DiddleBug FAQ

• What if my question is not answered here?
• Is it really free?
• Can I move my DiddleBug drawings to my desktop computer?
• What exactly is an IntelliBooger^TM extension?
• Why would I want to use IntelliBooger^TM?
• But isn't it easier just to switch to the other application instead of using IntelliBooger^TM?
• Why does it draw so slowly in freehand?
• The alarm doesn't sound when I turn my Palm off. What's up?
• Why can't I open the menu normally via the title?
• Why does DiddleBug immediately crash on my Sony CLIE?
• DiddleBug crashes when I select "Send" from the menu. What's going wrong?
• I upgraded from a previous beta, and now there are garbage titles all over the place. What can I do?
• Why does DiddleBug use the standard alarm sound instead of the one I selected?
• Why does your manual suck?
• Who can I thank for DiddleBug?

If you question is not answered by this FAQ, and you cannot find help in the (still incomplete) manual, then feel free to mail me with your question.

Yes, it is really free. You can use it without charge and modify or redistribute it under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Since I'm currently a full-time student without much money, I would appreciate a donation via PayPal, though. You can either donate directly to pputzer@users.sourceforge.net or use the SourceForge donation mechanism. All money donated will be used to buy new PalmOS devices.

Yes! There is a command-line program for Windows/DOS that allows you to extract sketches from your backed up DiddleBugDB.pdb file and save them as bitmaps. Daniel Lin wrote this program, and you can get it here.

A GUI program called "DiddleEx" that can be used with BugBMP was written by Roger Sondermann and can be found here.

There also exists a Perl-based program named Didcon that runs on both Linux/UNIX and Windows. It can be found here. Additionally, there is an online version that allows you to convert your DiddleBug sketches from any place with web access. A tutorial on how to use Didcon on MacOS X can be found here (alas written in German).

Recently, Max Vlasov has written another Windows program that does not need BugBMP. It is called "WindleBug" and can be found here. It also supports the new hi-res format.

IntelliBooger^TM extensions are the code embedded within DiddleBug that allows it to create entries in the ToDo, DateBook and other databases without leaving DiddleBug.  It is based on an advanced, unpatented pick-and-flick technology.

• Pick - Select "Transfer" from the menu.  You will now see the Pick Text Field at the bottom of the screen.  You can use graffiti (or the built-in Palm keyboard) to transcribe information from your sketch into this field.
• Flick - If you push the Flick Button (button on the left), then this information will be entered into the application of your choice.  You can select which app to flick to using the plugin button.  Any alarm or repeat information that you have previously entered for a DiddleBug sketch will be automatically read and used in the new entry.

IntelliBooger^TM is implemented using plugins that you can install on your Palm. Each plugin that you install allows a different target application or entry type to be used. Please see the plugin page here for more information. Also, please read the section in the manual about using the plugins.

DiddleBug has some advantages over the built-in applications:

• It is very easy and fast to enter information and set alarms.
• It allows you to show your sketches for alarms.

But the text data in the built-in applications also have some advantages:

• You can sync the info with your desktop.
• It is easy to catoragize and organize the info.
• Many third-party applications can work with your text info
• You can do a global search for text data.

IntelliBooger^TM plugins allow you to take adavantage of the very fast information capture offered by DiddleBug, while still allowing you to easily enter this info later into the built-in applications, so you can have your cake and eat it too!

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I will often have trouble remembering a phone number even for the amount of time that it takes to switch to another application. Also, using IntelliBooger^TM allows you to delete the sketch that you are transferring information from in the same step, so you don't have to worry about duplicate information.

The smoothing filter will introduce a delay between your pen movements and the ink showing up on the screen. You should set the filter to "Unsmooth" when you need fast performance for those fast scribbles. Also, smaller pen sizes will be slightly faster than the large ones.

The Palm Operating System will only check for alarms once every 60 seconds when the power is off. Therefore, the alarm may be up to 60 seconds late if you have turned your power off. You will not notice this in most applications because they usually will not let you see a running countdown to the alarm time like DiddleBug does. Rest assured that the alarm will eventually go off (within a minute). If you need greater accuracy than a minute, then why did you turn off your Palm?

Also, the Palm IIIx and Palm V machines have a known bug where sometimes alarms will not sound when the Palm is sleeping. If you do a soft reset of your Palm, the problem should go away.

If you've got a Treo 600, you will notice something similar: The alarm comes up, but initially there is no sound ("Remind Me" sounds do work). Please upgrade DiddleBug to v.2.90.b.4 or higher for a workaround to this hardware limitation.

This FAQ entry has been made obsolete by v.2.51.

As of that version, the shortcut menu is available via a swipe on the title bar, while simply tapping opens the normal application menu. Optionally, this behavior can be reversed by setting the "switch titlebar action" checkbox in the DiddleBug preferences.

DiddleBug provides its own shortcut menu, which will interfere with DiddleBug using that same action to show a shortcut menu. To fix this, simply go to the DiddleBug preferences and check the option that says "Disable titlebar shortcut menu".

This FAQ entry has been made obsolete by v.2.50.rc.3.

As of that version, DiddleBug directly supports the Clie hi-res mode. There is no need to enable or disable hi-res assist anymore.

You have to explicitely disable "HiRes-Assist" for DiddleBug. Beware though, sometimes it switches itself on again after upgrading to a new version!

There are two possible reasons:

1. You are using a non-German v.2.60 or earlier. Due to a missing resource, DiddleBug crashes instead of telling you to install SysZLib.
   
   Solution: Install SysZLib and/or upgrade to v.2.90.b.3 or higher. Both an ARM-version and the old 68K-version of SysZLib are included in the DiddleBug download (in the support directory). They equally work on all versions of PalmOS, but you should install the ARM-version if you've got a device running PalmOS 5.0 or higher (since it is much faster on those), and the 68K-version on all other devices (since on those the ARM-native code is just extra baggage eating into the precious amount of free memory).
   
   
2. In some cases, certain mail clients leave an unsaved preference on the device even when they are deleted, sometimes resulting in a crash when invoking "Send".
   
   Solution: Use SysTool to go through the unsaved preferences database and remove the entry looking like

   Creator: 'HsMx'[65532]
   Program: MailExchange-HsMx
   Size: 10 bytes
   00 00 09 5F 73 65 6E 64 ..._send<
   00 00 .. 

   to fix the crash.

The garbage titles only appear when you've upgraded from certain beta versions and not directly from 2.15. You can safely delete them via the "Details" dialog or the "Note" button.

There may be three reasons for this behavior:

1. You recently installed GeekSounds and did not re-set your alarm sounds. You might think that this does not matter, as GeekSounds contains all the standard Palm sounds, but unfortunately, PalmOS (and thus DiddleBug) remembers sounds by an internal ID and not their name. This means that after you installed GeekSounds, the IDs stored by DiddleBug pointed to non-existing records. When DiddleBug tried to use the designated alarm tone, the OS returned an error and the program used its fallback: the default alarm sound.
   
   Solution: re-select the various alarm sounds in the Preferences and/or Alarm Details dialogs.
   
   
2. You have read this FAQ up until reason 1.) and re-set all the various alarms, but DiddleBug still ignores your settings. In this case, you installed the MIDI database from GeekSounds, but it didn't overwrite the default system MIDI database because it didn't have the right name for your version or language of PalmOS. In version 2.1 of GeekSounds, the included database is named "System MIDI Sounds". PalmOS 4.x uses localized names, so if you've got a German Palm, the name would be "MIDI-Systemsignale" whereas some versions of PalmOS 3.5 use "MIDI Sounds" instead.
   
   Solution: delete the default database and rename the GeekSounds database to the default name. The easiest way to do this is using a file-management program like Filez.
   
   
3. You have got a Treo 600, which contains two MIDI databases by default.
   
   Solution: upgrade to DiddleBug v.2.90.b.4 or higher.

It's not done yet! If you want to help bringing it up to date, please contact pputzer@users.sourceforge.net.

DiddleBug is a collaborative project, and many people had a hand in creating and improving it. In the future, I will try to list the names of people who were the first to give a bug report or an implemented suggestion for improvement in the corresponding CVS message. In addition to those, some notable contributors are:

• Peter Putzer - Current maintainer (and German translator).
• Jerry D. Hedden - Plugin coder.
• Daitau Aaron - Chinese translations.
• Vincent Poty - French translation.
• Will Lau - New application icon.

These are the old credits from Mitch Blevins' version. Some of the information below has been superceeded:

• Mitch Blevins - Principal author and maintainer.
• Roger Critchlow, Jr. - Creator of the Doodle program, on which DiddleBug's drawing engine is based.
• Ben Darnell - Wrote most of the code that I stole for the DiddleSnap hack. Also was the person who first got me interested in Palm programming.
• Iain Barclay - Creator of the BugMe! program, which pioneered the yellow-sticky-note-with-alarm concept. You should check out BugMe! if you want a program similar to DiddleBug, but which uses the Palm categories and an index to organize your sketches.
• Daeyeon Han - Korean translation, much help with localization and bug reports.
• Francisco Sanchez - Spanish translation.
• Frederic Jean - French translations and several improvement suggestions.
• Stefan Schwingeler - German translation.
• Thorsten Tietz - Original German translation.
• Kurosaka Teruhiko - Japanese translation.
• Omar Colocci - Portugese translation.
• Petr Nozek - Czech translation.
• Daniel Lin - Creation of a desktop program to convert DiddleBug graphics.
• Roger Sondermann - Graphical shell for Daniel Lin's DiddleBug utility.
• Mike McCollister - General help, suggestions, guidance, bug reports, bug fixes.
• Alan B. (aka shrink) - Has more ideas than a dog has fleas.
• Chris Cardone - Conceptual design for IntelliBooger^TM extensions.
• Martin Geist - New program icon(s).
• Lonnie Foster - patches for program improvements and clipboard plugin.