How to Install Icons for use in DateBk6
General DateBk6 only uses one icon file. However, you can copy and paste icons easily from other collections into that one file, thereby building your own custom icon collection with all the icons that you want to use. If you are upgrading from a prior version of Pimlico Software's DateBk3/4/5, you may still have the older-style monochrome icon collection installed. It is recommended that you delete that memopad record (the one with DATEBK3 as the top line). If you only have one icon collection installed, DateBk6 will always find it. If you have two or more icon collections installed, however, you should make sure that your "working" collection has the name Icons-DATEBK (or Icons-DATEBK5 for backwards compatibility if you already have that installed) as that is the default name that DateBk6 will look for. You can rename the icon file using either dbIcon (in the zip archive) or using the third party icon editor, IconMgr. Case is important on this default name! Installing If you are starting off for the first time, it's probably a good idea to just install Icons-DATEBK.prc to get familiar with how icons work. Other sample icon collections are stored in the Icons.zip file which in turn is stored in the DateBk6.zip archive. Start off by unzipping the contents of the icons.zip file (the same way you originally unzipped the DateBk6.zip file) and select the icon collection you want to install by clicking on it. If the PRC extension is associated with the Palm Install Tool, it will then be set up for installation. Otherwise, you will need to extract the file, store it in a folder on your hard drive, then launch the Palm Install tool to install it from that folder. Using Icons Icons are not necessarily displayed by default in DateBk6 (they are, but only if you have a color icon file installed prior to first launching DateBk6). In all views but the monthly view, you enable the display of icons by going into View Display Options in the Options menu of that view. In the monthly view, there is a popup list on the selector control at the bottom of the screen that toggles between displaying Appt times, icons, text and free time. In the day view, you can attach an icon to an event in one of two ways: Tap on the item, tap on the Details button and then tap on the Icon button and select an icon. TapAndHold on the spot where the icon is displayed (or would be displayed) until the icon selection dialog appears. Using Icons from other Collections Remember that DateBk only uses the icons in One icon collection. If you have more than one icon collection installed, it is very important that it has the default name of Icons-DATEBK (or Icons-DATEBK5 for backwards compatibility) as otherwise, you cannot control which icon collection is used by DateBk. If only one icon collection is present, it will be used regardless of its name. The normal procedure for building a custom icon collection is to load all the icon collections that have icons you want to use onto your device with a hotsync and then launch the now freeware program: Icon Manager. Although you can use dbIcon, we now generally recommend the use of Icon Manager as it was recently changed to a free application and is much more powerful than dbIcon (which is why dbIcon has not been updated in recent years). Launch Icon Manager (which you can download from www.palmgear.com or any other number of download sites that handle Palm Software). In the opening screen, all downloaded icon collections are displayed. Tap on one you want to copy icons FROM so all the icons appear on the screen. If you are doing a lot of copying and pasting of multiple icons, you want to check the SELECT+ checkbox so you can select more than one icon at a time. Then: Tap on all the icons you want to pick up from that database, or tap and drag across them to select them quickly. If you accidentally tap the wrong icon, tap it again to unselect it. You can move to other pages to select icons prior to copying them. Select COPY TO... from the RECORD menu and select the icon collection you want to copy the icons INTO. Tap the CLOSE button. Tap the Icon Collection you copied the items into and verify that they copied correctly. Select SAVE from the RECORD menu to save all your changes and then tap CLOSE to finish. The icons will then appear when you next run DateBk. Note that if you intend to re-order the icons in the collection, it is very important that you set the option to track icons by resource ID rather than by index position (see Advanced Features below) as otherwise, your existing icon assignments (which are tracked by the position of the icon in the file) will all get shifted around! If you always add icons at the end of the collection, then this is not an issue. Important Compatibility Note dbIcon included in the Icons.zip file is a simple icon editor for handling standard density icons (i.e. for Palm devices with 160x160 resolution screens) and icon collections up to 255 icons in size. In order to handle icon collections with high-density icons (for 320x320 resolution screens) or to handle collections up to 2,600 icons, you will need to use the third party icon editor: Icon Manager which is available from most Palm software archives like www.PalmGear.com or www.handango.com. We now recommend that all users download Icon Manager and use that instead. High Density Icons High density icons can be displayed on OS5 devices with 320x320 screens or on OS4 Clie devices with 320x320 screens. If you select a small or tiny view, the icons are displayed at halfsize. DateBk6 first looks to see if you have a low-density version of the current icon for display. If you do, then that is displayed. Otherwise, on an OS5 device only, DateBk6 will automatically scale the high-density icon to half-size (never as good as a hand-tuned half-size icon, but maybe acceptable and obviously involves no effort). On an OS4 Clie device, you must provide a low-density version of each icon if you want an icon displayed in the small/tiny views. Missing Icons If an icon is missing (you are tracking icons by Resource ID and deleted that icon, or you have deleted icons and that icon index position is now past the end of file), DateBk6 will display a red box with an X in it. Advanced Features If you are a more advanced user, you can take advantage of the fact that Datebk6 can track icons by either index position (i.e. the record number in the database), or by resource ID (a tag associated with each icon). Tracking icons by index position is fast, but has the downside that if you delete or insert an icon, all icons past that point assume a different index position so any existing references to icons in DateBk6 get unexpectedly shifted. You can also track icons by resource ID. This is slower but has the advantage of avoiding a problem with inserting or deleting icons because the tag (resourceID) does not change as icons are moved around. To track icons by Resource ID, go into the main DateBk6 preference panel (Options | Preferences in any view), tap on the top of the screen or the MORE button, and select Advanced Settings and check the box to Track Icons by ResourceID. If you use this feature, Pimlico highly recommends the use of the third party icon editor, Icon Manager to handle the editing of icons. This program also has the ability to reset all the resource ID's. This is very helpful because if you start off by resetting all the resource ID's, they will then match the existing icon indexes, so that your existing icon assignments are preserved (see note in following section). Upgrading from prior version of DateBk6 If you are upgrading from an earlier version of DateBk that was tracking icons by index position and now want to track icons by resourceID, you must handle this carefully in order to ensure that all your existing icon assignments are not lost: Go into IconMgr, bring up the icon collection you are using and select the RENUMBER ICON IDs option from the IDs menu- best is to select CUSTOM ID NUMBER and enter value of zero. After doing that, use the TOGGLE ID NUMBERS menu option and verify that the very first icon has a number of 0 assigned to it. Save the database Exit out of IconMgr Launch DateBk6 Go into Options | Preferences, tap on title bar legend or MORE button, select ADVANCED SETTINGS and check the box TRACK ICONS BY RESOURCE ID (Remember to save this to all your saved views and startup view!) EXIT OUT OF DATEBK6 Re-launch Datek6 Also, note that if you track icons by Resource ID, you must ensure that all resource ID #'s lie in the range 0-2599. Any icons number 2,600 or higher will not be displayed in DateBk6.