Hi Cohost! I wrote this post on my Dana with WordSmith. I've been trying to figure out exactly how it works and just how useful of a program it is. I installed WordSmith on the Dana for its ability to sync files with desktop directly into .doc formats, making them easy to read and modify without having to use propietary desktop software, but the summary of it is that I'm dissatisfied by it all. While I am happy that WordSmith can write files that are more easily imported to and from the PC when editing docs (or modifying memo files that can be easily viewed and edited in palm desktop), there are three big issues with the program in my estimation:
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Having the program in a usable state means that it's not possible to launch AlphaWord. As I noted before, the program takes AlphaWord's place in the main menu. Apparently, it also needs to have AlphaWord in order to function as expected, so it can't be run off an SD card, since it won't have AlphaWord where it expects. Instead, strangely, AlphaWord will launch. This means that I have to choose between AlphaWord and WordSmith depending on what I want to use the Dana for, or, to be more precise, I have to delete WordSmith to run AlphaWord and treat the Dana as a general-purpose USB keyboard. I don't have a lot of USB keyboards around, and being able to have one handy where I can't, say, use a bluetooth keyboard (editing boot settings, for example) is obviously very useful. The computer-sicko example of this would be using it in keyboard mode with my galaxy phone docked in Dex mode, using the phone screen as a touchpad. I will do this at least once in my life.
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You have to select a destination to place a file before you write it. The top-right corner of the program is where the file destination is set. If you don't see this, then you might not realize you can read/write to SD card in the first place, and it took me a while to even figure out that was where the controls for doing this are, especially since I didn't have categories for files on the device memory, so when editing it just showed an empty square while editing. You can use that top-right menu while editing to move a file across destinations, but I greatly preferred the explicit destination setting on AlphaWord when you read and write files. It felt less fiddly. This is admittedly the least-significant of my 3 main complaints because now that I recognize it, it's unlikely to be a recurring issue, but it does feed into the third problem...
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Speaking of which, you can't use the SD card to sync files in WordSmith (and to give them some degree of credit, they do in fact acknowledge this in the ~85 page manual file). You HAVE to copy data to the main system RAM to sync to the desktop as expected. For files being edited long-term this isn't terrible. If the files have already been synced, they'll show up in the WordSmith sync list on the sync target (desktop). Remove them from that sync list and move the file to the SD card, and you'll retain the copy on the system and on the SD card; otherwise, the sync target's copy will be deleted. The most self-contained way to get documents off an SD-card appears to be using a custom converter program (that has a GUI extension). Put them both on the SD card you keep your WordSmith files, and you can download them easily. Of course, similar tools exist for AlphaWord, and AlphaWord has the added flexibility of its USB keyboard feature (especially handy for manipulating plaintext files) and so I'm doubtful that this is the preferable tool on the Dana, even if it otherwise supports it reasonably well.
WordSmith supports editing MemoPad files, and to be quite honest I don't think of this as a very useful feature, because the memo pad is perfectly functional on the Dana anyway. It even runs in full-screen. Considering how fast the Dana (and Palm devices in general) can switch between apps, this is not a terribly useful feature. If I were using a device that didn't have a built-in program for word processing, this would make a lot of sense to use, but on the Dana it's a questionable install at best given its conflict with AlphaWord.
The fact that it can sync with the desktop easily is its most significant benefit. For all the advantages that AlphaWord has, it requires installing the Dana-specific version of Palm Desktop. While Palm Desktop has gotten support over the years for modern but extremely niche devices (primarily intended for industrial use, where tech upgrades tend to be as slow as possible to prevent disruption), the Dana isn't such a device, and I struggled to get its software working on Windows 10. I may continue to experiment on that front. If I can get the Dana software working on W10, then there would be no reason to keep using WordSmith, and I can safely cleanse myself of its presence. Even if I can't, the sync tools for AlphaWord seem more appropriate to my use case, and of course the USB keyboard feature means that AlphaWord can easily sync the text data to anything that you can type into, not just where you have Palm Desktop installed..
By the way, if you wanted to use WordSmith, you'd need to register it. The registration process is a little involved because registration codes are tied to HotSync ID. If your hotsync ID happens to be "Dave" you can just use the publicly-avaialble registration code, but otherwise, you need to do this:
- Install a tool like HackMe to control hotsync ID per app
- Run HackMe and switch the ID for WordSmith to Dave
- Register WordSmith with the available registration code
- Switch back the hotsync ID (this might not be necssarily to sync files, but the program doesn't invalidate the registration info after you do this, so I figured it was worth doing just in case).
