Over the weekend we brought you news that Palm had released a new version of its Palm Desktop software for Mac OS. Among other things, Palm indicated that the new software version introduced a “fix to Instant Palm Desktop.” Geoff Perlman, president and CEO of REAL Software, the makers of REALbasic, indicates that this fix corrects a long-standing problem between applications made using REALbasic and the Instant Palm Desktop software.
“For the past several months we have been working closely with engineers at Palm to resolve a conflict between applications made with REALbasic and the Instant Palm Desktop extension for Mac OS,” he said. “Specifically, the problem would manifest itself if the user had the Instant Palm Desktop extension installed and ran an application made with REALbasic that included Help menu items. After the user quit the application, the Mac OS would crash either immediately or up to 30 minutes later.”
This bug can also affect applications made with other development environments if they dynamically generate their Help menu. The cause of the problem turned out to be a bug in Instant Palm Desktop, Perlman said. However, it’s now been fixed and the patch is available from Palm’s Web site. Anyone running applications made with REALbasic and the Instant Palm Desktop extension should download and install the updated Palm Desktop software.
“Special thanks to the fine folks at Palm for working so diligently to resolve this issue,” Perlman said.
Palm Desktop, now up to version 2.6.3, is the free organizer for keeping track of contacts, appointments, to-do lists, and memos in a single program that can synchronize with a Palm OS-based handheld. Other than the Instant Palm Desktop fix, changes to the new version involve support for features of the new Palm handhelds running version 4.0 of the Palm OS.