Based on feedback received from my post on a neat GTD application for Palms (NoteStudio), I decided to try StyleTap to see if it would run NoteStudio on my Dell x51v Pocket PC. I also decided to test how it would do with Bonsai, a great project management tool for Palms. I have long thought that Bonsai on a Pocket PC would be a big hit because it is such a great tool for managing projects (easy to use with a lot of good features).
I was very pleasantly surprised that StyleTap runs both of these great Palm applications very well. To install the NoteStudio and Bonsai applications on my x51v, all I had to do was use StyleTap’s installation utility. I did have to beam NoteStudio’s databases from my Palm to my x51v, because I could not find the corresponding pdb files anywhere on my computer, but beaming them was easy.
After doing this and running StyleTap on my x51v, here is the menu it presented to me:
(Note that StyleTap comes with a few sample programs, such as HandyShopper and the game PilotMines.)
StyleTap ran NoteStudio and Bonsai with their full capability, just as if they had been running on the Palm. Additionally, I could even use Calligrapher on my Pocket PC to implement macros and shortcuts. Now that is nice!
The only downsides I found in running these two programs using StyleTap were:
- You lose the ability to sync back to the desktop software for NoteStudio and Bonsai. Perhaps a future version of StyleTap will overcome this. (StyleTap has been improved a lot since I first tried it out a couple of years ago — it now supports a lot more programs than it once did.)
- The word-prediction capability of the Pocket PC (in using its keyboard or block recognizer modes) did not work with StyleTap.
I don’t consider either of these to be major issues: they are more than offset by the ability to be able to use all other aspects of these Palm programs on my Pocket PC.
It is so good to be able to run these two really super Palm applications on a Pocket PC. My understanding is that you can also use StyleTap to run Palm programs on a Windows Mobile Smartphone. I haven’t tried it out, but given how well these two programs worked on my x51v, I would fully expect StyleTap to function well on a WM Smartphone.
Have you tried this program out yet? Have any thoughts on it?
I really love style tap. I can run some medical reference programs created for palm now on my windows mobile phone/pda. The program runs itself, very user friendly.
Good to hear that, ajanedo! It is an impressive program, and I have heard there are some great medical programs for Palm that would not otherwise be available on a Pocket PC.