Tiny tool to read data from Palm Desktop Windows software and push it to your Google Mail account (and probably use it on your Android phone).

Convert Contacts.

Palmreader 0.2 is able to read your Palm Desktop's address.dat file, extracts all address information and directly pushes it to Google Mail. Afterwards, of course, these records are as usual automatically pushed to your Android device.

You need a running Java installation and the attached file Palmreader-0.1.zip (see Downloads tab). Extract the file to any directory and start conversion using run.cmd, supplying the path to address.dat file, your googlemail account name and your password.

   run -a d:/daten/palm/marcus/address.dat -u test@googlemail.com -p test

Of course, there's no warranty that all versions of Palm Desktop have the same file format, but it works fine for mine. Update Since today I know that the format I've implemented is for Palm Desktop up to version 4.0. From 4.1 on, another format is used, which (at the moment) isn't understood by Palm Reader. Sorry.

Update Thanks to Kevin, there's a new version of PalmReader which is able to read Palm Desktop 4.1 file format. Thank you Kevin!

Bonus for iQue users

On good old Garmin iQue GPS enabled Palm Handheld, contacts can be waypoints. Unfortunately, Android, while location-enabled, seems not to have any possibility to store waypoints. (You only may display the address of a contact entry in your map) However, I didn't want to lose my waypoints from iQue, even if today I don't know how to use the geographical information on Android.

My tool reads Garmin's private location format (GARMIN string in Custom4 field of contacts) and converts it to de-facto-standard geotags and stores them in the "note" field of the google contact.

Example:

geotagged
geo:lat=32.741392850875854
geo:lon=-16.84405166655779
geo:symbol=picnic
geo:alt=779.0281

At the moment, nobody uses this tags. Hopefully, at some time in the future, there will be a really GPS enabled Android phone (I'm still hoping GarminAsus will do) which will have some possibility to store waypoints. I hope, then, it will be easy to convert my data.

Fragen / Kommentare - schreibt mir: Marcus at Schmidke.de