zaurus notes
So I got my Zaurus SL-5600 Thursday from amazon (they seem to be having a 40% off sale on PDAs through January 25). My main purpose is simply to use it for language study - a PDA can hold a lot more words than the same sized amount of paper cards... However, as I feared might happen, I have so far spent a lot of time doing geeky software stuff and websurfing for information and downloading stuff and no time actually doing language study. The 2 main issues are: how to handle foreign character sets, and how to develop an app for it.

The Zaurus is a Linux-based PDA that had been recommended and got lots of good reviews. It also is somewhat unusual since it has the ability to slide a cover down revealing an actual physical keyboard in addition to the usual stylus-based software text entry methods (virtual keyboard layout, handwriting recognition, picking from an insanely long table of Unicode values, and cell-phone-like text entry). If that is unclear, see pictures. It seems cool to me so far for the most part, though I don't really have any basis for comparison. This is my first PDA, so I'm coming at all this as a total newbie. Out of the box, the Zaurus knows nothing of Esperanto text. This problem seemed like it shouldn't be too hard to solve. Indeed, after less than an hour I had the ability to display ĉapelitajn literojn thanks to the package unicode-fonts which has all Latin and Cyrillic letters. But I could only see them on existing files that I had transferred to the Zaurus - I still couldn't enter them.

Customizable Keyboard solves the input problem. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that out though, since initially I didn't see the Esperanto letters in the Unicode input area even after installing the new font. I found other input packages as well but they didn't seem useful for Esperanto (e.g. one came with some other specific languages hardcoded in it and no info on how to add more languages.)

So basically I can input and read Esperanto text now. The input is cumbersome. The custom keyboard is a separate keyboard option one must activate, i.e. choose between the handwriting recognition, the virtual keyboard laid out like a physical keyboard, or the Custom keyboard. Possibly I will end up keeping the virtual one active to pick out ĉapelitajn literojn, and use the physical keyboard for actually typing in other letters. The drawback to that is you can't uncover the physical keyboard when the unit is in the cradle; you can only use the stylus methods for entry of letters. I would really like it if I could augment the existing keyboard or handwriting recognition. E.g. I noticed the handwriting input already recognizes if you draw umlauts or circumflexes over some letters (probably specifically Latin-1 characters) but not ĉ for instance. Is there a way to do this? After quite a lot of scrounging for info, I still don't know. But hey, I knew all along that entering text on a PDA was going to be a pain in the ass.

The much harder problem is app development. I know the sort of program I want to make, but getting to that point is a pain. There are several possible paths. There is a database system PortaBase that looks pretty excellent (and cross-platform - it exists for PDAs and Windows) and can export/import XML and CSV files and it's UTF-8 aware, and it has a user interface as well as a programming API. I need to download it and play with it to confirm, but it looks awesome and cool and I'll probably want to use it for storing the word list and their meanings and other info I want to keep with them. It is built on Metakit which has a C++ binding, which seems nice since I like C++ fine.

However, I'm finding it a real hassle to get set up for doing C++ development so far. There is some GPL SDK stuff from Trolltech, the people who make the commercial QT environment that Zaurus comes with. Finding concrete clear useful information has been somewhat challenging. Sharp's developer site has some info too. I've also spent some time on tangents such as figuring out what Opie is (seems to be an open source replacement for the QT framework that comes on the Zaurus.) And QT is very Linux oriented, and my box at home is Windows. Yeah, I could set up an old box as Linux, indeed I farted around with that a while back, but I work faster and more comfortably in Windows, and remember my goal here is not to spend lots of time being software geek, I just want to get my Zaurus set up with my language-learning tools. I posted a question to a Zaurus forum and got a pointer to some info on using Cygwin to develop with the Zaurus SDK, so that will be my next step, and hopefully this will work...

Plan B would be some other language. The cool-looking Metakit database system also comes with bindings for Python and Tcl, but I don't know them. And the Zaurus comes with Java on it, so I downloaded and was reading some info about that. I've never used Java but I know enough about it by osmosis that my main issue there would only be learning the Java libraries, not the language itself... but then it doesn't easily play with Metakit.

One final note: the go program that comes on the Zaurus plays really really badly. :)