FreenoteQT vs pdaXrom. Tough call?

[obscurite]

Hello. I'm about to buy a C860 from Dynamism.

I'm a little concerned, because I want to run the best rom (apprently pdaXrom), but I also want desperately to run FreenoteQT (http://www.urban.ne.jp/home/kanemori/zaurus/freenote_e.html). As a software developer with some C++ and QT experience, I plan on trying to help with FreenoteQT development if I end up using it alot, and if I can understand the code.

With pdaXrom, it seems you have to port apps to get them to work, where they would normally work fine on the stock/cacko roms.

1) I would like to be able to contribute code/fixes/etc to the pdaXrom code base
2) I would like to have a clear path to porting apps to pdaXrom such as FreenoteQT should I want to do that

I took a look at the pdaXrom site and didn't see any source available - is this a closed source project? Sorry if the answer is obvious.

Thanks for your help in advance!

-Daniel

PS. Please feel free contact me directly if you use FreenoteQT extensively on a clamshell zaurus, particularly if you got it to run on pdaXrom! We can compare notes and have our own note-taking mini user group  Thanks.

[fabianE]

Hello Obscurite,

I used freenoteqt with the cacko-qt-rom a lot, with pdaxrom I miss such an app. In theory, one could use gimp 1.3 to do the same job, but currently it is too slow to write multiple lines. Other alternatives could be gpaint (I couldn't try it because it is broken with pdaxrom 1.1rc3) or any other paint program.

Since you haven't received your zaurus yet I suggest to try both roms. I personally stayed with pdaxrom...

Concerning your other questions, they are partly already answered in this forum: source for rc3/4 is released, development howto is available at pdaxrom and in this forum.

For pdaxrom, you normally don't port the qt-based apps from the sharp-based roms (mostly qt2 based) but instead port X11 based applications which are (in my opinion) more powerful (abiword, gnumeric, tkinter, qt3, xmms,...).

I used many notetaking programs on the palm and pocketpcs before, so I appreciate anything that will be development in that direction very much. You might want to take a look at opie drawpad for the zaurus or bugme for the palms as other good examples for sketch programs.

Regards,

Fabian

[Zumi]

This program is exactly what I need and what I wanted!
Please try to compile it somehow! I hope it is doable.

Zumi

[obscurite]

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to try Cacko and pdaXrom and decide which suits my needs better. Since FreenoteQT is the most exciting app to me, I may well end up running Cacko + Xqt (or whatever it is that lets you run X apps) until I can get it or something similar running under pdaXrom.

There have been other threads on note-taking apps, here's my list of known apps. Chime in if you know of another and have specific reccomendations.

FreenoteQT - best suited for taking lecture notes because of huge freeform canvas
IQNotes - good outliner note taker, but costs $20
notez - text only note pad
drawpad - a sketch pad type app
justmemo - dont know much about it
stageone - outliner note taker, commercial
tkcmemo - memo pad

-Daniel

[jabbath]

Hi!
Maybe gpaint is what you search for (unlikely but possible )
(zaurus.spy.org/feeds/jabbath)

grusz, jabbath

[fabianE]

Hello Jabbath,

does your gpaint run with pdaxrom 1.1, the version from the pdaxrom feed is broken with 1.1 (was compiled with old version of compiler).

By the way, I saw that you compiled many programs: Do you have any tips&tricks for compiling programs. I know the forum entries but maybe you can share some of your experiences.

Thank you in advance.

Regards,

Fabian

[obscurite]

**UPDATE**

I finally received my C860, and flashed with Cacko 1.21b, which is a really huge improvement over the Sharp ROM. (Thanks  Maslovsky and friends).

I also got to try out FreenoteQT, stable and dev. I don't know if the author of FreenoteQT uses ZUG, but if you do, please say hello for your fans, and there are a lot of us.

I find FreenoteQT very very useful, almost useful enough to replace paper notebooks when I take notes in class or sketch out ideas. There are a few usability concerns that I have, and some feature improvement ideas.

pdaXrom looks awesome, but I'd hate to lose FreenoteQT, which I had been looking forward to for some time. I suppose I'll do that dual-boot thing at some point to try it out, or just flash for a day and restore afterwards.

I found a page somewhere listing some "tablet pc" oriented linux software... http://groundstate.ca/node/view/370 . There's really not much out there that's known. I'd love to find out more, and try to work myself up to contributing to some pen based software projects. As much as I have a problem with Microsoft's stranglehold on software, I really commend their efforts on OneNote, an amazing piece of software for Tablet PC's for notetaking and organizing information. I wish there was something along those lines (not just a sketchpad like Gournal seems to be)...

One of the hardest parts about learning FreenoteQT is figuring out how the tools work. For example, to delete something you have to erase it and then hit the OK or enter button. In the stable version, there is a "Return" icon you can hit instead. It's all a little odd, especially the cut and paste functionality, which works unlike anything else I've seen - kinda cool actually. I'd be glad to lend a hand working on a better English user manual...

Is the author out there??

Sincerely,
Daniel

[Zumi]

...

Seems to be a nice app indeed.
Oh, I wish we could port somehow...

Zumi

[Mickeyl]

Don't want to reign on your parade, but FreenoteQT uses the closed source binary only libsl which means you would have to rewrite all the classes it uses from this library to compile it against Qt/X11.

[obscurite]

Mickeyl,

I guess it should have been called libSOL

Is this what I should be watching out for in the source?

$ find |xargs grep sl/
./FreeNote/fnfiledialog.h:#include <sl/slfileselector.h>
./FreeNote/fntextdialog.h:#include <sl/slcolorselector.h>
./FreeNote/FrmMain.cpp:#include <sl/slzdb.h>
./FreeNote/frmmain.h:#include <sl/slcolorselector.h>

Have done a little QT coding, but don't know much about Qtopia or the sharp extensions... thanks for the help.

-Daniel

[pgas]

seems someone made a port:

http://wing.nagaokauniv.ac.jp/wiki/index.php?pdaXrom

[ZDevil]

Yes, and it has also been discussed here:
https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=15167

[scoutme]

absolutely perfect!!! Finally we got it

now pdaxrom has everything we need on pda side. We can do better in certain cases, but our needs are covered. Freenote port rocks!!

install it, it's amazing

[desertrat]

There have been other threads on note-taking apps, here's my list of known apps. Chime in if you know of another and have specific reccomendations.

FreenoteQT - best suited for taking lecture notes because of huge freeform canvas
IQNotes - good outliner note taker, but costs $20
notez - text only note pad
drawpad - a sketch pad type app
justmemo - dont know much about it
stageone - outliner note taker, commercial
tkcmemo - memo pad

tuxcards is a very nice RTF text only notes program. It's biggest problem is that it's fairly easy to lose data -- if for any reason the system or the program crashes, the file that was being worked on is lost (0 byte file left). Although it makes a backup, any work that you've done since the "last save" is lost. To get around that, tuxcards has an option to run a command after a file save, I use this to copy the newly saved file into a backup directory (with datetime appended to filename).

-- cheers

[ZDevil]

Besides TuxCards, I also highly recommend vym, which is available here: https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=16627 .  It has even freer form than TuxCards.  And the biggest strength is its rich visual widgets that significantly help stimulate thinking and association, without sacrificing any desired feature in other outliners.  Plus the export to XHTML (its HTML export is just as pretty basic as other outliners) function produces a really gorgeous page layout.   The capability to attach URLs and image files also does an amazing job.  I'd say it's the most beautiful outliner I've ever used.