Tags for this article: application, email, hypertext, pda, smartphone, web browser
Don’t you think so that it would be really great to have a hypertext system on the PDAs? If you were actually able to enter a meeting in your calendar, and linking that to the address of the meeting in your address book, additionally linking it to your meeting notes, and further with the email that you had received about the meeting. As a matter of fact the display on the PDAs is way too small to actually enable the switching between the windows therefore it is not really easy to swap between the windows and view the different events like the notes, address or the email. In fact, you have to first open the window and find the event in your calendar and then find the address in your address book and then further find the notes in the notebook and then finally locating the email in your email program.
Therefore, it is very important to have PDA’s that have enabled hypertext. As we know that PDA’s like Nino and Palm are becoming popular by day and is infact becoming an important day to day tool. As a matter of fact you would find a lot of web browsers that come especially for your PDAs. Putting the PDAs on the web is one important task and further it is more important to hypertext enable the applications that are used on the PDAs such as calendar, to do list, address book, email and notes.
All the different activities that are performed by you are all interconnected. Addresses are connected to the events, notes further to the To Do list which is further connected to the entries in your calendar and emails are connected to the persons, their birthdays, and anniversaries and so on. But once these applications are put on to the digital form the device is just not able to read them and therefore it becomes literally impossible to travel between the applications and thereby creating the links and the shortcuts that actually exist in the real world.
The main issue that arises is that the PDAs first have very small memory and also have very limited screen space. Usually when the PDAs are synchronized with the information on the desktops and what is important is to save these links on the PDAs. And another important issue to be considered is to have the browsers that are compatible with all the different PDAs that are available in the market.
If you are using palm for your implementations, it has the inbuilt features like the Phone Lookup Function wherein you can look up for the person in the address book from almost all the applications except for the Email. Although this is an amazing feature but still has certain limitations to it. You are only able to perform the function that is just listed which means just retrieving the information about the person. But just in case it if there are any kind of changes in the personal information about the person, it is not further updated in all the applications if done in one.
Another approach for integrating the core PDA applications would be creating true web based applications that have the applications and also be able to synchronize with the PDAs. The main benefit with this approach would be that it would work or be compatible with any device that supports the web browsers.