Initiate, and the Visor Edge

I've recently made the switch to using Initiate as the launcher on my Treo, after what seems like an eternity of using ZLauncher. ZL is still a great and mature app, but not as Treo-aware, and the developers seem to have lost interest. Rob over at Hobbyist Software is always writing and updating new apps, so I decided to try for about the umpteenth time to switch to Initiate. This time it worked. I'm really bummed now that I passed on an offer to be a beta tester for Initiate v. 3.0, because a few months ago I didn't think I had the time commitment to properly test an app I don't normally use (and never liked very much when I tried). Now that it's my regular launcher I wish I was in on that --version 3 sounds like it's going to fix a lot of things I still miss about ZLauncher.

One of the remaining things that bugs me about Initiate is that it has this feature called "smart search," which lets you type in any letters that appear in the name of the file or contact you're looking for, as long as they're in the right order. The example given in the documentation is that if you wanted to launch Filez, you could type FZ and be pretty sure nothing else would come up. This feature kind of came up in a thread on the Hobbyist forums, where a poster used the example of Albert Einstein to illustrate how v. 3 will underline the letters in the name you typed.

I took this opportunity to add my two cents about the smart search feature, and how I felt that if it was really smart, when I typed "AL(space)EI" that the first result should be Albert Einstein and not Alan Wasser Associates.

I then went on a little tangent about this little-known, and probably not-remembered-by-anyone-but-me app that used to be on the Handspring Visor Edge.

First, a word about the Edge
If you came to PDAs after about 2001, you may not have ever heard of the Edge. It's probably for the best that you haven't, as it had this horrible tendency to freeze so bad that you had to wait for the battery to die, at which point you've lost all your data back in the days when there were no external memory cards to restore from. This was a somewhat common problem reported on the forums of the day, and it happened to me two or three times. The last time, I was in my first hour of a two-show day (at Les Miz of all things) -- so approximately 12 hours before I could get home to my computer and sync, when the thing crashed. So I had no access to my calendar or contacts for that entire day. The next day I bought a Palm 500m, which I still think for its day was the greatest PDA ever made.

But the Edge, while flawed and suffering from design decisions that can kindly be called "interesting," was really beautiful in some ways. It was thin, (thus the name). Maybe still the thinnest ever, as seen here measured in metric BreathSaver-widths:It was made of aluminum when most if not all PDAs were plastic. Due to the thinness, the stylus was not in a silo but clipped into these little slots on the side. The main problem with this was that the stylus was heavy and some ridiculous shape that was not really comfortable to use, and no 3rd-party stylus manufacturers even attempted to make a better one, although Handspring eventually came up with a pen stylus themselves that was better.

The protective cover was a good idea, but it couldn't flip all the way around to the back, so it always looked like something between a tricorder and a metal notepad.

It was removable, and I usually carried my Edge without it in a leather case, which of course even empty was thicker than the Edge itself, defeating the whole purpose. The Edge came in three colors: silver, and red and blue which were only available online. I still think the red one of the sexiest PDAs to look at. Even the hotsync cradle was thin and artistically designed. In the end it was not a very good PDA, but it was a brave attempt at something groundbreaking, which was what Handspring excelled at for a while -- in fact to this day when millions of us use Treos it's really their product -- but this particular idea turned out to be a really bad one.

But about this Address app...
Among the metal case and thin profile and crashing, most people lost sight of this little add-on to the standard Palm contacts app (then called Address). If you were in the regular address view and pushed the Up key, it would take you to something called Fast Lookup. Here's the screen, with my personal phone numbers blurred.
Speaking of which, those are my current contacts synced to the Edge. If software could think, I'd love to know what The Missing Sync thought when it was given a hotsync command by a Visor Edge, a handheld that predates the first version of Missing Sync by about two years. After a series of emphatic "No"s to questions like "Would you like to sync your iTunes playlists to this handheld?," I just synced contacts, and in one of the few benefits to Palm not having updated their OS significantly since the dawn of time, it worked well enough, although it seems to have mapped some of the numbers to the wrong description (e-mail addresses show up as "home").

Fast Lookup was designed to allow you to look up a contact by first and last name simultaneously. Basically it assigned the left two hard buttons to the last name, the right two to the first name. If the first letter of the last name was between A-L, you hit button 1, if it was between M-Z you hit button 2. Same deal with buttons 3 and 4 for the first name. If that didn't return your result you would move on to the second letter, and so on, working independently on each name.

As you can see in this picture mid-search, I am narrowing down my contacts, and there are dots on the bottom showing how many letters of each name I have already entered.
It usually only took a few presses to narrow it down to the result, from what I remember, but upon trying it right now I am doing horribly, and I'm having to spell out almost the entire name to get it down to the right person. I remember being pretty good at it at the time, though. Maybe because I had a few hundred less contacts back then (I keep everyone I've ever worked with).

It always amazed me, especially back in the days before PDAs had keyboards, that no one else ever tried to revive this style of contact lookup. My best guess is that Handspring may have patented it, but you'd think even then there'd be some pirated version floating around. Maybe enough people didn't try it for a developer to get interested in it. I know at some point years ago I tried to extract the .prc file and get it to work on another PDA, and failed. Of course in hindsight, maybe it just wasn't that good of an idea, except on a handheld where the stylus was so distasteful that you'd rather be pushing those four buttons for five minutes instead of writing a few simple letters.

In conclusion, I'm glad we've moved on from the days of the Visor Edge, but I still haven't quite found the perfect contact-searching app.