Welcome to the PtCon home page!

PtCon (pronounced P-T-Con) stands for Palm Tcl Console. Palm Tcl, developed by Ashok Nadkarni, is the port of Tcl 7.6p2 to PDA's (personal digital assistants) that run Palm Incorporated's operating system (Palm OS). PtCon enables the creation and execution of Palm Tcl scripts interactively within a Palm-enabled PDA. The scripts are stored within PtCon's database between sessions. As Palm Tcl scripts are evaluated, the results are retained and displayed individually. Each evaluation result generated during the current PtCon session can be redisplayed at any time.

PtCon is developed using the Toucan IDE for Palm Tcl on either the GNU/Linux or Microsoft Windows platform. The user interface of PtCon consists of Palm resource elements, such as forms, menus, strings, and bitmaps. The internal functionality is implemented via Palm Tcl scripts that are embedded in the PtCon resource file (ptcon.prc) and auxillary scripts stored in the PtCon database file (PtConDB.pdb).

In order to run PtCon, a PDA that has Palm OS 3.0 or later must be used. In addition, a computer must be available with which to install the PtCon program into the PDA. Instructions for installing PtCon into a PDA are included in the PtCon User Manual, which is in the distribution.

This project will serve as a means of refining the initial release of PtCon. It is hoped that PtCon will become the preferred tool for experimenting with Palm Tcl scripts in a mobile environment.

PtCon is licensed under the same license as Tcl (BSD). Details can be found in the distribution.

Screen shots

Below are a number of screen shots of PtCon running on the Palm OS emulator (Pose).

Console menus


Script pulldown.	Results pulldown.	Help pulldown.

Evaluation and results display


Script selection for evaluation.	Resulting evaluation.	Evaluation results selection.	Redisplayed results.

Editor menus


Script pulldown.	Edit pulldown.	Insert pulldown.	Move pulldown.

Script editing


Editing of the new script, example, prior to save.	After the save (unique ID assigned).

Downloads

PtCon 0.1 is available as either a gzipped tar archive for GNU/Linux (and other Un*xes) or a pkzip archive for Microsoft Windows. Both can be obtained at PtCon SourceForge Files page.
Earler versions of PtCon can also be found at the PtCon SourceForge Files page.

Feedback

Feedback and suggestions for new features for PtCon are invited. Be aware that development is still ongoing. New features and bug fixes are in the works. New versions of PtCon will be made available as time allows. You can send your emails to maccody@home.com. Replace "home" with "attbi" for all you non-spammers!

Links

The PtCon SourceForge Summary page.
Browse the PtCon CVS repository.
The Toucan SourceForge site.
Ashok Nadkarni, developer of Palm Tcl, has a SourceForge site.
The ActiveState Tcl website.

Last updated Friday, December 20, 2002