Well, I gotta say, I’ve been having great fun with my snazzy new wireless keyboard. In fact, I’m on the bus right now, hacking up this blog entry, keyboard in my lap, TX battery slowly bleeding away. Pretty darn cool, I think.

But the real bonus is the new capabilities this keyboard affords. One of the things I’ve always been curious to try is Palm development. However, the barrier to entry is pretty darn high… getting a devkit working on Linux is a non-trivial procedure, to say the least, which is saying a lot, given I hand-rolled my first GBA development kit.

The other option had always been an onboard environment of some description. And there are a few that are workable. There’s HotPaw Basic, which provides a fairly complete Basic environment right on the Palm. ‘course, it is Basic… shudder. Then there’s LispMe, which is a reasonably full-featured Scheme implementation. Unfortunately, it has stabilities issues on the TX which ruled it out. Additionally, I came across OnBoard C, which is actually a C development environment which runs right on the Palm, and generates standalone applications. ‘course, it’s C… which provides me with a little more hanging rope than I would like.

And then I discovered PP Compiler. Like OnBoard C, this is a full development environment for the Palm which generates 68k or ARM applications. However, this is a Pascal compiler. IOW, I get a reasonably powerful, and safe programming environment that allows me to write, well, essentially anything I want! It also appears to have a fairly lively user community and developers who are actively maintaining the project.

‘course, the next question is, now what? Honestly, I have no idea. But it is pretty cool. :) And at least it gives me another justification for purchasing this keyboad…