Palm OS Development Resources

• Wade's Pilot Programming FAQ is getting to be well out of date these days, but it's still got some useful pointers.
• There's a CodeWarrior FAQ and a prc-tools FAQ (which used to live here).
• There were many interesting articles in the sadly defunct Hand-Held Systems Journal. They've taken their archives off-line, but you can buy a CD.
• The newsgroups pilot.programmer, pilot.programmer.codewarrior, and pilot.programmer.gcc (and a couple of others, but those are the main ones) are archived back to day 1. These only really exist on Darrin Massena's news server, but mysteriously enough from time to time they make it out to DejaNews as well, which is very handy when you need to search them.
• Palm administers several developer mailing lists which have a larger audience than the Massena newsgroups and are often better for Palm OS-specific issues. The volume is such that they are practically unreadable as mailing lists; there is NNTP access via news.palmos.com (you need to sign up for the list -- set the nomail option -- and play silly games with passwords), and there are patchy third-party web archives:
  • eScribe archives palm-dev-forum, emulator-forum, and others
  • eGroups archives palm-dev-forum and some of the others
  The eGroups archives go back further than the eScribe ones, but are less conveniently presented.
• The pilot-unix mailing list has had many incarnations over the years. There are a subscription form and archives for the current (and best!) incarnation, and a slightly older archive that probably contains nothing that the current archive doesn't. There are also old archives from when the list was at best.com (1996 to early 2000).
• Some parts of Palm's Developers' Zone are absolutely vital:
  • The API documentation. Indispensable!
  • The Palm OS Emulator, for Macintosh, Windows, and Unix. (Unix people used to get by with XCopilot.)
  • The Creator ID Database. This is where you register IDs for your creations: any application that escapes from your laboratory needs to have its own unique ID. (As do Hacks and libraries: if I understand it correctly, IDs used for features or app preferences ought to be registered just like those used for databases.)
• Truly obsessed people need the DragonBall documentation.
• Historically, software like prc-tools and pilot-link was distributed from ftp://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/pub/PalmOS/. Prc-tools now has a home at SourceForge. Pilot-link had a stint on SourceForge too, and is now available through David Desrosiers's CVS repository.
• Palm has now documented the PDB and PRC file formats (see the documentation page listed above), making the old reverse-engineered quasi-documentation less important. Ted Ts'o has BFD patches which add a certain amount of support for PRC files, and his PRC reverse-engineering work is still useful for its description of what resources you are likely to find in a Palm OS application.
• People using prc-tools need PilRC (which used to live here) to add resources to their applications. (People using Constructor might prefer to be using pilrc :-).)
• LinkMaster is a way of linking data between different applications, and HackMaster is an old favourite.

There are others as well. This isn't a fair list, it's just what I find particularly interesting. See Wade's FAQ for others.

PRC-Tools and GCC

Version 2.0

Version 0.5.0