Assembly
If you're a blood-and-guts programmer who thinks C is for wussies,
you'll be happy to know that there's a well-supported Palm assembler
called Pila.
There's also a PRC disassembler called PilDis, which
runs under Windows. PilDis can label Palm OS API trap calls with the
name of the API.
PRC-Hacking Tools
Prc2Pilrc extracts
all the resources from a PRC file. Most resources it can extract into
PilRC format, and the rest it just extracts as raw binary data.
PTools is a
resource and database viewer written in Java. It can open .prc/.pdb/.bin
files and display forms and bitmaps graphically, and it can display
strings and stringlists. It can also display most things as PilRC style
resources and everything in a hex dump form. It's free and full source
code is included. This is a cool way to poke around in your program
or database files to see what's there and get a look at how things
are done.
Prc2Bin
breaks a resource database (PRC) file down to its constituent
resources. Each resource is written as a separate file. You can use this
to break down a .PRC file into it's seperate parts, change some of them
and then use Pila or build-prc to put them back together.
Resource File Tools
Alvin Koh has created a program called rsrc2rcp which converts
CodeWarrior resource files to PilRC format. Previously, the only way to
do this was to use one of the above PRC-hacking tools on a pre-existing
PRC file. This tool is great if you find CodeWarrior sample code on the
net but want to convert it to build under PRC-Tools and PilRC.
Deployment Tools
Beiks LLC has developed Pilot Catapult
which is a Windows product for packaging your Palm OS application and
its conduit for automatic installation on your users' PCs. The cost is
$100 for the supported version, though there is apparently a free
unsupported version.
Your humble FAQ maintainer wrote a set of tools for shareware
program key management called PORT. This
tool set takes care of everything from parsing the order data that PalmGear sends you when a customer
registers your product, to generating a registration key from that info,
to building the registration email you send to your new customer. These
tools are all free software, licensed under the GNU GPL, with the
exception of the one file you link with your program for verifying keys.
They're designed to work best on Unix/Linux systems, but they will work
on Windows without too much trouble.
Copyright © 2000-2001 by Warren Young, © 1997
by Wade Hatler. All rights reserved.