   $Id: README.txt,v 1.16 2002/01/27 11:03:43 vons Exp $

DESCRIPTION

   This is version 1.1 of 'Pane", a program that will remind
   you of anniversaries and other special events.

   Pane will scan one or more custom fields of your AddressBook, looking
   for events.

   Every day at a user-configurable moment (default 07:00), Pane will
   run through the event list, and display an alert both for the day's
   events as well as reminders for future events.  If the AddressBook
   has changed since Pane last looked at it, it will be rescanned first.

   Pane expects that a custom field contains one or more event
   descriptions, separated by a comma. Each of these event descriptions
   should end with a date, and may have a comment that describes the event.

   If the exact year of an event (e.g. someone's birthday) is not known or
   does not apply, use a question mark or leave the year out altogether.
   If a potential event has no date, it is skipped.

   The year, month, and day should be in the same order as specified in
   the preferences panel; Pane will complain if a date looks wrong.

   Example:

      Let's assume that you know someone named John Smith, born 31/3/1973,
      who is married to Martha, born 24/6/1972. Their son Billy was born
      January 5th 199-something.

      Assuming also that you renamed one of the custom fields to "Family",
      the AddressBook record for John Smith should then contain:

        Lastname: Smith
        Firstname: John
        ...
        Family: 31/3/1973, Martha 24/06/72, birth Billy 05/01/199?

      If you have a separate AddressBook entry for Martha (she has her
      own e-mail, work- and mobile- phone numbers, etcetera), you could
      still list the family members in her entry as well:

        Family: husband John, Billy

      Since there are no dates, no entries will be added to Pane's
      event list.

      You can also add an entry to your AddressBook for national
      holidays, like

	Company: holidays
	Events: Christmas 25/12

      where "Events" is again one of your custom fields. Leaving the
      last name and first name fields empty gives a nicer view in Pane.

   Pane will alert you when there are problems parsing the date strings.
   Note that a date with a 2-digit year yy is interpreted as if yy <
   31 then 20yy else 19yy.

   Also, Pane considers it an error if an event is more than a year in
   the future; this to catch errors where 2-digit years are incorrectly
   interpreted (i.e. year 22 interpreted as 2022 when it was intended
   to mean 1922).

TECHNICAL STUFF

   Pane is an application for the Palm (compatible) handheld devices,
   and requires PalmOS 2.0 or higher.

   Pane has been tested with PalmOS3.3 and PalmOS3.5 on a real Palm,
   and with PalmOS 2.0, 3.0 and 4.1 on the Palm emulator.
   Support for Japanese/Chinese versions of PalmOS has been "tested"
   (I don't speak japanese so I don't understand the OS text/messages)
   with Japanese versions of an IBM Workpad and Sony Clie in the emulator.
   The Sony JogDial support has been tested using the Sony Clie emulator.
   The Handera support has been tested on a real Handera 330 with OS 3.5.3.

   Pane has been made using the Palm SDK 4.0, prc-tools 2.1, and pilrc
   2.8p7.

   For the latest version, see the PalmGear site <http://www.palmgear.com>.

COPYRIGHT

   Pane is copyright (C)2000-2002 by Gert-Jan Vons <vons@iname.com>.

   You can distribute this program freely. If you find any bugs or have
   other remarks, please let me know.

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REMARKS/KNOWN PROBLEMS

 - Don't put Pane on a SD/MMC/CF card or memory stick, the alarm won't
   work ok (Palm m50x in the emulator) or the system may crash (happens
   when Pane's alarm expires when Handera's CardPro app is open)

 - The Clock app as found in Palm m100/m105s with PalmOS 3.5.1 has an
   annoying bug: it's alarm won't sound if there's already an alert on
   the screen, an alert that can be displayed by any app (Pane, built-in
   Date Book, ...). You can avoid that Pane interferes with the Clock
   app by having Pane check for new events at a later moment than your
   alarm usually goes off.

 - See FAQ.txt for more info.
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CURRENT VERSION: 1.1

1.1	2002/01/27
	- new: support for non-latin alphabets like Japanese and Chinese.
	       Also works with InterPilot, didn't test with CJKOS.
	- new: time at which Pane checks for events is now configurable.
	       (also solves an incompatibility with RunTime's auto-off
		feature and can be used to work around a bug in the m100
		Clock app)
	- new: date format in table is now configurable and independent
	       from the system's date format.
	- new: events (i.e. events between today and 9 days away) are
	       clearly marked in the table.
	- new: an alert is displayed when a new event has a negative age.
	- new: Pane will now beep to signal new events.
	- bugfix: Events on Feb 29 were only visible in leap years.
	- bugfix: fixed menu display problem under (a.o.) Japanese PalmOS
	          versions where a gray box was displayed instead of '...'.
	- bugfix: pane crashed when the AddressBook was empty.
	- bugfix: fixed some display glitches that could occur in
		  low-memory conditions.
	- change: history limited to 1 month and max 2 events.
	- improvement: scrolling is now much faster.
	- improvement: better support for Sony's JogDial/JogAssist.
	- improvement: a number of minor display improvements like more
		       info about the date and age of the selected event,
		       too long text fields are now truncated, ...
	- improvement: minor time changes (like TimeCopy applies) no
		       longer trigger the display of the current events.

0.7.2	2001/07/25
	- Pane now waits 5 seconds before reacting to a system time change.
	  This to avoid the stack-overflow problem that occurred when
	  TimeCopy (a new app of mine) changes the system time during a
	  hotsync, which indirectly launches Pane, followed by a crash.
	  (I've no idea who consumes all the stack space, it's not me :-/)
	- Right-justified the age column.
	- Made the help more accessible by moving it from the about dialog
	  to the menu of the main form.

0.7.1	2001/06/27
        First public version
	- In a weird case, one could end up with the [address...] button
	  being visible but not active.
	- Put FAQ in separate file FAQ.txt
	- Updated urls in about dialog and doc to point to palmgear

0.7	2001/06/24
	- Added support for the Handera 330's hi-res screen, virtualised
	  silkscreen, and jog dial.
	- Table font now user selectable
	- New icons, now also in grayscale and color
	- PalmOS4 support (new SDK, new date format type, still need to
	  add support for the attention manager)
	- Slight change to screen layout, more room for table
	- Table's date column now also shows the year, and for events less
	  than 10 days away, it shows <n>days/tomorrow/today.
	- The age is now also displayed in the event details zone
	- Internal improvements

0.6.2	2000/11/11
	- Fixed bug in age calculation for last/next year's events
	  (thanks Gilles!).
	- Fixed crash in progress bar display when AddressBook was empty.

0.6.1	2000/09/11
	- bugfix: upgrading from older version that had email enabled
	  would still result in email addrs being listed in the event
	  announcement, even though 0.6 was doesn't support email anymore.
	  The list of addresses contained junk however, causing pane
	  to crash.

0.6	2000/09/10
	- Fixed 16bit overflow in progress bar fill calculation.
	- Support Sony's JogDial.
	- Scroll with hardkeys/JogDial now moves the selection instead
	  of scrolling the table content.
	- Sending of mail (temporarily) removed from distributed version.
	- Changed icons (soliciting user feedback)
	- Added url to about dialog

0.5.1	2000/08/23
	- updated small icon
	- made this README readable with notepad (unix2dos)

0.5	2000/08/20
	- Prevent app switch when there's an alarm on the screen (just
	  like the DateBook)
	- Add "Address..." button to main form, reorganised the layout
	  a little.
	- Fix icon display problem under PalmOS2.0.
	- Interface to Mail app does not work under OS2.0.

0.4	2000/08/15
	- Handle upgrades gracefully: recover settings, and tell user to
	  start Pane once if he just installed (a newer version of) Pane.
	- Test for presence of Mail application (apparently not present
	  on the Palm M100) and disable the mail functionality if needed.

0.3	2000/08/14
	- automatically restart timer after install/upgrade. When it
	  is a new installation, the user should still go into Pane to
	  configure his preferences.
	- progress bar now also when Pane is not the active application.

0.2	2000/08/13
	- added progress bar during scanning of the AddressBook
	- email basics in place: user can choose email address and a msg
	  will be added to the Mail application's outbox. Not finished yet.
	- added menu entry that allows the user to edit the AddressBook
	  entry that corresponds to the highlighted event.
	- added menu entry that triggers the notification of today's events.
	- added ROM version test, users with an OS < 2.0 are now informed
	  that Pane won't work on their device.

0.13	2000/08/12
	- highlight invalid record when jumping to AddressBook.
	- added alarm and reminder preference.
	- bugfix: no longer crash when an alarm needs AddressBook
	  information that is no longer there (e.g. when an AddressBook
	  entry has been deleted).

0.12	2000/08/04
	- bugfix: records in custom field that followed an empty record
		  were not seen.
	- records without a date are now ignored. Difference between no
	  date and an invalid date: it is a date if there are at least
	  2 digits in the last word.
	- prefs form has become a dialog.
	- pane database remains tagged as not 100% valid when user
	  skipped one or more problems.

0.1	2000/08/04
	- bugfixes...
	- improved table display: blackfill+inverted-write looks better
	  then clear+write+invert, less flicker.
	- upgrade detection. don't crash when an older database is
	  detected but rebuild it instead. Use will also be asked to
	  re-enter his preferences.

0.0.4	2000/07/00

	- First usable version. Displays all events in the table, has
	  a minimal preferences form, but no alarms yet.

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