Palm and Treo Hacks

Turn your PDA into a Flashlight

When darkness falls, you can engage the backlight on your Palm and light things up.

You can turn on your Palm’s backlight to act as a basic flashlight. However, you will need to disable the power-off feature if you need to use the flashlight for more than a few minutes (either that or you will have to keep turning it back on). This works nicely on a Treo with the lighted keyboard, but it also works fine on a regular Palm device. There are a couple of simple programs that do this for you.

FB Hi-Light

FB Hi-Light displays a flashlight (bright white light) and has some digital sound effects. It is available from PalmGear (http://www.palmgear.com; search for the name of the application there).

TealInfo/Teal Light

The program TealInfo from TealPoint Software (http://www.tealpoint.com) allows you to create and use simple interactive databases and mini-applications. One of those programs (called Folios) is Teal Light which gives you a variety of choices for turning your PDA into a flashlight. You can choose from a set of different colors and different patterns, as you can see in Figure 2-25.

Figure 2-25. TealLight

As you can see, this is a very simple hack—the programs give you some neat options, though. Keep this idea in mind if you need a flashlight and all you have with you is your Palm device.

Hacking the Hack

You can also easily create your own flashlight program. ...