DrWhizBang's Journal: Join me on the Dark side, Joe...

I am currently downloading development tools form Microsoft. gak! gah! ugh!

I have had a CASIOPEIA BE-300 for about a year now. Bought it because my Visor got stolen when I was on vacation in Toronto. I remember being in Futureshop, looking at the Palm, the Handspring, the iPaq. Although I had been happy with the Visor, I was really disappointed that none of the PalmOS devices at the time could play mp3s. Then I saw the Casio - full colour, 16 megs of ram, 16 megs of flash, CF slot, and mp3 player built-in. All for the same price as the low-end Visor or Palm.

I then swallowed my pride and bought a WinCE palmtop. I am not proud of the fact that I gave money to Microsoft, but I just got wowed.

What I didn't realize at the time is that what I had purchased was a Windows CE device, but not a "PocketPC". Casio got me. Although the BE300 is very cool, it does not run all of the PocketPC apps. That means no Pocket Outlook. The primary function of my Visor was to keep lists, which it did well. The Casio supplied application to track tasks is next to useless.

I soon discovered that there was a very active community on the web built around the BE300, and something called ePods. ePods is an alternative "distribution" of Windows CE for the BE300 that makes it operate much more like a real PocketPC. Not 100% though, and still no Pocket Outlook.

Having seen the rapid development of ePods, I had hope that someone in that community would build a better PIM application. But here we are, a year later and no PIM. My BE300 has not seen a lot of use (it probably would see more if i bought a nice big CF card for mp3s)

So I recently explored synce, and was able to transfer files back and forth from my linux machine at home. This is great - it means if I get a CF card, I will be able to use it as an mp3 player. But I still need a decent PIM, and I realized now that I will have to write it myself.

Which brings me to eMbedded Visual Tools 3.0. I hope I can figure out how to build a little task/calendar with a vCard driven back-end that ill let my keep a buch of lists categorized so that I can find my way around them. I know nothing about MFC, and little C/C++, so wish me luck.

If I get something usable, I will definitely release it for all the other BE300-heads out there.