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RePalm

dmitry.gr

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Re: RePalm

#31

Post by tgmatt »

ckz wrote: post #7

Side note: Dmitry (creator of RePalm) is a treasure and his impact on the Palm community cannot be understated. He has a world-class depth of knowledge of the inner workings of these things and is one of the key players in extending PalmOS device capabilities today (patching ROMs, new hardware, etc.). He also contributes regularly to apps the community is developing, teaching us hobby devs new tricks. :) As someone w…

Out of interest, and a genuine question, why do you use PDAs when smartphones exist? Surely they do everything the PDAs did but better?

Re: RePalm

#32

Post by muyuu »

brookst wrote: post #19
stephc_int13 wrote: post #18

PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical weaknesses. 16 bits memory limitation, even at the time that was silly. Armlets? Extremely hard to write simple native code or to port apps and games from other platforms. No file system, a custom and rather slow database instead… But they had tons of documents on how to follow their UI/UX guidelines. Basically, they had no real kernel upon which building an OS,…

All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story. I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but they weren’t better-enough to change my habits.

Canadianfella's reply is dead so I'll reply here.

Eventually Symbian (sp?) was better and when Sony killed their Zire division I just have Palm Treo one last chance. It was a bit laggy and the battery didn't last long enough.

I always wanted to give Zaurus a try, but the Linux ones not the Palm ones.

Re: RePalm

#33

Post by stephc_int13 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #28
stephc_int13 wrote: post #18

PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical weaknesses. 16 bits memory limitation, even at the time that was silly. Armlets? Extremely hard to write simple native code or to port apps and games from other platforms. No file system, a custom and rather slow database instead… But they had tons of documents on how to follow their UI/UX guidelines. Basically, they had no real kernel upon which building an OS,…

Palm was killed by their inability to evolve the platform in the face of quantum leaps from other players -- but that same thing caught out pretty much every other mobile platform of the era. In 2004, the Treo 650 was as good as it got. I LOVED mine, and there was really no other player in the market that could truly best it until Apple landed with the iPhone. (And I say this having sampled best-of-breed Windows Mobi…

RIM and Palm suffered the same kind of huge technical debt on the low-level kernel stuff.

They basically started with something very crude that barely did the job, and built stacks on top.

But they had nice frontends, nice hardware, especially the Sony Clié series was quite ahead of its time hardware wise.

Re: RePalm

#34

Post by epilys »

stavros wrote: post #30
epilys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't ship to Greece. (yet). Also the keyboard is less than ideal.

I quite like the keyboard, but then again I'm not very picky with keyboards. I got mine reshipped from Germany, so that's a route you can go. If you want a repairable laptop with a good keyboard, getting a Framework now gets you much closer than hoping someone makes one. Also, you enable and encourage the company that already makes a repairable laptop to eventually sell a great keyboard, which giving your money to Ap…

I will wait a bit more in case they expand their shipping.

What do you think of the monitor by the way? Does it compare to e.g. a Macbook even a little bit?

Re: RePalm

#35

Post by njacobs5074 »

I had the interesting experience to work at Palm in the early 2000's on a project that was to compete with the Blackberry.

Needless to say, it never saw the light of day but I still remember that we had to ask the PalmOS engineering group to create a hardware layer thread so that we could do network I/O in parallel with running the user app.

It was an enormously challenging platform to work with.

Re: RePalm

#36

Post by stavros »

epilys wrote: post #34
stavros wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite like the keyboard, but then again I'm not very picky with keyboards. I got mine reshipped from Germany, so that's a route you can go. If you want a repairable laptop with a good keyboard, getting a Framework now gets you much closer than hoping someone makes one. Also, you enable and encourage the company that already makes a repairable laptop to eventually sell a great keyboard, which giving your money to Ap…

I will wait a bit more in case they expand their shipping. What do you think of the monitor by the way? Does it compare to e.g. a Macbook even a little bit?

I really like the laptop in general, but, again, I'm not very picky. I have an old MacBook Air and the Framework's monitor is just as good (though much higher res). My only issue is that it's a little dim in sunlight.

Also, obviously Intel can't compare to an M1, but I hope the new AMD processors will improve on that somehow.

Re: RePalm

#37

Post by muyuu »

As much as I love retro stuff I see no point in reviving Palm. It's like bringing back MS-DOS, perhaps you have something ready made for that environment and you want to use it as is because you don't want to relearn some newer interface. That's ok, it can be done with emulation. But other than that why would you want to impose yourself a bunch of anachronistic limitations?

Re: RePalm

#38

Post by stephc_int13 »

muyuu wrote: post #32
brookst wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story. I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but they weren’t better-enough to change my habits.

Canadianfella's reply is dead so I'll reply here. Eventually Symbian (sp?) was better and when Sony killed their Zire division I just have Palm Treo one last chance. It was a bit laggy and the battery didn't last long enough. I always wanted to give Zaurus a try, but the Linux ones not the Palm ones.

Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short stack limit that created tons of bugs and it was not possible to build software without their own customized toolchain that disallowed some standards C/C++ stuff such as static variables.

The best kernel at the time was WinCE, good old Win32 API with basic POSIX capabilities for networking, filesystem and memory management.

Microsoft had a winner platform on their lap, but for some reason they invested very little on the platform, I remember talking with someone on the PocketPC team at the time and they were less than twelve developers, and shrinking.

It was the same era when Intel stopped all their investments on the ARM architecture after successfully building the most impressive one at the time (the StrongARM followed by the XScale)

Re: RePalm

#39

Post by michaelhoffman »

tgmatt wrote: post #31
ckz wrote: post #7

Side note: Dmitry (creator of RePalm) is a treasure and his impact on the Palm community cannot be understated. He has a world-class depth of knowledge of the inner workings of these things and is one of the key players in extending PalmOS device capabilities today (patching ROMs, new hardware, etc.). He also contributes regularly to apps the community is developing, teaching us hobby devs new tricks. :) As someone w…

Out of interest, and a genuine question, why do you use PDAs when smartphones exist? Surely they do everything the PDAs did but better?

I don't use non-smartphone PDAs anymore, but I really miss:

1. Their ability to do absolutely everything offline. No need to worry that I won't be able to access something because somewhere without data service

2. The ability to have all the PDA features at my fingertips without being hooked up to the world's biggest attention-killing distraction network.

Re: RePalm

#40

Post by stephc_int13 »

causality0 wrote: post #29
stephc_int13 wrote: post #18

PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical weaknesses. 16 bits memory limitation, even at the time that was silly. Armlets? Extremely hard to write simple native code or to port apps and games from other platforms. No file system, a custom and rather slow database instead… But they had tons of documents on how to follow their UI/UX guidelines. Basically, they had no real kernel upon which building an OS,…

Yet somehow using it was far more pleasurable than Pocket PC. I could certainly do more things with my beastly 640x480 624mhz ipaq, but everything about the UX was better on Palm. Apps saved state automatically. I didn't have to open a start menu to launch something and I didn't have to open two menus and manually close them because Windows Mobile doesn't close anything when you hit the X button. The buttons, d-pads,…

Yeah, it's a shame, Microsoft had the better kernel and SDK (by a long shot) but their UX was crude and relied too much on old Windows paradigms.

They should have kept the kernel and ditched the Shell to build something tailored for the form factor and usage.

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