If you are a Palm developer, take a look at Synergy Solutions' Plugin SDK. Check out the Plug-in Development documentation. If you know C and have a Palm OS development kit, creating a plug-in may be easier than you think.

How it works
MagicText, like its predecessor, is a HackMaster hack. If you haven't yet discovered HackMaster, you probably haven't added many extensions to your Palm device yet! HackMaster, by DaggerWare (at http://www.daggerware.com/), has become the standard for adding Palm OS system extensions. Through an arrangement with Synergy Solutions, HackMaster is provided with MagicText and is free of charge solely for use with MagicText. Of course, if you find HackMaster useful for running other extensions, you should register it.

When you install MagicText, you'll need to install both the application (MagicText.prc) and the HackMaster hack (MagicText Hack.prc), as well as any plug-ins you want to use. If you don't already have it, you'll also need to install HackMaster (HackMaster.prc).

The MagicText application is used to configure plug-in settings and get help for the application, as shown in Figure B. The MagicText Hack controls the contextual menu. A HackMaster preferences panel allows you to customize the sensitivity of the MagicText Hack and also choose the MagicText activator button.

FIGURE B

The MagicText application is used to configure plug-in settings.

After configuring the settings, as shown in Figure C, you can access MagicText's contextual menu from any application simply by dragging up from the MagicText activator button. The activator button is simply one of the buttons in the Palm's silkscreen area. Magic-Text doesn't take over that button entirely, but can share it with another application. For example, I activate MagicText by dragging up from the top half of the Calculator button, into the Palm display area.

FIGURE C

A preferences panel allows you to customize the hack.

How to get it
MagicText is a commercial application. A fully-functional 30-day demo version is available. You can download everything you need from the Synergy Solutions Web site. If you decide to keep it, MagicText retails for $17.95. Registered users of TextEdit Hack can upgrade to MagicText for no extra charge.

MagicText requires Palm OS 2.x or higher. Warning: it will crash on a 1.x version of the Palm OS! MagicText requires 26K of RAM.

HackMaster is shareware. If you use it for anything other than MagicText, the shareware fee is $5. Additionally, some of the third party plug-ins distributed with MagicText are also shareware. See the ReadMe files in the MagicText distribution for details.

Vicki Brown has done freelance writing for such publications as Handheld PC magazine and MacTech Magazine. She is the co-author of the book "MacPerl: Power and Ease". Pointers to her various published articles are available on her web pages at http://www.cfcl.com/~vlb/CRC/articles.html. She can be reached via email at vlb@cfcl.com.