A fork of the original SiEd Palm OS text editor project, optimized for the AlphaSmart Dana's widescreen display. SiEd-Dana is based off of the 0.10.0_beta3 release of SiEd from April 27, 2005 by Benjamin Roe.
NOTE: I lost my Palm OS development environment in a hard drive crash years ago so I can do longer do any work on this project. I may unarchive this if I ever get around to rebuilding that environment but for now, I'll leave this up in case anyone else would like to carry on.
- The current version of SiEd-Dana is 0.10-0-beta4.
SiEd-Dana is a free and open-sourced simple text editor optimized for the AlphaSmart Dana based off of the original SiEd text editor for PalmOS devices by Benjamin Roe. Its purpose is to provide an easy way to create and edit large text documents without the limitations of the built-in Memopad program while taking advantage of the full 560x160 pixel display of the AlphaSmart Dana. The program is distributed under version 2 of the GPL.
To install SiEd-Dana, just download the latest PRC file and use your favourite Palm desktop software to copy the file over to your AlphaSmart Dana. If you want to hack around with the source or build your own PRC you'll need the PiLRC and PRC-Tools packages as well as copies of Palm OS 5 SDK R3 or R4, Palm Desktop SDK 5.4, and a copy of the AlphaSmart Dana SDK. Some build instructions are included below.
Using SiEd-Dana is pretty self explanatory. All commands have a keyboard equivalent (listed in the menus). Documents auto-save on exiting the application.
- Support for plain-text files on VFS volumes
- DOC format support (uncompressed only at present)
- Edit ~100Kb text files on the AlphaSmart Dana
- Search and replace
- Word count
- Large undo history
- Encrypted file support using 128-bit AES encryption
- Split view - view/edit two files at once Emacs style
- Macro Recording
- Support for text/plain files through Exchange Manager (beaming, inter-application transfer etc)
- 12 display fonts (4 Hires, 4 standard Palm, 4 normal-resolution)
- GPL licensed
- AlphaSmart Dana, either 8MB or 16MB versions
SiEd-Dana may run on other devices running PalmOS v.3.5 or greater, however the SiEd-Dana interfaces are optimized for the 560x160 resolution of the AlphaSmart Dana and as such, may not render/operate correctly on other Palm devices. For now, use SiEd instead.
There is a usage guide with screenshots and other useful information available from the original SiEd project site, which you can now access via Archive.org's Wayback Machine. Even though the screen size in the User Guide is based on screens with a resolution of 160x160 pixels, functionality-wise, the interfaces are the same.
- Will most likely contain any bugs that were already present in the original SiEd-0.10.0_beta3 release.
- Does not handle Screen Rotate very well; will edit and render text off-screen once the cursor goes past 160 pixels in vertical mode. For now, use SiEd-Dana in normal display mode.
- Let me know if you find anything else by filing a report!
Compiles using PRC-Tools and PiLRC.
The original SiEd release from 2005 as published by Benjamin Roe was slightly modified in order to compile using more modern Palm SDKs released after 2005 (mainly, the addition of a few more library header includes in the 'editor.cc' file) as well as to update the rendering engine to work with the AlphaSmart Dana's 560x160 pixel display. Has tested as successfully compiling using either Palm OS 5 SDK R3 or R4 combined with Palm Desktop SDK 5.4. It might work with other combinations of the Palm/Garnet SDKs as well, but for future development, it'd be wise to standardize on these versions of the SDKs. With the inclusion of the new library includes in editor.cc, SiEd-Dana may no longer compile successfully using older Palm SDK versions without reverting the changes first.
Building a PalmOS executable from this source code requires a complete install of the PRC-Tools and PiLRC packages, as well as Palm OS 5 SDK R3 or R4 along with Palm Desktop SDK 5.4 and a copy of the AlphaSmart Dana SDK.
When creating your Palm SDK directory by combining the AlphaSmart Dana SDK, Palm OS SDK and the Palm Desktop SDK library files, ensure that the .h. files from the AlphaSmart Dana SDK as well as the the 68K and Common directories of the Palm Desktop SDK appear inside the root include folder of the Palm OS SDK. Depending on where/how you obtained your SDKs, the library files may have been formatted for Windows machines, which may give warnings when compiling SiEd-Dana under a Linux environment. If so, you'll want to run all of the text files through a utility such as dos2unix first to convert them into a Unix-friendly format before working with the files.
Also note that Palm changed some of the macro definitions in the later versions of their SDKs, which may require a modification to the WideTallApp.h file from the AlphaSmart SDK in order to get things to compile properly. If so, change all invocations of the _Str() macro in the WideTallApp.h file to invoke _PalmTypes_OS_CALL_Str() instead.
The targets (i.e. type make <target>) available for the make process are:
-
all: builds the English language full version -
portuguese,norwegian,dutch,italian,french,german,spanish,catalan: builds appropriate language
##Copyright Notice This software is licensed under the terms of version 2 of the GPL, included in the LICENSE file in the source code directory.
The icons are Copyright Stefan Smith and Tankut Enric, and the copyright for the translations is attributed in the text_resource.h file. Portions of SiEd-Dana are based off of the original SiEd project Copyright 2003-2005 Benjamin Roe. New additions are Copyright 2016 Reg Tiangha.