1) Using Pippy involves entering Python commands.

2) Still, Pippy gives you enough to play with now, and enables you to do some useful things without too much effort.

3) For now, Pippy is just this interactive environment, not a way of creating standalone applications (unless you want to delve deeper into the source than I could).

4) If you do manage to build Pippy from source, you'll have the option of compiling in your own Python extension modules, and you will be able to import them by default.

5) With Pippy, Python programmers can create custom applications to run on Palm devices, as well as use Pippy as an interactive environment directly on the Palm.

6) The bad news is that, so far, Pippy is still fairly "bleeding edge" software, and a lot of the things programmers want in a development environment are planned for later versions, not available today.

7) The good news about Pippy is that it allows a Python programmer to write and run programs right on the Palm.

8) Compiling Pippy is a lot more work than just downloading the executables.

9) Moreover, with version 0.7, Pippy has gotten faster, more stable, and easier to use.

10) Within a Pippy executable archive,[http:///pippy.html] you'll find a relative directory called ./pippy_0_7.

11) When installing Pippy, first download its executables and/or source archives.

12) Let me introduce Pippy in the style of a good news/bad news joke.

13) Pippy is an interactive environment, similar to the Python interactive shell, but owing even more to another PalmOS language/environment called LispMe (see Resources later in this article).

14) David evaluates the strengths and limitations of Pippy as a means of implementing Palm applications.

15) There are two programming environments under which you might build Pippy.

16) Once both PRCs are on your PalmOS handheld, all you need to do is run Pippy (I like to move it to a "Programming" Applications category, but this is a small convenience).

17) For this article, we'll just assume you are using the distributed executable version of Pippy.