Pilot Development Resources

This site is not intended to cover all things Pilot. Fortunately many other sites are available, more every day, covering a broad range of topics. I'll just categorize sites as those with particular relevance to Pilot software developers and 'the rest'. Send me mail if you know of good development-related sites that should be added to this list.

Pilot Software Development Resources

Newsgroups for discussing Pilot software development topics are now hosted on Pilot Software Development (news.massena.com). Please join us! You can read these newsgroups with your favorite news reader or most Web browsers (Netscape 2.0 or newer, Internet Explorer 3.0 or newer). With a browser, follow these links:

pilot.programmer news://news.massena.com/pilot.programmer
pilot.programmer.gcc news://news.massena.com/pilot.programmer.gcc
pilot.programmer.pila news://news.massena.com/pilot.programmer.pila
pilot.programmer.jump news://news.massena.com/pilot.programmer.jump

USRobotics - The creators of the Pilot host the Pilot Developer's Zone which is a great place to start if you know nothing about Pilot software development. All their SDK documentation and header files can be found there as well. They sell an SDK (~US$300) for developing Pilot applications on a Macintosh computer. The SDK is also available from MetroWerks.

The Handheld Systems Journal is a bimonthly printed magazine targeted at developers of (surprise!) handheld systems like Windows CE, Newton, GEOS, Magic Cap, and most importantly, the Pilot. Every one of the last several issues has at least one Pilot programming article which puts it ahead of any other magazine I know of. Excerpts from Handheld Systems are available online including these articles of particular interest to Pilot developers: Palm Ups the Ante with Pilot by Steve Mann, The Palm Operating System - Technology Overview by Palm Computing, Pilot Programming Primer by Steve Mann, WorldTime - A Pilot World Clock by Steve Mann, Extending Your Desktop With The Pilot by Stu Slack, Hacking the Pilot by Edward Keyes, Pilot Serial Programming by Iian Barclay, UNIX And Pilots by Kevin L. Flynn, Compact Application Solution Language by John Blue, TCP/IP With The PalmOS by Ray Rischpater, and PalmPilot Development Tools by Scott L. Sbihli.

The Windward Group - This company will develop your Pilot application for you if you want (where's the fun in that?). They've also released a couple games (Blocks & Blackjack).

Scott Ludwig's Pilot Software. Scott uses the Alternative SDK to write his games. Check 'em out!

68000 Assembly Programming Resources

Motorola - Motorola makes the MC68328 "DragonBall" integrated processor that is the heart of the Pilot. They have some great documentation online in PDF form. I highly recommend downloading and digesting the MC68328 DragonBall ™ User's Manual. Additional documentation can be found on the Motorola site including the most highly revered 68000 Family Programmer's Reference Manual. The 68K Ref Manual is essential reading for all 68K assembly language programmers. Most of Motorola's documentation is in PDF format so yu might need Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader.

ftp://nyquist.ee.ualberta.ca/pub/motorola. This FTP site is a backup of Motorola's support BBS and has a great number of 68XXX programming resources including source code to compilers, assemblers, debuggers and emulators.

Other Pilot software development sites

http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/raylau/pilot/Development.html
http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/raylau/pilot/DevelopmentSourceSample.html
http://www.inforamp.net/~adam/pilot/development.html
http://userzweb.lightspeed.net/~gregh/pilot/
http://www.scumby.com/scumbysoft/pilot/pilrc/index.htm
http://www.caslsoft.com/
http://www.ftpx.com/pilotgcc/gccwin32.html
http://cpu563.adsl.sympatico.ca/gcm.htm

Other Pilot Resources

Adam's USR Pilot Software Archive
The Pilot Light
Scott's Pilot Page
Usenet news: comp.sys.handhelds
Usenet news: comp.sys.palmtops


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