Hi, Thomas (and other Free42 on Palm Tn things.) I've recently acquired a Palm T3 (ver 5.2.1, app ver 4.5.1P) and installed Free42 (decimal, 1.4.49). It works great except that when I put on the Ehrling42sm skin the Graffiti2 area doesn't disappear when the device is opened (and it doesn't shrink when it's closed, but I'm not sure it was supposed to do that?) I tried setting the maximum gif size to 450 and 480 from 256, but that appeared to have no effect. Help?

You should be able to collapse the graffiti area manually by clicking on the arrow in the bottom right corner of the screen. Once you've done that, the input area will expand and collapse automatically as needed, like when you select a different skin, or when dialog boxes are presented or dismissed.


Whether the graffiti area is expanded or collapsed is a global setting, not application-specific; Free42 will collapse the graffiti area when Ehrling42sm is selected, *if* it was collapsed when Free42 was launched.


Think of it this way: the graffiti area can be in two states, expanded or collapsed. When a fixed-size window is presented, the input area is forced into its expanded state (if the window is square) or into its collapsed state (if the window is tall, like the print-out window), but the user-selected state is remembered, and is restored when a resizable window becomes topmost again. You can tell which state the input area is in by looking for the arrow in the bottom-right corner: if it is missing, the current window is fixed size; if it is present, the current window supports both small and large sizes.


Allowing the graffiti area to expand when a 320x450 skin is selected is a feature, not a bug; this allows the use of graffiti in ALPHA mode.

(The "maximum GIF height" setting specifies the maximum height of the GIF files generated when printer output is captured. This has nothing to do with skins.)

- Thomas

Edited: 10 June 2009, 6:51 p.m.

If I open free42+Ehrling42sm from the expanded Home with no Graffiti input showing, the first thing that shows is "Loading", with the Graffiti area, and then the Ehrling skin under that. The Graffiti close icon is greyed out, with any skin.

Could you try uninstalling Free42, then hard-resetting the Palm, then reinstalling?
Does that make a difference?
Also, what does the print-out window look like?

Currently a grey square (probably half the pixels white, half black); doing a print stack, the four lines at the top are white, T= value, ... X= value, then the rest grey. Keying 1 ^ 2 ^ 3 ^ 4 print stack, those values are now below the others. Hot Syncing ... Hard Reset ... Hot Sync ... problem has not gone away. I'm a little surprised that both Free42 and EatWatch were automaticly reloaded. I'll try deleteing them from both places and trying again tomorrow. Is there some update to the T3 that might change this? The only one I saw was something to do with SD cards, and I'm not using those.

I believe there is an OS update for the T3, but I don't know what it does - the link to it at palmone.com is broken.


So, the arrow is disabled on the print-out screen, too (disabled or missing?). Strange, it's like the OS does recognize that the main screen is resizable, but for some reason it refuses to collapse the graffiti area. I'll have to look into the API docs to check if that version of the OS requires any special treatment. I thought that the dynamic input area was introduced in 5.3; I may be doing something wrong with the OS capability checks.

Feel free to contact me off-line if you want to continue this discussion outside of the forum. If hard-resetting and reinstalling doesn't fix this, this may require some actual debugging, and that could become a bit boring for the rest of the forum participants.

- Thomas

Sorry you are having trouble with this. I use Free42 on a Palm TX (indeed, Free42 was the main reason I got that particular Palm a few years ago) and that skin is my skin of choice. Never any problems.

I am suspecting you have some specific issue with your Palm model or the OS. I hope you you sort it out. Free42 really works well on Palms, and the flash card storage makes program I/O a piece of cake. Free42 is the only reason I keep my old Sony Clie and Palm TX in commission.

Les

Will do. I'm sure it's something about the differences between the T and T3 and T5, we just have to figure out what it is. We'll report back when we succeed.

Free42 runs fine on the very old HandSpring Visors, btw.

Fixed, unpublicized Palm T3 software update.

There are a pair of files ( AppSlipRotate.prc and StatusBarLib.prc ) distributed with several apps that are for "!!! T3 only !!!"; upon installing this pair prior to installing Pimlico's DateBK6 which requires them on a T3, the screen now properly shows the shrink graffiti icon, and it works as expected.

Thomas, you should probably put a note in the install docs for Free42 that these are needed for Tungsten T3 use.

That's good to hear -- thanks for figuring this out!


Do you know if those two prc files are freely redistributable? If so, I'd like to include them in Free42PalmOS.zip, or maybe offer them as a separate download at free42.sourceforge.net.

Quoting from http://fitaly.com/fitalyvirtual3/readthisfirst.htm

---

T3 Dynamic Input Area libraries

FitalyVirtual requires the presence of two libraries — AppSlipRotate.prc and StatusBarLib.prc — for the Dynamic Input Area of the Tungsten T3 to work properly. Installing these libraries will override built-in ROM libraries and will require that you do a Reset at the end of the Hotsync. (This is normal and does not cause any data loss. It only occurs once when you install these libraries.)

These libraries are provided by PalmOne who endorses their use. You may find other third-party applications also asking you to install these same libraries but you only need to do it once. Note that reinstalling them does no harm: the Hotsync log will include a message telling you that they are already present. Finally, if you attempt to enable FitalyVirtual without having installed these libraries, enabling will fail and you will get a warning message asking you to install them.

These libraries should never be installed on a T5 or a LifeDrive.

---

The other places I've seen the files have similar messages; provided by PalmOne, needed on T3, dire results if they are installed on any other Palm, or if they are not installed together. Finding "official" news about these is difficult, at least for me. If you have access to the old Palm developer docs you might find some info there.

I hot-synced, dragged the two into the install box, hot-synced, got a soft-reset, opened Free42, and it was working.

---

http://www.handshigh.com/html/tungstent3.html

http://www.red-mercury.com/t3.html

are two other sites with similar info. Seems the T3 shipped without something, and for some reason they didn't put it into the flash update that came along later.

Edited: 16 June 2009, 1:55 p.m.

That agrees with a few other web sites I found -- simply googling for AppSlipRotate.prc turns up several sites that have these prc files for the T3.


OK, since those files are pretty small, I'll just add them to the Free42PalmOS.zip package, with an additional README file to explain what they're for.