www.devco.net by r.i.pienaar

Métro – Public Transport Guide

In many large cities there are train, bus, underground and sometimes water based public transport systems, these can be very confusing and you can spend hours a month staring at various maps to figure out the best route from A to B. Enter Métro a tool for your Palm, PocketPC or Smartphone that will calculate the quickest route or route with the fewest changes for any of these systems. It currently covers over 250 Cities and amazingly is also freeware.

A full overview with plenty of screenshots are available here so I will not be posting any screenshots here, but this is an essential tool for anyone living or traveling to a large city.

Important features include:

• More than 250 cities covered
• Interface available in more than 30 languages
• Compute routes based on Place of Interest, Station Name, Contact details for some stops.
• Contact list with address/station associations in order to do route computes based on contact name
• Full display of stops on individual lines
• Auto-completion of inputs

This is definetely an essential tool, one that I have been using since about 2000 on my Palm based PDA's

Cambridge vxUtil

Since the iPaq I got has both bluetooth and wifi it is very useful in a networked environment and so the obvious requirement is a networking tool that can do the usual diagnostics work. I found a excellent freeware tool called vxUtil from Cambridge Computer Corporation.

Features:

• DNS Audit
• DNS Lookup
• Finger
• Get HTML
• Network Interface Info like ifconfig or ipconfig
• IP Subnet Calculator
• Password Generator
• Ping and Ping Sweeper
• Port Scanner
• Quote
• Time Service client
• Traceroute
• whois

All round excellent tool one that I often use, view the extended entry to see screenshots of it in action.

Birdsoft BatteryWatch

I have created a new category for iPaq and Pocket PC related postings, I am hoping to post here bits about all the software I use on my iPaq mostly as a place where I can come back and find things that I loose but also in the hope that someone will be finding it interesting.
A shortcoming in the Pocket PC 2003 OS in my view is the lack of a simple to locate battery monitor, the battery monitor only appears when the iPaq is nearly flat otherwise it is buried deep in the settings menus. I found a good freeware system tray battery meter at Birdsoft and it works really well so far, below a screenshot of it in action. It does not provide much functionality but clicking on the icon allows you to click on short cuts to the power management and the battery management of the iPaq, not much else you would want from such a tool.