Yet the number of commercial, freeware and shareware programs for the PalmPilot has passed the 700 program mark, so there is quite a range of third-party software to choose from. In this article, I'll suggest which programs you simply have to have and also point out a couple of great ones that you might have missed.

A couple of baseline criteria have influenced my selection. The primary factor is that I have included no software, no matter how cool, which regularly causes my PalmPilot to crash and burn. Yes, Virginia, there are programs out there in eternal betaland which once installed cause me to either quickly reach for last month's article by Chris Brown on how to recover from PalmPilot data disasters or to reach for a paperclip and perform the dreaded hard reset ("Recovering lost PalmPilot data").

I've written it before and I'll write it again: back up your PalmPilot. Even the best intended software writers may occasionally release something which is, shall we say, a couple of releases shy of being ready to being installed on my worst enemy's machine, much less mine. Translation: PalmPilot software often has an incredibly short development time; the developer has no way of knowing precisely what's on your beloved PalmPilot. New programs (even non-beta versions) sometimes render PalmPilots ready for a hard reset. You therefore ought to HotSync regularly and backup stuff that you can't afford to lose! End of sermon.

As you read this article, you will notice that there's only one game on this list. I will admit it. I am game-impaired. Aside from Solitaire on Windows and Zork on any platform, I'm not a games guy. What are your top ten must-have games? Why not post them on the PowerBoard discussion group? If you want to do that, just click on the link at the end of this article and talk about games to your heart's content.

The programs you gotta have
There are just some programs I can't live without. Some are free and the others are inexpensive.

Aportis Doc
Aportis Doc (formerly Doc) is a document reader for the PalmPilot. Rick Bram, who actually has a day job, created this masterpiece. With it, you can read documents far longer than those that the built-in Memo Pad application will allow you to use. Gone for me are the days of carrying around a paperback in case I get trapped someplace without a book. Now , as shown in Figure A, Aportis Doc lets me always have something interesting to read. There are many documents already formatted for Aportis Doc format. A great source for these is the Lending Library at http://www.macduff.net/. Aportis Doc enthusiasts have also created a web ring at http://www.pilotlibrary.org/webring.html that lists an additional 20 sites with texts you can read in Aportis Doc. And the PilotNewspaperDaily at http://mullara.met.unimelb.edu.au:8080/cgi-bin/pilotnews.cgi will let you create a newspaper customized to your individual reading preferences. They can even email it to you on a daily basis.