Diego's Pilot Page

This page is hopelessly outdated. Please do not use it!

For some time now, my favorite toy has been a little device called the PalmPilot, built by U.S. Robotics. This little device, apart from being extremely neat for a technological gadget fanatic like me, has actually been useful for keeping track of appointments, lists of things to do, addresses, and (of course) for playing games. Besides, it provides yet another platform to program in.

So this page is devoted to that little gadget. Here you will find information that I have collected over time, pointers to resources, and any other thing that I can think of.

Using a Pilot with Unix

One of my biggest problems with the Pilot is that USR only makes the desktop software for Windows and Mac. I use only Unix, so, like many other people, I was out in the cold, without support for HotSync'ing, installing applications in the Pilot, and so many other cool things that PC users automatically have upon opening their Pilot boxes.

Fortunately, lots of other people were in the same situation than me before me, and a number of efforts were started to provide Pilot Unix users with appropriate tools without having to downgrade ourselves to using inferior computing platforms.

The software for Unix is still under heavy development, but it has shown to be quite stable, and although documentation is sparse, getting things to work is not very hard. To help with the process, I have put together step by step instructions for getting started with your Pilot on Unix, getting and installing the main tools.

Programming for the Pilot under Unix

The other great aspect of the Pilot is that all the API specifications and headers were made public by USR, so free tools are available for building applications under Unix (as the commercial SDK's support, of course, only Windows and Mac).

I have provided simple step by step instructions for getting and compiling all the tools you need to develop Pilot applications under Unix.

Pilot links

Over time, I have collected a number of links pointing to different Pilot-related resources. Some of them are here.


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Diego Zamboni
Last modified: Wed Jul 7 14:53:20 EST 1999