Robert -
Sorry I didn't respond to this before now (since you mentioned me
specifically) - I got way behind on my NewtonTalk reading this week.
On 8/20/00 1:45 PM, Robert Benschop [mailto:robertbenschop@bigfoot.com]
wrote:
>Now I know that this has been discussed often and it did come up recently
>and I deleted most on the subject since I don't own a Palm (and doubt that I
>ever will, love the HWR on the 2.1 Newt and hated Graffiti when I had to use
>it on my 110) but it seams very hard to synch a Newt and Palm and I don't
>really see why.
Because the Newton applications are far more powerful than the Palm ones;
there are many features (and data items) on the Newton that do not make
it over to the Palm. You'd have to severerly limit your Newton use in
order to sync the two. I gave up. Too much work to clean up the data.
It'd take me weeks.
>As I said, I can't test this myself since I'm not going to spend money on a
>Palm just for this test, but since it's pretty easy to export data to Palm
>Desktop and/or Claris Organizer and the Palm can synch with that data again
>the road that way seems quite easy.
You're correct, it was fairly easy to either export from NCU and Import
to PD, or even sync (at least sync out going from NCU to a blank PD file)
>(or are the limitations of the Palm
>giving trouble by this stage already ?)
Yep.
>BTW, can a Palm synch with CO or solely with PD ?
Solely with PD. PD is CO with Palm Sync added.
>The other way around I can see trouble since you have limited data that
>would possibly erase the more complex data in your Newt, no way around this?
No way short of knowing ALL the limitations and limiting your Newton's
data to that of a Palm.
>Sorry if I'm boring diehards in this, but the subject seems to be creeping
>up time and time again.
>I searched the FAQ, but am I right that this one has never made it there ?
>(I'm especially curious what Bill has to say on this ;-)
Examples of data problems (when I went from Newton to PD to Palm IIIx. I
haven't closely examined the data on Palm Desktop, only on the Palm:
Palm Notepad notes limited to 4-8k, much smaller than the Newton. Any
Newton notes bigger than that are not imported, they're simply lost.
Palm Notepad doesn't support outlines, checklists, drawings or shapes,
ink, custom stationery, etc, so that data is transferred oddly or lost
completely (especially the graphics/ink). Outlines and checklist are
transferred, but it's ugly. Unchecked checklist items are shown prefixed
with "ToDo:" and indented a space or two (barely visible). Checked item
are prefixed with "Done:". Text styles and fonts are not supported. If
you don't title all your Newton notes MANUALLY, the notes exported to the
palm all just show up as the date the note was created on the Newton (the
Newton Notepad will automatically pull out the first few words of the
note if you don't manually label it, but this doesn't export out of NCU)
I never tried synching back from the Palm to PD to the Newton, but I
imagine things would get uglier still!
I had many problems with events in Dates not exporting to the Palm
properly, especially birthdays and other repeating yearly events (or
other repeating events). A lot (but not all) of them ended up clustered
on January 1. There are also other limitations of repeating events.
The Newton Date and To-Do's are integrated. They aren't on the Palm. I
can't recall how or even if the Newton to-do items transferred to the
Palm at all.
The Palm address book is SEVERELY limited compared to the Newton. The
Newton allows multiple copies of many fields, such as address, etc.
These don't translate well to the Palm. Some get stuffed into Notes.
Some get completely lost. Major problems here until you clean up all
your data to match the Palm's limits. Palm doesn't have companies vs.
people either, and no groups. Different number of custom fields. And
there are other problems.
There are limitations in the quantity of "folders" (categories on the
Palm). The Palm has fewer than the Newton (which has too few, but not as
few as the Palm).
This is just stuff I remember from my first attempt at this about 13-14
months ago. It wasn't pretty.
That being said, if you experimented with this and cleaned up your data
to match the Palm, and didn't use anything but text notes, it may be
doable. I have over 1100 notes, about 700 names, etc, and it was just
too much work to try to do that. As I said, it'd take me weeks to figure
out all the limits and clean up all the data to match the Palm or PD
limitations. I use the Newton address book's features that the Palm
can't match a LOT. I use checklist and outlines a LOT. And I'm not sure
there are other hidden "gotchas" in there. I'm sort of slowly working on
getting the Newton data cleaned up to the Palm limits, but it's a
definite major leap backwards.
-Bill
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