Flashy games and widgets

My first Palm device was a m100 followed by a few Sony Clie SJ models. For the longest time my favorite was my UX-50. Like a mini-tablet PC with wifi and bluetooth. I had an application on the UX that allowed my to play flash (swf) files. It was more of a novelty due to the low processing power of the Clie. I did manage to rip or download quite a few flash files to try on the Clie. When I saw the Chumby appear, I downloaded various swf files from the Chumby website.
Flash forward to May 2010 and I have my Palm Foleo. With a limited number of applications and just a few programs I started to surf around for more options. Like a lot of people I have a Nintendo Wii that uses the Opera browser. In fact it, like the Foleo, uses the Opera 9 browser. I googled around and found various solutions to a few issues included a tabbed browsing and Stumbleupon workaround. I then discovered a whole slew of online flash games designed to use with the Wii. All the sites loaded rather quickly and about 85% of the games played with little to no problems.
Duck Hunt was one of those games.


I then thought back to all the flash games and widgets I had downloaded. I tried one (minigolf) and it worked flawlessly. I went to Chumby.com again and tried a few more. Some of the current Chumby widgets are for Flash 9 and higher so I was limited.
In the end, I have quite a few games and other widgets like news feeds to add to my collection of useful Foleo apps.

How do I play these files? Simple, Opera 9.02. Opera's Menu tab allows you to 'Open File...' but when you click around it does not recognize .swf files to open them in this manner. Rather, I had to manually enter the location of one file onto the address bar. Once I had one file up and running I bookmarked it into a new folder called Flash Games. I then changed the file name in the address bar, accessed a new flsh game and bookmarked it. Now, without an internet connection I can play countless games.
They have sound and run rather smooth. I even played PacMan while running pTunes in the background.

Foleo's Web Browser

As promised I will do a different post about each app on the Palm Foleo starting with the Web Browser. Its an Opera 9.02 and loads up just as fast as the other apps (instantaneous).

The top bar consists of the standard back, forth, stop, reload, home, and bookmark buttons followed by a secure icon then the address bar. The address bar acts like a Chrome browser in that you can also just type search queries into it and it will search Google for you. Date and time followed by wifi, bluetooth and battery status finish of the top.
Pressing the Menu key reveals six options which I will detail below.
File - Open Location (highlights the address bar)
Open File (opens a smaller File Browser window)
Save Page As (opens above window with option to rename file & save it wherever)

Edit - Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, Find on Web, Find on Page, Find Next

View - Show Bookmarks Toolbar, Show Downloads Toolbar (see screenshot)
Stop, Reload, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Zoom 100%

Browse - Back, Forward, Home, History Strangely every Menu item listed has a shortcut key except Back, Forward and Home.

Bookmarks - Bookmark this Page, Edit Bookmarks It then lists all your bookmark folders and loose bookmarks.

Options - Preferenses, About Web Browser
Choosing Preferences opens a smaller window with a General and Advanced tab.
Under the General tab is the home screen settings, pop-up blocker and download images options.
The Advanced tab shows Memory Management with buttons to clear the cookies, history and cache. You can also set your maximum cache size. 16MB seems to be the max. Also under the Advanced tab is the Advanced Features with checkboxes for Enable Javascript, Accept Cookies and Use Proxy Server.

Upon starting the Web Browser it will try and load the last page you visited. If you wifi or bluetooth internet connection is off it a window will pop up asking you if you wish to establish a connection. My wifi connections take just a few seconds before it finds it and starts updating the page.

Obviously Flash issues and the lack of YouTube helped with all the trash-talking of the Foleo. I don't view YouTube too often but the lack of anything greater than Flash 7 is sometimes restrictive where interaction via flash is needed for uploading or interacting with options on web pages. An entire posting or two about Flash will be forthcoming in the future.

Thats all for now. Long winded and mainly boring UI blah. I will post about the general Web experience as well.

ixle