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I am a little confused by all the "but why" comments here. Because it's fun! Because it's cool! Because it's full of weirdness, archaisms, and edge cases - working through those is a playful challenge, and conquering them all gives a wonderful feeling of mastery. It doesn't need to be any more 'useful' than any other hobby or game.
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.
Better than what? What was the competition back then?
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?
So, in a way, im not surprised he’s done something like this. A work of ¿love? ¿Art?. A testament of deeply knowing the object of his passion.
Take a look at his code and admire it for what it is. Read how he explains it. It’s worthy on its own.
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,…
And then iphone's multitouch UI drove the final nail.
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…
Is there a recommended Palm device for modern use? What software do you use on Linux/Mac/Windows to sync the PDA?
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…
Is there a recommended Palm device for modern use? What software do you use on Linux/Mac/Windows to sync the PDA?
For people that do these kinds of projects, I always wonder how much progress is getting made in an average night of poking around. I'm only able to make big leaps on things by just eating up evenings. Are some people just really good at picking things up and making progress?
Don't see any intro or summary. Just "history" and then diving straight into the details.
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?
Funny you should say that. There WAS no emulator for any ARM palm devices. Ever. Until I wrote the only one: https://github.com/uARM-Palm/uARM