Mac OS X Tools for Palm Development

 


 

The osx-palm-tools project aims at creating a set of tools for Palm developers working on Mac OS X. The lack of good development tools and the need for specialized utilities targeting specific development tasks led me to write some of the tools I needed for my Palm OS development.

Since many developers use Mac OS X as their preferred platform for Palm OS development, it seemed like a good idea to share these tools with others. This project was born after I wrote Cocoa Palm Reporter (see below) and is improving with new tools like the USB-TCP Bridge (see below) and HostTraceGlue (see below).

 

Cocoa Palm Reporter (1.0.1)

The purpose of this tool is to provide a decent utility to examine and log traces output by applications running on the Palm OS Emulator or the Palm OS Simulator. While the later only runs on Windows, it is possible to configure it to send its traces over the network to Cocoa Palm Reporter.

While a tool named Palm Reporter already exists for Mac OS, it only runs on Classic. No carbonized version has been distributed, and I needed a tool running under Mac OS X in order to be able to both use the debugger and the reporter at the same time. If you are developing Palm OS applications under Mac OS X, you know what I'm talking about.

 

Project summary page at SourceForge
Download Cocoa Palm Reporter
Browse the CVS repository
Go to the discussion forums
Cocoa Palm Reporter screenshot

 

USB-TCP Bridge (1.2)

This tool bridges communications between a Palm handheld connected with a USB cradle and a TCP/IP socket. It can be used, for example, with the GDB debugger (which normally connects to the Palm OS Emulator on TCP/IP port 2000) to debug on a Palm handheld instead of debugging on the Palm OS emulator.

It can also be used to connect the Unix-based pilot-link synchronization tools to a Palm handheld on Mac OS X.

There are many more features, like support for packaged redistribution with predefined settings, etc. Check it out!

Project summary page at SourceForge
Download USB-TCP Bridge
Browse the CVS repository
Go to the discussion forums

 

USB-TCP Bridge Screenshot

HostTraceGlue (1.3)

Palm OS Emulator supports a very useful API, HostTrace, which allows applications to send traces to a trace reporting tool like Cocoa Palm Reporter. Unfortunately, the HostTrace API is only available when running on the emulator or simulator. HostTraceGlue fills the gap by providing the same calls than the HostTrace API provides, and allowing these calls to output data even when running on a real device.

Instead of calling the HostTraceXXX functions, you just call the HostTraceGlueXXX equivalents in your code, and you're done. To see the traces emitted by your device, you'll need to use USB-TCP Bridge (see above) to bridge connections from the handheld to Cocoa Palm Reporter, and Cocoa Palm Reporter (see above) to see the actual traces.

Very easy to integrate in your application, HostTraceGlue is just one C file containing the glue and one header file containing the function prototypes.

 

Project summary page at SourceForge
Download HostTraceGlue
Browse the CVS repository
Go to the discussion forums

 

 


Copyright © 2002-2003 by Florent Pillet
Email: fpillet@users.sourceforge.net
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