Jason’s Random Thoughts

For five years I had been using Windows Mobile 2002 on an incredibly failure-resistant HP iPaq 2210, and had become accustomed to the speed each program would operate. All in all, most of the software I had installed was snappy, with the only exception belonging to the last few versions of AvantGo. Now that I’m using a newer iPaq 211, I have the opportunity to use the latest and greatest version of Windows Mobile (in this case, Windows Mobile 6 Classic), which seems to have seen the same leap in features as we could find between WindowsXP and Vista. That said, the same amount of bloat between those two desktop systems seems to have found its way into the mobile version of the code as well. So, after a few weeks, I have come to the following conclusion: Windows Mobile 6 is fast, but every other Microsoft application for the platform is slow.

Office Mobile Not So Portable

I am a heavy user of Word and Excel. Word Mobile is active on my PDA for an average of 4 hours per day, and Excel is used at least half-a-dozen times each week to crunch some stats I download from various sites to test marketability of certain markets. On the older Windows Mobile 2002 platform, Word flew. It would load in half a second, and could open a 400KB document in less than 5 seconds. This newest version of Office, though, seems to require an excessive amount of processing power and time to accomplish even the simplest of tasks … like starting up a new document.

The problem is with the same technological demon that plagues almost everything Microsoft has released in the last four years, and that is MS-XML — Microsoft’s own version of the eXtensible Markup Language. Although XML was initially created to foster better cross-platform and cross-application data collaberation, it has been horribly bastardized and has become the biggest reason for resource hogging on most Windows-based PC’s. If you don’t believe me, simply compare your current MSN Messenger software with an older, non-XML-based version. Chances are that the non-XML version caused very few momentary hiccups (when your computer freezes for a second) when someone messaged you and loaded at least ten times faster than the current generation of the software.

So, that said, I’ll need to use something a little more resource-friendly until my WM6-compatible blogging software is ready for testing and tweaking. And luckily, there are options.

MADE

This is a small and incredibly powerful text editor for Windows Mobile 2003, 5 and 6. What I really like about this application is that it can save files in both UTF-8 and UCS-2 encodings. On top of this is an unlimited number of Undo/Redo calls and the ability to have several documents open simultaneously. This is a great feature for me as I often spend several hours writing articles for various blogs, and I’m still working on that big novel that likely nobody will read. If these features aren’t enough to grab your attention, did I mention that MADE is 100% free?

If you’re interested, you can download it here for free.

PocketNotepad

Notepad in Windows is a dead simple application, giving us the very basic requirements for text editing and, if you’re feeling particularily nostalgic for the good ol’ days of yore, HTML editing. The concept of PocketNotepad is “To provide the same feature as Desktop Notepad does” or “Nothing added to the original Notepad”. That is, no toolbars, rebar bands, etc…. On the other hand, it does not provide several functions as it is becoming to its name. Functions like printing, drag & drop and the search function.

That said, if you’re looking for something dead simple that uses next to no resources, this might just be the software you’re looking for. Just like MADE, PocketNotepad sells for the incredible price of nothing. You can download it from Tillanosoft here.

Word Mobile

If the prospect of installing free software doesn’t appeal to you, there is another option: save your Word Mobile documents as .doc rather than the default .docx.

Unless you’re allready using some of the rich features found in Word2007, or need to open specifically-formatted documents in OpenOffice, there is really no need to save Word Mobile documents in the XML-based file format. Not only is there very little short-term advantage to the file type, but it’s a waste of both processing power and storage space. If you write as much as I do, then the difference between a 500-word 6KB file and a 500-word 11KB file can be quite significant.

• This post saved as a .docx file: 17KB
• This post saved as a .doc file: 9KB
• Number of .doc files on PDA: 734
• Combined storage requirement for .doc files: 10,381KB

Although it’s not an accurate measure of the storage requirements, if every .doc file on my iPaq were saved as a .docx, I could require as much as 22 MegaBytes of storage to save the exact same information. Sure, we could just make use of storage cards or, heaven forbid, delete older files, but we shouldn’t be expected to buy more storage or faster processors just because a software company is over-using a severely hacked apart version of an open source document format.

That’s so Adobe.

I have a lot of respect for Microsoft and the things they’ve accomplished over the years, but I have some serious issues with their approach to XML and how they use it.

It’s Not The Size That Counts…

Whether you opt to use a light-weight text editor with the basic text formatting and language tools, or a fully featured package with all the bells and whistles, at the end of the day we’re really just choosing the tool that suits our needs better than the alternatives. Sure, we could use a sledgehammer to put a nail in the wall for a small picture frame, but a smaller ball-pin hammer will likely do the same job both faster and more easily.

Do you do a lot of writing with a PDA? What’s your text editor of choice?

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