Thursday, May 29, 2008

Optimizer 1.0.6 ( for Zaurus ) - now free to download



The (once 3rd best selling) retail Sharp Zaurus software, Optimizer, is now available for free.

From its retail description: Optimizer is a utility to help monitor and maintain an optimal amount of free storage memory space on your Zaurus by tracking changes to your PDA's file system over time.

Before you go off to download it, let me give you some background.

Back in the day when I was first learning Personal Java (the precursor to J2ME, JavaME - Java Mobile Edition) I wrote a small program for a flagship Java device, the Linux based Sharp Zaurus SL5000D/SL5500, that could keep track of changes to files and directories, since Linux was a still a new and scary operating system, and I didn't always know what files were altered when I installed something new.

As you may have guessed, Optimizer was the name of the program. No nifty file MD5sum or datestamp checking to compare file changes, nope, this purely uses the existence of file paths, so it doesn't check for file modifications.



As it was written in Java I adapted the program to be compatible with Jeode (evm) on PocketPC (it was given away free with Axims at the time) and even on a desktop PC (although it's a bit slow on large filesystems). In time, I made it compatible with Sun's Personal Profile J2ME (cvm) making it compatible with other Zaurus' and had it use a layout manager to adapt to any screen size. Truly forward thinking ;)

Now that it is no longer available retail I offer it for free, without any support.

I'm not proud of the source code, it certainly isn't poor, but it's not that great either, so I won't be releasing it (you could decompile it, but really, it's not worth the effort just to embarrass me with some code I wrote 5 years ago)!

Download the last retail version of Optimizer 1.0.6

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