Hacks for the Palm OS

Hello everybody,

Chris here, the newest member of the Canuck PDA blog community. I hope to help make Canuck PDA a great resource for every Palm user and an especially great place for Canadian users to get together.

My first post is about hacks for the Palm OS. Wait a minute, what the heck is a "hack" you might ask? Well, in the Palm world we have many situations where the functionality of the Palm system may not be exactly as you would like. Before the Palm OS 5 was available, the only way to change most of these system behaviours was to use a hack manager, an application for your Palm that controls the hacks you have installed on your handheld. Without a hack manager you have no way to control which hacks are enabled and in fact hacks will not work without a hack manager. Hacks do not show up in the Palm Launcher because they're not launchable applications themselves, they need a hack manager to work.

A hack does something NOT SUPPORTED by Palm Inc., so please understand that your mileage may vary when using various hacks, but don't let that scare you. If your Palm handheld is an older OS 4 type, then you have many hacks available to you as most hacks were for the OS 4, but if your using a newer OS 5 Palm, then beware that older OS 4 hacks are usually entirely incompatible. Since the Palm OS 5 added more direct support from Palm to create hacks that did not require a hack manager, many OS 4 hacks have not been remade to support OS 5, but don't despair as there are still many useful OS 5 compatible hacks available. In order to use hacks on your OS 5 Palm be sure to download a hack manager that supports the Palm OS 5 specifically.

My favourite OS 5 compatible hack manager is by far the excellent YAHM (Yet Another Hack Manager) which has ability to use older OS 4 style hacks in OS 5, though the hacks themselves must be made to support the newer OS 5. I know some of this may be confusing for a new user, so here are some OS 5 hacks that you can try and I will vouch that they work fine for me on my OS 5 Palm Tungsten|E. Again, your mileage may vary, so if you can do a backup of your Palm data or even at least hot-sync then do so before adding these hacks just to be safe. Again, I have had no problems with and recommend the following hacks:

The first is ClipStringHack5, which extends the Palm clipboard function to allow unlimited amounts of text to copied, instead of the normal 1000 character limit and even has a clipboard viewer. Note: This hack for OS 5 only.

Another, Smooth Scroll Hack allows you to change the scrolling speed of text and list boxes that appear in most every Palm application. Not a huge thing for most people, but the insane speed of scrolling on most OS 5 Palms can be annoying for some, so this hack might be very useful to you. Note: This hack for OS 5 only.

My last hack today, PSHack (Paranoid Security Hack) is a great hack for OS 5 that allows you to lock the Palm to a specific application at any time. For example, say you want to let someone use your Palm for it's calculator, but you don't want them to access anything else, like the launcher screen. With PSHack you can access the command menu or use a graffiti stroke to lock the Palm handheld to the app your using and if you want to exit you have to enter the normal Palm security password to unlock the handheld. The security features of this hack are impressive, in that even after a soft or warm reset the Palm security is still in place since the hack locks the handheld on shutdown when it's active. Note: This hack for OS 5 only.

If you have any questions about installing and using hacks you can find me on the forums.