Testing An Editor That Doesn't Not-Suck
Wednesday, Apr. 23, 2003

In my search for a decent text editor for my palm, which I'm typing on again while sitting at the kitchen table, I kept running into the same old crap.

Not that the programs I'm about to mention are crap, that being Pedit and QED, but that you have to pay $20 to use them.

Pardon me for taking the alleged moral high ground and saying that I'll not pirate software for my palm, all the while running an operating system that I don't own. In fact, I've never bought an operating system and the one that came with the computer I bought 12 years ago and I've been gradually upgrading was Windows 3.1.

Well, all that said, it took me a while but I found this program called Freewrite. Palmgear had it listed under Science. Freewarepalm didn't even list it. Basically, what I'm writing now, is a test of it.

Aisai and I just got finished watching Roswell. It's in syndication on the Sci-Fi channel. If memory serves, there are only 78 episodes. Or at least that's what I'm adding up in my head since I think it was WB for the first two year and had one final year on UPN.

The episode we saw was the one where Alex gives blood and later turns the laptop around. If you don't know what I'm talking about, good. I'm really enjoying the series and when it starts over with the pilot again, I suggest you watch it.

Though, I'm not sure if I would have started the series if I had realized that sweeps starts Thursday. Though, for some reason, the lil TV dudes aren't making stuff that interests me that much. The only stuff that I'll be interested in during May sweeps is how Angel and the crew will stop Jasmine (AKA Zoe from the cancelled Joss Whedon show Firefly, showing up on Angel to brainwash the whole planet into thinking she's some kind of Messiah when she's actually walking maggot girl) and how Buffy will end, where she's fighting the former Captain of the Serenity (the ship on Firefly) who's now a uber-powerful fake Catholic priest. And I don't mean a Lutheran.

What I need is for Tech TV to have a show dedicated to freeware that'll run on three year old Palms. Heck' they could call it the IIIxe show.

Ahhh, I just finally cranked out a sentence so fast that I was keeping ahead of the unit's screen. That's the big drawback to the otherwise very cool software that Palm included with the unit. That stuff is called DocumentsToGo.

The main irritation, and this smacks of crippleware but it's not, is that you can't create a new XLS or Doc file on your palm. The simple workaround is to put a file, and empty xls or doc, on the palm with the name New.doc. Actually, mine are named newdoc.doc and newxls.xls, because it is set to hide the file extension.

If I understand it correctly, Freewrite, which is designed for elementary through high school kids to write science reports on, will export all that I'm typing as html. That's fine, just as long as I can copy and paste it.

Oh, and one thing that Freewrite has that the powerhouse pedit and uber-editor QED don't is a spell check built in. Thus the need for a serious test.

However, the more I write the slower it's able to update the screen. I think if I could think ahead enough, and suppress my desire to stop typing when I can't see what should be showing up, then I could definitely type an entire line ahead of the screen.

Man, it's getting really slow now. But even now WordToGo was worse. I'm trying to get something since I really like typing anywhere.

Well, I'm going to spellcheck now and synch up. Wish me luck.