Old Faithful

Old faithful Dataviz returned to the rescue this week. I have been using Smartlist-to-go (sltg) for years and began a slight detour to Mobisystems Database. Unfortunately there were a few problems with this program that I have not been able to correct.

First and foremost I think that it is really necessary for a company to respond to its phone calls or emails. Mobisystems has done neither over the past 8 weeks. Here are a few negatives that I ran into attempting to write a Patient Database program with what I feel is one of the Desktop's best Palm Database programs. I should also add, I feel that Mobisystem's Database is one of the best reference database programs ever written for the Palm. The ability to add photos and continuous search functions is so intuitive and easy to use, conforming to many of the Microsoft standards, that it almost seems like heresy to write anything bad about it. In defense of Mobisystems though, I must add that some of the problems are Lifedrive related.

Issues with Mobisystems Database:

1. Several crashes seem to occur when attempting to access linked files.
2. There is no ability to print from the lifedrive, including with Printboy.
3. Individual records are difficult to access, without the use of Primary Keys.
4. Recently I wrote an On-Call program which showed the pictures of Physicians
on call, with the dates of availability for call. Several additional issues were
noted:

A. I was unable to use the Rom calendar to apply the dates.
B. Each date had to be created as a separate record.
C. The Applet creation function from the Forms section worked well until it
was hotsynced. Following this, there was an icon in the launcher menu,
but no program. Even after several resets.
D. The ability to transfer an Access file only includes tables, which is
basically a CSV table transfer.



So, the solution for last weekend was to go back to old faithful, SLTG. At least for the next few weeks. There is no delay (a Lifedrive problem) with the input or the output. I can easily transfer via IR to a text file all of my patients for the month/week/day, but alas, there was one small problem, even with the SLTG program. Dastardly crashes !!!!

Since I had a lot of the DRG and CPT codes in different files, which were accessed relatively quickly on the Lifedrive, the potential for crashes was always a possibility. Due to this problem while I was on call, it was time to do something ridiculous. You cannot imagine the absurdity of trying to enter DRG and CPT codes with resets occurring randomly. There was only one solution (of course, short of going to the Windows platform).

I am now using two Palms. The Palm Tungsten (1) for all my medical stuff and the Lifedrive for everything else (web browsing, mp3's, movies, Office files, ebooks etc). This morning I picked up a 1 gigabyte SD card and I hope to attach the MobiPrograms and the Dataviz ones directly to the card. Hopefully if I can load the Database to the card and use it directly with the Palm Tungsten I will be very happy.

Amazing isn't it, what's old is what's new.


LDD.