accessed solely by me, manually. I hope I encounter few, if any, data glitches from the synching that I'll now be doing with Google Calendar. (4/8/11: So much for that hope.)

I generally don't keep or care about historical records on my Palm Calendar. According to my recollection, I had deleted many (all?) of the non-repeating historical ones on the Palm prior to this conversion, intending to reduce unimportant data baggage. However, when I made one last pre-conversion backup of my Palm data to my PC using Palm's HotSync Manager, I think I forgot to change the settings to Handheld overwrites Desktop, so the default of Synchronize the files applied, horribly effectively undoing my deletion of historical records.

I never had any need to use Palm Categories (e.g., Business, Personal) for Calendar records, so that simplified my data conversion.

In some of my other app research, someone suggested simply using Google's free calendar app. I want as much of my iPod functionality to be available even when I'm not online, so I rejected that option.

IPOD/GOOGLE CALENDAR OBSERVATIONS:

• Calendar search is available at the top of the List view. Both the List view entries and search results are limited to records going back one year (as I see from repeating events); see http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2667000. I largely use the Calendar for future events, so that search limitation probably won't hamper my usage.
• Google Calendar apparently defaulted all my converted events to send me e-mail 10 minutes beforehand. I quickly changed my settings to put a stop to that, and to other unwanted e-mail notifications.
• When logging into this gmail account using the Google app, I was asked whether to allow the app to use 10 more MB on my iPod, to which I agreed. That was presumably related to the calendar conversion.
• If you turn off the iPod when Calendar is running as the foreground application, when you turn the iPod back on, regardless of whether you are in the List/Day/Month view, you will be taken to today's date (and the current time) (4/9/11: This behavior does not seem consistent; I don't know what the deal is.). That does not happen if you close the Calendar and reopen it later, even if you turn the iPod off in between. If I am looking at a future (or past) date, that unstoppable go-to-today behavior is counterintuitive and undesirable -- it means I have to do more work to get back to that date, which I may not have finished dealing with when I turned the iPod off. There is already a Today button which can accomplish the same thing but only at the user's request (tap). The obvious workaround is to always close the Calendar before turning off the iPod, but we shouldn't have to do or remember that.
• To keep data cleaner (e.g., to avoid spurious results in searches), delete repeating events through Google Calendar, which allows deletion of All events in the series. The iPod Calendar can only Delete This Event Only ( = Google's Only this instance) or Delete All Future Events ( = Google's All following). I had tried to limit repeating events to one month in the past on the iPod in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Calendars > Sync, but that doesn't seem to have applied to the initial retrieval of calendar data from Google. Depending on your intended change, you might also want to modify repeating events through Google Calendar.
• Although on the iPod, you cannot enter an Xth Y-day of the month repeating event, e.g., the first Friday of the month, you can do so in Google Calendar and let that sync with your iPod
  (5/7/11: Some subsequent iPod modification of such an event apparently caused it to later show on the iPod under Repeat > Custom as "Every month on the (null) Friday", which in practice meant EVERY Friday, so this workaround isn't perfect. I almost never use my Google Calendar except for the add/delete "tricks" I write about in this blog entry, so I'm pretty certain the problem originated from iPod event modification(s). I can't reproduce this problem now with a new event and a few simple test modifications, though. I'll likely keep using this technique, since the apparent potential downside is limited.).
  Don't overlook using Google Calendar's strengths; the iPod can "understand" more options than it allows you to use natively. Perhaps more options will be available in future iOS versions.
• 5/16/11: Ugh, that makes twice (!) today that about a month's worth of past events (back to 4/11/11) which I had previously deleted from the iPod abruptly reappeared, and had to be deleted for a second and third time. This bad behavior might be reproduced by flicking backwards in the List view too quickly (?) -- I know I have a tendency to do that. The associated Google Calendar account showed a 4/12/11 instance of a repeating event, which was apparently resurrected each time.  The 2nd time the iPod calendar went wacko on me I also found two more instances of a different repeating event on 4/22/11 and 4/23/11 in Google Calendar. Anyway, I delete the bad events wherever they are found, and hope for better behavior in the future. When I get more time I will search to see if others have experienced similar problems, and if there is a recommended solution. I switched Calendars > Sync to the minimum of 2 weeks back instead of the 1 Month Back which it had been set on. I also got rid of a rarely-used Google Mail account which I had recently added for Mail only -- maybe that was interfering with the other Google account which I am using via Exchange for Contacts and Calendar? Perhaps not allowing "over the air" syncing to finish before exiting Calendar causes problems?
  5/20/11: Argh, once again, many of the same events have returned on the iPod from the land of the already-deleted, dating from 4/12/11. Four events similarly returned on the Google Calendar side, dating from 4/12/11.
  (Man, I miss my Palm Calendar!)
  6/2/11: Yet again, events dating from 4/12/11 which I'd previously deleted have reappeared. I was just deleting events from 6/2/11 and 6/3/11 when the event List temporarily displayed only those two days, I got this bad sinking feeling, and bam, long-deleted events were back again, yet again.
  8/27/11: I am cautiously optimistic that my earlier deleted events are finally staying deleted. I deleted them on the iPod very patiently (i.e., I waited for the "throbber" icon to stop rotating after every delete operation before starting the next one, to avoid possible data processing "race condition" errors), and they actually seem to be truly gone now. Perhaps it was a bug in iOS 4.2.1? I was only able to upgrade to 4.3.5 earlier this month; maybe that fixed this problem.
  10/7/11: Ugh, cautiously was the right adverb for optimistic. Quite a number of my previously deleted events from as far back as 4/2011 are back again. Maybe iOS 5 will fix this, but I am not sanguine about such prospects.

"Converting" Palm Contacts to iPod

In my Palm Contacts, I generally only kept basic information on a small set of people and organizations with whom I connected more frequently. I transferred that data to my iPod primarily by using the iPod's Exchange account capabilities in its Mail, Contacts, Calendars area, using a gmail account as a contacts conduit. I don't actually use that gmail account to e-mail anyone; its primary utility to me is to provide a web interface into, and to serve as a backup repository for, my iPod contacts.

As I had done with my Palm Tasks, I used my PC to transfer some data using copy and paste between Palm Desktop and gmail's web interface. I entered some data on the iPod, through which I could enter, e.g., a person's Chinese character name as "Nickname" using "Add Field". Gmail's Add dropdown list allows you to add a nickname (or other fields, e.g., Title and Company), but I couldn't conveniently add Chinese characters from my PC.

Google now provides the capability of restoring contact data from within the past 30 days, which could certainly be useful if, e.g., you mistakenly delete some:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1069522&hl=en
Thanks, Google! You're an even better backup buddy now!

Miscellaneous notes about the process follow.  Any item here may no longer be relevant in the future, and it's always possible I misremembered or misrecorded something, but maybe these will be helpful. I only rechecked some of these before adding them here.

• "Google Sync for iOS devices is still in beta" (as of 4/2/11), per Google's note under the "Known Issues" tab on http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?answer=139635 (same link as given above). Prospective users of this method should read
• Do not double-click on a Windows .vcf file (a Contacts transfer avenue out of Palm Desktop that I investigated, but in the end did not use) that contains lots of records, as you will be forced to manually close each one of them.
• The order of phones entered in gmail is significant. The iPod's order is work/work/home/mobile/pager; the default type for input is mobile.
• "Other" or "Main" as a phone type from gmail will not sync to the iPod as phone.
• 3 different phones and 2 different e-mails seemed to be the most that would come over from gmail for a given contact via a sync operation.
• iPod entry does not allow for 2+ home phone numbers or 3+ generic work numbers.
• Gmail defaults to sorting by first name, but you can change that to last name (which would match the iPod).
• Gmail data entry work/home distinction of e-mail gets lost in the sync to the iPod.
• It doesn't seem possible to turn off synching (with the idea of only periodically re-enabling such temporarily) without losing all contacts stored on the iPod, so there will be ongoing synching and concurrent battery-draining (except when in Airplane Mode). Even though I quite rarely update my iPod Contacts, at least I'm protected from forgetting to sync, and consequently finding my iPod and gmail contacts out of sync (but see important 7/31/11 note below).

4/3/11: jmcrsb wrote "from palm desktop v6.2.1 exporting all the contacts as Vcard format allowed nearly perfect import into gmail contacts" in this Google discussion thread, but I'm already done with my Contacts "conversion".

7/31/11:
I misunderstood exactly which iPod contacts get synced to Google. I have occasionally entered new contacts from scratch on the iPod. I mistakenly thought that that contact data was syncing to Google, but it wasn't. The reason I was confused is because if I had originally entered a contact on Google, then iPod updates to that contact's data would get synced to Google. However, totally new entries on the iPod get no link to the Google account, UNLESS they are entered under the Exchange group under Contacts, which I didn't do.
(8/28/11: If you press and hold on, e.g., a phone number in an e-mail message, you are prompted with a choice to Create New Contact or Add to Existing Contact. Following along with what I wrote above, Create New Contact will only add the entry on the iPod, not on Google. So for my purposes for new contacts, it's better to copy the phone number text and paste it in while manually creating the new contact under the Exchange group.)

As I have mentioned in other blog entries, my iPod has a hardware problem; I have no regularly reliable way of backing up my iPod's contact data through my PC's iTunes connection, so instead rely on Google for such backup. To correct this just-discovered data problem, I manually created duplicates of these iPod-entered contacts, some in my Google account, and some on the iPod but this time under the Exchange group under Contacts. That gave me the Google backup that I mistakenly thought I was already getting.

Then I deleted the original data for each of those contacts, data which was only on my iPod. In some cases, I no longer needed a contact's data to be on the iPod, so those I simply deleted without first duplicating them on Google. I had one contact entry which is merely one of my own e-mail accounts, which I don't need or want synced elsewhere, and it serves as a little reminder to me about where to enter new contacts on the iPod when I want them backed up to Google.

8/21/11:
Presuming you sync your iPod Contacts to Google as I describe above, then when you lack WiFi access to the Internet, I strongly recommend you switch the iPod to Airplane Mode before accessing Contacts. Twice when away from home (and consequently away from my usual WiFi) I failed to do that, and my iPod seemed to have gone into continuous overdrive trying to find WiFi access, presumably in order to synchronize my Contacts data with Google's. The iPod got hotter than I remember it ever getting on any other occasion (8/22/11: Hmm, queueing up multiple podcasts to load at one time also heats the iPod up significantly.). In one case, I completely powered down the iPod until I could get it to WiFi access again, although other solutions might also have been able to get it to cool down.

"Converting" Palm Tasks to iPod using Notespark

6/23/12: I eventually decided I wanted a dedicated to-do list app, and found a good one: GoTasks.

1/3/14: Notespark services except for export were shut down on 12/31/13.

The Palm Tasks functionality is like a to-do list, with the ability to assign a priority between 1 and 5 to each item. You could check each item off when it was done, keeping an archive record of it on your PC if you chose. I just learned a moment ago that you could also set a due date on an item, a feature I obviously never used.

I simply used Palm Tasks as a somewhat longer term to-do list, which I only occasionally consulted.  Given that, I created five Notespark (which I first wrote about here) Tags tasks1 through tasks5, and used copy and paste operations on my PC (between Palm Desktop and Notespark's web interface) to throw all the items having a priority of 1 into a single note with the Tag tasks1, doing the analogous operation down to the items having a priority of 5.  Then I synched Notespark to get those items onto my iPod.

I never archived checked-off Tasks items on the Palm, I merely deleted them.  Keeping all the items in Notespark notes allows me to access them rapidly without needing a dedicated to-do list app, and I just delete the text of any item that I finish.

Converting Palm memos to iPod using Notespark

12/29/13: I switched to both Simplenote and to WriteRoom+Dropbox for different portions of my Notespark usage, which I wrote about here.

10/26/13: I am so sad to learn that the Notespark Team plans to shut down the Notespark service on December 31, 2013, suggesting:

We recommend that you export your notes and import them into an alternative product, such as Evernote, which is free, or one of the many Dropbox-based notes apps (e.g., Notesy, Nebulous, Write, PlainText).

They have apparently removed the app from the Apple App Store. It was a great run, but having observed the slowed pace of the app's development in recent times, I'm not totally surprised by this news.


I recently got a used 3rd generation (no camera) iPod Touch. It has an unreliable communication port, so synching data with iTunes does not appear to be a practical possibility without a $200 repair (3/20/11: If I really needed iTunes connectivity, an Apple Certified Refurbished iPod Touch could be a better deal, coming with a new battery and outer shell, plus free shipping). However, after fiddling with the connected cable, I was at least able to upgrade the iPod's iOS to 4.2.1. Then my adventure began, and a most enjoyable adventure it's been.

The first Palm PDA data I converted for use on my iPod was Memos, of which I had a couple hundred. After discovering that the iPod's built-in Notes application was incredibly ("laughably") basic compared to Palm Memos, I researched various replacement apps in Apple's App Store and on the web.

The clear winner: Notespark (version 1.3.1; $4.99 when I installed it). It quickly and correctly converted all of my Memos into its own notes, translating over the Palm category (e.g., "Business", "Personal", plus the categories I had created) into a Tag.

Notespark synchronizes note data from iPods over the web (using https) to their servers. Although I originally wanted to keep the synching of data between my iPod and my PC, I couldn't do that with the iPod's broken communication port -- the iPod wouldn't show up reliably as a device in iTunes. However, my notes being on Notespark's servers brought the huge advantage of being able to edit notes over the web. Using a computer, I can copy lengthy text from the web onto my iPod (after a sync), or edit Notespark notes whenever a computer keyboard is more helpful than the iPod's on-screen keyboard (most of the time, although at the moment, I can only enter Chinese from the iPod).

Some Notespark note advantages over Palm Memos:

• Notespark Tags are like Google Mail's Labels: more than one can be applied to a single data object (a Notespark note or an e-mail message, respectively).
• Accepts Chinese characters, providing a great practical opportunity to practice writing them more often. To use Chinese characters (I use traditional, but behavior is presumably the same for simplified) when creating a new Tag, you must include a regular English letter to activate the Save button. Then you can delete the English letter and use the still-active Save button. I've notified Notespark of this bug; the Notespark web interface works fine with Chinese characters and does not need this workaround.
• Lengthy notes are possible. On the Palm, I had been forced to split some text across multiple memos because it wouldn't fit into a single one.
• You can limit the scope of a search to the notes within a given category, e.g., All (closest to the Find capability on Palm, which always searches through all Memos and other data stores such as Calendar, Contacts, etc.), Starred, or associated with a specific Tag you have created. If you have a Tag for, e.g., Project_1, and you only want to look for occurrences of a particular string within notes that have that Tag, you can do so, avoiding superfluous search results associated with other Tags. (Herein is mention of how a Tag and Starred was useful to me for travel.)
• Because you can sync data on the Notespark server with your iPod, if your iPod is out of power but you have access to an Internet-connected computer, you can make changes to your notes over the web and sync them to your iPod later, when it does have power.
• The reverse chronological ordering, based on date last edited, of notes, can be helpful. One time I had edited multiple notes having multiple Tags, and a short time afterward I remembered there was something I had written which I had wanted to deal with. Checking the All category showed me the notes I'd edited recently, so I was able to quickly find what I was looking for.

Some Palm Memo advantages over Notespark notes:

• Can rename a category and simultaneously update all memos already associated with it. Pick your Tag names carefully in Notespark, or else you may be in for some laborious future renaming, one note at a time (speaking as someone who knows from multiple such experiences).
• Categories sort case-insensitive, the most intuitive way. "iPod" should not appear lower in an alphabetical list than "Zune", which is what would happen now in Notespark on an iPod. Before converting from Palm Memos you may wish to rename all your categories to use consistent letter case for sorting consistency within Notespark. The Notespark web interface does sort categories case-insensitive. I've notified Notespark of this inconsistency; they've filed it with other bugs, and hopefully it will eventually be fixed so that iPod Notespark sorts categories case-insensitive, as it should.
• Memos stay in the order found on the Palm (this was even a choice within the Palm Desktop PC client: Sort by "Order on Handheld"). If you grouped two memos adjacent to each other, you could edit either of them without disturbing the order in which they appear among other memos. Notespark Settings allows notes to appear either in reverse chronological order by last date edited, or in alphabetical order of "title" (what I believe is the first line of text of a note). Notespark's title order option is not as useful as the arbitrary order of the Palm, which you could set yourself by dragging a note to a different ordinal position.

I've only lightly touched on the web interface and other aspects of Notespark. Check out https://notespark.com for more information.

I have no affiliation with Notespark other than as a satisfied customer.