PalmOne needs to update the documentation for the Handspring Treo 600.

The user guide shipped with the product and found on the Handspring website makes no reference to where the text shortcut symbol is hidden. On a graffiti-based Palm you can make a curly cue – known as the ShortCut symbol – and enter “br” and the word “breakfast” will magically appear. You can set your shortcut preferences adding new words or phrases. That’s very handy in graffiti – perhaps less so on a keyboard-based Treo 600. But since AT&T Office Online doesn’t let me set a “signature block” for the email I send from the Treo – I went in search of the text shortcut. I found the shortcut text entry option under the preferences menu. I just couldn’t find the way you are supposed to trigger it from the keyboard. It’s not in the documentation. It’s not available via a Google search. So I did what any self-respecting geek would do – played around with it til I found it.

The text ShortCut symbol on a Treo 600 can be found by typing an “s” then hitting the “alt 0” key, then scroll down and select the last symbol (why is it the last symbol?) – then enter your text shortcut and, yes it types out the full text.

Guy Bjerke
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From my Treo 600

In my pursuit of a RSS scraper I’ve received no direct feedback from anyone, but writing the post in this weblog has not been totally in vain. You see Google is helping out – which probably means everyone who is looking for a RSS scraper is helping out. How? My previous RSS scraper post comes up number 1 when you search for those terms on Google.

How has that helped so far? Well, today I saw several Google search hits on my weblog for RSS scraper and decided to check on the results myself. On the right I found an ad for NewsTrove.com which allows you to create an RSS feed by subject and appears to scan quite a few publications. It is not exactly what I’m looking for but it could be very useful. I’ve created a few subject feeds and am testing it out. Thanks Google. Thanks Newstrove.

To retrieve my office e-mail on my Treo 600 I signed up for AT&T’s Office Online service. It worked fine for several weeks. Then, right when I was about to go out of town – and actually needed to get my email on my Treo – it wouldn’t work. The “Welcome to Office Online” page on the Treo would offer me the choice to login, but never gave me the login page – instead it endlessly looped back to the same page.

I spent about two hours waiting and talking to the AT&T folks. Adjusting settings on the Treo – because everything was fine on the “host” computer at work. No luck. I even visited AT&T’s online support chat – an excellent service – but also no go.

Frustration. Then it dawned on me. Several days before I was headed to Las Vegas I got one of those Palmgear=handango or something emails advertising something handy – a pda Zagat’s guide-like service call Vindigo. I bought it, installed it and it looked like it might be useful – especially since I hadn’t been to Vegas in 15 years. AH HA!

Removed the Vindigo app from the Treo. Removed the Vindigo app from the desktop and from the backup folder in the /handspring folder. Did a hard reset of the Treo to clean out all the data and start fresh -(hotsync first to put all data on the desktop before doing this) and voila’ – Office Online works again.

And that’s good -cause I’ve got to travel to Palm Springs this week. I’ll stick to brochures when it comes to learning Palm Spring’s local highlights.

There are several news sources without RSS feeds I like to read on a daily basis. Right now I use the news aggregator in Radio to read my RSS subscriptions – and until about December 28, 2003 was able to use the Stapler utility to successfully scrape the sites I wanted to follow. Something has broken, and after several frustrating attempts to fix it – I decided to go look for another solution. There is an automated scraper at myrss.com but it isn’t quite ready for prime time. Any suggestions?

I’ve had the Treo 600 (AT&T Wireless) for almost a week and I’m extremely happy with it. I’m a Palm IIIx > 500 > 515 > Tungsten2 user and carrying the Palm and cell phone was getting old. I almost jumped at Verizon’s Kyocera 7135 earlier this summer and Samsung’s I500 looks good – but they are both using an older Palm OS. Moving from the high resolution Tungsten2 to the lower resolution Treo 600 wasn’t that hard. I’ve been following the articles and discussion board over at Treo Central and was wavering about whether the 600 was THE convergence device for me. Discussion boards are valuable but they really should have to post a warning like:

“People with problems, real or perceived, tend to post more than people who are satisfied.”

Keep that in mind next time you’re reading a discussion board.