• Twilight Edge Software

• $16

• Looks Nice when it works

• Doesn’t work most of the time
• Many application problems
• Expensive for it’s features

Design:
Cost/benefit:
Coolness:
Overall:

Setup
To install BackDrop, you have to activate "Trap Weaver" which apparently helps the system avoid problems, and then install Backdrop GC with the themes. You can use the "brightness" command to turn up the picture’s brightness, to make everything easy to see. I had a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, and when I set it up right, it looked great.

Then, I went to the default Palm Launcher. Many icons break the "Code of Palm" about having transparent icons, and this is the case here. Many icons had blank white space around them, immediately killing the coolness of the launcher.

Next, I tried Palm’s default apps, which all worked great, and looked very cool with the image in the background. I was quite pleased at this point, but unfortunately I decided to continue testing.

Third-Party App Problems
I don’t use Palm’s Memo Pad, so I fired up WordSmith. It showed my documents correctly in the "navigate mode", but as soon as I clicked on and opened a document, it showed garbled, unreadable text. This was the first application that I disabled the background on.

Next, I tried out SilverScreen 2.5, which was a huge disaster. The Ticker crawled across the screen, with odd colors in place of former blank spots. Everything ran slow, and the icons were still as messed up as before. So, I disabled the background on that application.

Next, I tried out McFile, which resulted in two miniature screens fragmented on the top of the display, in bizarre colors. I disabled this, and many other applications, until I was down to Palm’s default applications. At this point, I would have been happy with it running in those, because it was bearable to have it off in Silverscreen and Wordsmith.

Memory Card Problems
Unfortunately, that wasn’t all. Every single application on the memory card had the background behind it. I frantically searched for the reason. I disabled the Backdrop for every single application on the Palm, and it didn’t help. I keep my applications in the launcher folder, where SilverScreen activates them, so there was no helper file to choose, I suppose was the problem. Because of this every application on the memory card (mainly images/videos and games) either slowed to a crawl, or had heavy display problems. At this point, I had had enough, and I disabled the software.

You’ll notice the dearth of screenshots in this review, because BackDrop GC generates errors in Palm OS Emulator, and the Screenshot hack that I installed didn’t take the pictures properly, but you probably wouldn’t want to witness them anyway.

Conclusion
BackDrop GC is a good idea, and one that has promise. In applications that it worked, it was really cool to have things in the background. Perhaps in the future, in the days of OS 5 when application developers have to follow Palm’s code more fully, Backdrop GC will work.