Comparative Review of PrefDB Management Software

General Overview

Firstly, what exactly is a "PalmOS PrefDB Management Software"? Well, in order to understand that, one needs to understand how the PalmOS manages applications and application preferences.

Each PalmOS application is assigned a unique CreatorID. No two applications in the PalmOS world have duplicate CreatorIDs. These CreatorIDs are four character codes, and all CreatorIDs that consist of all lower case letters are officially reserved for Palm and PalmOS applications. Each application can then create its own preference settings in the PalmOS Preference Database (PrefDB). Think of this PrefDB as the PalmOS equivalent to the Windows Registry. The difference is that each preference created has it’s CreatorID attached, so one can always find out which application created that entry in the PrefDB.

Unfortunately, just like in the Windows world, not everyone follows the rules, and many applications leave their "droppings" behind in the PrefDB even after you delete it. These "droppings" are called Orphaned Preferences, where the associated application that created the preference can not be found on the PalmOS. This is true even if you use your launcher or other such program (like FPS Utilities 4) to delete your applications. Even if you choose "Delete Preferences" when deleting an application (like in Launch ‘Em), some of these applications leave Orphaned Preferences behind. These applications do this for various reasons, like installation history, licensing, and so on.

The problem with this is that it eats up space on your Palm. Furthermore although no application is supposed to duplicate another application’s CreatorID, it would be quite disasterous if you installed two applications with the same CreatorID on the same PalmOS device. And if your PrefDB gets too large and has too many entries (just like the Windows Registry) it could be the cause of crashes and other problems. All this is especially true if you regularly install and delete all sorts of programs.

The solution to this, and the PalmOS world’s equivalent to the Windows RegClean, is PalmOS PrefDB Management Software. As with RegClean, you must be careful how use any of these software since it can really mess up your system if you use it improperly. In this comparative review, we will take a look at three such programs, Preference Editor 0.1.2, PrefViewer 1.0.4 and PrefMgr 1.5.

Product Discussion - Preference Editor 0.1.2

Preference Editor has a very simple interface, showing you a list of CreatorIDs of each preference in the PrefDB on the left, and the associated Application on the right. Orphaned Preferences have "-none-" displayed where the application ought to be. It allows you to view both saved and unsaved preferences. Select any one of them, and you can click on view or delete. View shows you both the hex and text data of that particular preference record, while delete removes that preference permanently from your PrefDB.

Product Discussion - PrefViewer 1.0.4

PrefViewer basically allows you to view both the saved and unsaved preferences. You can also switch to Hex mode and view each preference record in hex if you like. to view the next preference, just hit the "next" button. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent "previous" button. When it comes across an Orphaned Preference, it shows "belongs to: - no app -" on its screen. It does not have a delete function but interestingly enough, it has a manu option labeled "(nothing)" that allows you to create a "dummy application" named "DeleteMe" with the offending CreatorID. You can then use your launcher to remove the "DeleteMe" application and it should also take the preference along with it.

Product Discussion - PrefMgr 1.5

PrefMgr is probably the oldest program of these three. When you first start the program, you must press the "Go" button for it to scan the entire PrefDB. The screen is divided into three parts, but this is not obvious to the beginning user. The top part holds a drop-down list of all the preferences it finds, the middle has a scrollbar and allows you to browse the summaries of each preference record, while the bottom part consists of three buttons, "Go", "Mark/Unmark" and "Delete". What makes it confusing is that when pressing the "Delete" or "Mark/Unmark" button, it will perform that action on the Preference record listed in the top part of the screen, not the middle. What is nice about PrefMgr is that it gives you two useful features - a "Delete Orphans" button and allows you to keep a list of "Favourite" preferences so that you can just choose "Delete Favourites" from the menu to get rid of the lot of them. For developers for example, this would be quite a useful feature to have since you don’t always have to keep hunting for your app’s preference record to delete it when doing debugging.

Conclusion

There is one irritating feature of the three programs reviewed: none of them sort the preference list in any way at all. They appear in the order they are stored in memory. For beginners, the "Delete Orphans" menu option in PrefMgr is a no brainer. Can’t get any simpler than that. And it’s ability to keep a list of favorites is a good one the have. Even so, one really wonders if these two features are really worth the US$15 that the author wants for it.

PrefViewer on the other hand, has a serious flaw in that it reported preferences created by Desk Accessories (DAs) like ezConvDA, MelodyDA, CalCal and so on as an Orphaned Preference when it was not. Preference Editor and PrefMgr did not make this mistake.

Under the circumstances, it looks quite clearly that Preference Editor is the way to go.

Update

Bodo Bellut, developer of Preference Editor 0.1.2, highlighted that Preference Editor doesn't contain a Delete Orphans option on purpose, because in his opinion it is far to simple to (accidentally) delete valuable information using such an option.

Furthermore, Sven Bring commented that he compared the lists that Preference Editor and PrefMgr created, and there were many prefs reported by Preference Editor as orphaned that PrefMgr found to be in use. He didn't dare delete anything after seeing this. Bodo Bellut replied that Preference Editor reports all records that are not owned by an application. That doesn't mean they’re not used by any application. PrefMgr perhaps somehow "knows" some such preferences and doesn't display those. It also doesn't display it’s own record used for licensing.

Personally, licensing or not, every software developed ought to use PrefDB properly. Some, like Multimail, are notorious, using ten to twenty (too many to count) PrefDB entries. And for what, I have no idea. Until such issues are resolved, I guess we’ll still need to watch our Windows Registry, oops, I mean Palm PrefDB carefully.

Summary:

Review: Comparative review of three PalmOS PrefDB Management Software
Review Date: January 25, 2000
Updated: January 22, 2001
Available from: Most leading Palm Software site (eg http://www.PalmGear.com)

Software 1: Preference Editor 0.1.2
Developer: Bodo Bellut
Developer Home Page: http://www.bellut.net/pilot.html
Price: Freeware (GPL)
Requirements: 22Kb

Software 2: PrefViewer 1.0.4
Developer: HotPaw
Developer Home Page: http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/hotpaw/
Price: Freeware
Requirements: 7Kb

Software 3: PrefMgr 1.5
Developer: Schachar Levin
Developer Home Page: http://members.xoom.com/PixIL/Software/PrefMgr/index.htm
Price: US$15
Requiremnts: 15Kb

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