|
88 of 89 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Useful book, August 12, 2000
Since there are lots of good general reviews already here of this book, I thought I would add a few comments I didn't see elsewhere.Although this is an excellent book, I think most people who buy Palm Pilots and Visors are technically savvy enough so that learning the basic operation of the device or the built-in apps is not much of a problem, which is what most of the book is about. That being the case, I think the best way for most owners to use this book is to do the following. The book has hundreds of undocumented tips and tricks that are worth the price of the book just by themselves. I would just go through each chapter and read these first, and not worry too much about the rest of the text for now. Then later, if you want to go back and read the full description of one of the applications or some other topic, you could do it then. The tips and tricks are set off on each page with a little picture of an owl, so they're not hard to find. I actually read the whole book before this occurred to me, which was fine, but since then I have dipped back into many of the chapters just to refresh my memory on all the great tips and tricks, and I've found this to be a good way to pick up more time-saving short-cuts, or just new, fun ways to use the device. In addition to all the tips and tricks there are several special sections I have to mention just because they're so much fun. These are the descriptions of how to access all the hidden "Easter eggs." There are more of these than I realized. You can learn how to bring up all of them, including the "dancing palm tree," and the little "taxi cab." (The Palm's original project code name was "Taxi"). Since there are several places in the text where these appear, the best way to locate them is to just look up "Easter eggs" in the book index. There is one chapter, however, that I would read all the way through. This is the chapter on hot-synching. There is some good info here, especially on some of the more technical aspects of hot-synching, but perhaps most importantly, on how to avoid some of the pitfalls. If you're an experienced Palm or Visor user, you may have noticed that this process isn't always as straightforward as the regular manual says, and sometimes it does some unexpected or even weird things. Since we're on the topic, I have to mention one of these here. If you're one of those people who have two (or more) Palms or Visors, here is the most important thing you can learn about hot-synching. I experienced this problem before I encountered the explanation and fix for it in this book. (This was worth the price of the book just by itself.) If you have two units and you hot-sync to the same machine or computer, you must give each of the them a separate name in the Palm Desktop software. You do this by clicking on the "User" box in the top-right of the Palm Desktop software program and selecting "edit users." Give the second Palm a different name from the first. Then always use the correct name with each Palm or Visor each time you hot-sync. There is one more gotcha here. In the desktop program you can pre-select the name of which unit is to be hot-synched. However, if you do this from the cradle without the desktop program being launched, it will pop up another dialog box, and at that point you can select which name to use. If you just click on "okay" assuming that the desktop program knows which one you're using, you can still get into trouble. If you fail to give different units different names, and furthermore, to select the correct one each time you hot-sync, the desktop software can become confused, and, as Pogue points out, may hopelessly thrash the information on one or both units. So beware. All in all a useful book for any Palm or Visor owner.
|
by Victor Cherkashin
See all Editorial Reviews
