The first time I held a Kindle in my hands I thought, this might be a game changer - at least until you start reading scientific papers which have a two column layout. Which is great for printed media, but as soon as you want to read it using a device zooming won't help. Thanks to a hint of Christian I found this blog entry from Steven Wittens presenting the idea of cutting a two-column PDF page into 4 pieces. The complete program was written in Python and a no-brainer to execute - if you love the command line...

Today I released PyPalm version 0.20.17 and it adds one bugfix and one feature: The bugfix fixes the issue that one could encode the $L() call with single quotes instead of double quotes - both can now be used. The feature was proposed by Johan in the comments of this entry and adds a default text (which is the key) for each untranslated item and prepends the key with "_%_" so that when preparing your application for translation you see if you found every string that needs localization. As a last step I added backwards compatibility for all those...

As a short new years present I upgraded PyPalm to version 0.20.10 :) and added scene and localization support. The first one comes handy when creating new scenes for the application. To add a new scene to your application call the following command from your terminal {% highlight sh %} pypalm new_scene MySceneName {% endhighlight %} where MySceneName is the name for your new scene. The second new feature of PyPalm is more important and even more helpful. When developing applications, especially web and mobile applications, customers are often scattered around the globe and localization is a key factor...

In the recent days I had the chance to get my hands on a Palm Pre and sure this device may not be as feature complete as Apples iPhone but the UI is appealing and it brings some new UI concepts into the game. The development environment is really nice since the Palm emulator is not homegrown piece of software but a plain small linux that boots into a browser using VirtualBox as a virtualization solution. Now the developer can choose between using either his editor of choice and the supplied command line tools or use a...