Why Namemaker?

Some people may be wondering why I put "Namemaker" together when I already had TSX. The primary reason was speed. I had an idea, and being the geek I am I had to test it out. I created a new storage format for the TSX tables to see if it would improve performance - and it did amazingly so. Which, I think, makes "Namemaker" far more useful for most people than TSX.

Simply put, with something like TSX (or the desktop TableSmith), most people don't care if they have the ability to create their own tables. They want a tool that has done the work for them already. Essentially, you get both with desktop TableSmith - it has a ton of tables available for people who just want to use them, but you also can create and edit your own. You also get both with TSX, but at the cost of speed. To provide the flexibility that TableSmith enjoys, TSX has to do some things that don't make it the speediest Palm program out there. It runs acceptably on my PDA (Zire 71, 144 Mhz...and it looks like it's been discontinued by Palm...the 72 runs at 312 Mhz? Wow...hmm...no, can't justify that yet...but, I digress), but I imagine that on older, slower Palms, it's slow enough to be unacceptable. So for people who don't want the ability to create their own tables, they can't even run the ones that exist.

Thus, the reason for Namemaker.