Palm jive

Just a couple of pointers to some nice Palm software I’ve run across lately.

First, my buddy Jon built a sweet WiFi discovery tool called WiFiWhere. If you’ve got a WiFi-enabled Palm device, you’ll dig this. It does the standard discovery and connect thing, but it also gives you a choice of notification when it finds an AP (sound or buzzer), shows expanded information about the access point, you can filter out WEP AP’s, you can save access points as favorites, and you can export data to memopad for further analysis or to share with others. Why would you want to export stuff to memopad, you ask? WiFiWhere allows connection with a GPS device, so you can really hone in on where you found a particular AP. That’s the kind of stuff you’ll want to share… It’s nice, I’ve been using it for about a week and I dig it. I’ve been using Netchaser, which I believe has been the defacto standard for connected Palms, but I think WiFiWhere is going to eat Netchaser’s lunch.

The other thing, which I just ran across and haven’t tried out but think is pretty cool, is TraxItAll. It counts stuff. Thaaaat’s right. It counts stuff. It counts stuff three different ways. Three! I’m honestly on the fence about whether to make fun of it, or admit that I think it’s pretty cool. The lowdown on the different count types comes from here:

COUNT: How many times did
something happen on a given day? For example, how many sales calls did
I make? How many customers did we have? How many miles did I run? How
many cigarettes did I smoke?
 
YES/NO: Did a particular thing happen or not on a given day? For example, did I work out? Did our family have dinner together?

AVERAGE: What was the level of a particular thing on a given
day? For example, what was my weight? Blood pressure? Blood sugar? A
stock price or currency value? When did I wake up or go to bed?

Yeah, you could totally do all this on a spreadsheet or database, but since this is a dedicated tool, it’s cleaner, easier to read and takes way less time to set up.