Bernie Roehl

I'm still very much enjoying my HTC Magic.  Lots of features, lots of software, and Android is a very clean system.
 
I've been looking at file managers for Android.  The leading contenders appear to be AndExplorer, Astro and Linda (which used to be called Android File Manager).  They all have their strengths and weaknesses.  I've settled on Astro, at least for the time being, but the fact that it's a beta that expires at the end of September makes me a bit uncomfortable.  Fortunately, it's easy enough to change file managers.
 
I've installed Wapedia, which is a friendly interface to Wikipedia.  Very nice, and I could easily spend hours just looking at random pages.
I've installed a little text editor called "Text Edit" (gosh, I don't know where they come up with all these creative names...).  It doesn't do much, but it's simple and it's exactly what I need for making quick changes to small text files.
SkyMap is nice if you like watching the stars on a cool summer night.
Spare Parts lets you keep track of what applications are eating up your battery, as well as letting you configure a few things that aren't available through the standard settings.  TasKiller is a utility for killing tasks (sort of like the "kill" command on Linux).  Haven't had much need for it yet, but it's somehow comforting to know it's there.   :-)
 
I'm still working on tethering, hope to have something to say about that soon.
 
Now, about converting contacts from my Palm Treo so I could import them into Google...
My code for doing that is nowhere as clean as what I wrote for handling the datebook, but the basic idea is pretty simple.  You export the contacts from Palm Desktop as a CSV file, then generate another CSV file for Google to import.  You could import it directly without any conversion at all, but a lot of the data gets converted into Notes rather than fields.
To get around that, you have to figure out what Google's contact manager is looking for in the CSV file.  If you create a contact in gmail (with multiple phone numbers, etc) and then export it as CSV, it turns out that the structure is fairly straightforward.  They keep track of a Name (first and last combined), E-Mail, and Notes.  All the other data is stored in Sections, with one Section for each type of contact information.  The Description in each Section tells you what that Section is for (e.g. "Personal", "Work", etc).  Within each Section you can have Email, IM, Phone, Mobile, Pager, Fax, Company, Title, Other and Address.  So someone's work phone number might be stored in "Section 2 - Phone" where "Section 2 - Description" is "Work".  It's a very flexible system, and once you understand it, it's not hard to convert to.  Python's csv module makes it particularly easy.
 The details all depend on how you stored information in the Palm initially, so you'll have to figure that out yourself.