Jpilot

Jpilot is another full-featured Palm Desktop sync application. It is probably the better choice for Handspring users than kpilot because it is not daemon based. It was written using the GTK toolkit, and thus is also very Gnome-friendly, for those who have a desktop preference (it seems to work fine under every window manager I tried, as did kpilot ).

Interestingly, jpilot uses the pilot-link command line applications underneath, as we shall see shortly.

When you first open jpilot, it's a featureless wasteland ( Figure 16-17 ).

Figure 16-17. Jpilot ”start.

The File menu has the following options:

· Search: This works like the Find feature on the Palm device itself ( Figure 16-18 ). Just click on an entry, and the main screen will bring that database entry up. Note the application understands only the Memo, Addressbook, To-Do, and Datebook applications. It won't find data records from other applications in your Palm. (By the way, sorry for scrambling some content ”some of my personal records just don't belong in your book!)

Figure 16-18. Jpilot ”search.

· Install: This is the application installer for jpilot. When selected, it opens the dialog window shown in Figure 16-19 . Here I have selected a .prc (PalmOS application) file to install the next time I sync.

Figure 16-19. Jpilot ”Install.

· Preferences: The "Preferences," or setup, screen for jpilot looks like Figure 16-20 . You see it here set up for my USB Handspring (which I have symbolically linked to /dev/pilot ).

Figure 16-20. Jpilot ”Prefs.

· Quit: This quits jpilot (duh!).

Okay, back at the main screen. You see the four "buttons" that look like the buttons on the Palm III that correspond with the Datebook, Addressbook, To-Do, and Memo applications? Well, press any of them and you will get the jpilot user interface (UI) for those. Figure 16-21 shows what you get when you select the Datebook button (you can also select an application UI with the F1 “F4 function keys or via the View menu).

Figure 16-21. Jpilot ”Datebook.

Feel free to explore the other jpilot interfaces. They are clean and easy to understand. They correspond well with the "Official" Palm Desktop that runs on another operating system, whose name shall remain Windows.

Now let's get to some fun. How do I know that jpilot uses pilot-link? Well, let's hit the Backup button. Figure 16-22 shows the screenshot. Does this look familiar? Sure enough, it is the output of the pilot-xfer-backup command! Backup does a full backup. Sync does a sync of only the four jpilot-supported applications. This is an important point and one that bears repeating. The Sync button on jpilot syncs only the Addressbook, Datebook, Memo, and To-Do applications and nothing else.

Figure 16-22. Jpilot ”backup.

This leads us to the major deficiency of jpilot. It has no provision for adding conduits for additional applications. It can back up the data in your other applications, but it cannot process it in any way. However, this may be less of a restriction than it seems.

Unless you are a programmer yourself, you are unlikely to be able to write a conduit for pilot-manager or kpilot, the two products listed in this chapter that do support add-on conduits. Plus, due to the fact that Windows remains the majority OS, most PalmOS software authors who do have conduit applications (such as LandWare's Pocket Quicken, one that I use personally ) write the conduits for that platform only. Still, it is one mark against jpilot that it has no provision for add-on conduits. In every other way, I found it to be the best sync GUI I've seen so far.