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Bots / The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 10

252 The Ultimate Palm Robot

Y our Palm robot may be alive and well, but how can you claim to live the
robot lifestyle without surrounding yourself with robot stuff? It’s like
Kevin always says: “I need Powerpuff shower curtains to go with my
Powerpuff toothbrush and Powerpuff bathrobe.” You can apply his dedication
to that particular hobby to the world of robots.
Where should you start? Right on your PDA, of course. In this, our final
chapter, we’ll point out some of the coolest robot stuff you might want to get
to impress your family and friends. And it’ll give you something to do when
you’re not playing with your Palm robot.

Installing Palm Programs

You can find all of the Palm OS programs mentioned in this chapter at
www.palmgear.com, an excellent resource for shareware, freeware, and com-
mercial PDA software. To track down one of the titles we discuss, visit
Palmgear and enter the name of the program in the search box. When you get
to the proper page, be sure to download the appropriate file—usually .zip for
Windows users or .sit for Mac users.
If you’re new to PDAs, it pays to keep in mind that downloaded applica-
tions aren’t immediately ready for installation. Usually, programs arrive on
your PC in the aforementioned form of .zip or .sit files. You will need to ex-
pand the .zip or .sit file into its original form before the program can be in-
stalled on your Palm (see Figure 10-1).
We recommend these tools for managing compressed files:

❏ Windows Use WinZip to uncompress ZIP files. If you’re using
Windows XP, a rudimentary unzipper is built in, so you don’t
even need WinZip.
❏ Macintosh Use Aladdin StuffIt Expander to manage SIT files.

Of course, if you’re already happily expanding compressed files with an-
other program, keep up the good work; these are just our favorites. If you
need to find WinZip or StuffIt Expander, try www.download.com.

Once expanded, a typical ZIP file will have many individual files in-
side—readmes, HTML files, and so forth. You can ignore most of that stuff.
The readme will have instructions you may need to read, of course, but in gen-
eral you need to install only files that bear the file extensions .prc (which are
the executable program files) or .pdb (which are database files that supply in-
formation the PRCs need to run).

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