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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?
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> Most people would not take on a task of writing a just-in-time translator alone. But that is just because they are wimps :) (Or maybe they reasonably assume that it is a huge time sink with more corner cases than one could shake a stick at)
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…
You’re not kidding. I had a HTC HD2 and the hardware was very futuristic-feeling (one of the first phones with the original Qualcomm Snapdragon, and a “huge” 4.3” screen that my friends gently mocked for being ridiculously large), but the software experience was leagues behind iOS and Android, despite they themselves being in relative infancy. It would have been pretty nice if it got an update to Windows Phone 7, which was promised but never came.
HTC’s own customisations were the worst part. Their flashy animated home screen was very nice, but the iOS-style threaded SMS app couldn’t deal with threads longer than about 300 messages and would routinely lock up the phone for minutes at a time until you deleted your conversation history.
In the years after I got rid of it people continued to port newer versions of Android to it, but I just remember it being shit at texting and browsing the web—the only things I actually wanted it for.
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?
I think big progress will eat up an evening but I think the important point is that it's not a job -- so when it eats up an evening it should be fun and when you've not other important/interesting things to do. I almost never know when I'm going to make progress when I start.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
I see a big opportunity should rePalm be ported to generic low cost embedded hardware. ESP32(|ARM|Risc-V) board+LCD+LTE module, all costing a dozen bucks each or less, would make the basis for a powerful dumbphone for when manufacturers will cease any production of them. I would personally love to have such a device.
Broadly speaking, PalmOS had filesystems, networking, graphics and interface controls, sound, hardware access and more. Who cares if I can't watch high resolution movies or play AAA games with it, the goal should rather be to use it to do things where Linux is not only overkill but also would require hardware that cost a lot more. Forget about phones and PDAs, if I want to build an I/O panel with buttons and display for some instrument, a light OS like this one could help to lower costs by doing it on much cheaper hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do the same in my brain dumps when coding. For me it stops my mind from wandering and describes to myself why I am writing that function.
This is such a great idea for people who have trouble staying focused. It can help you decide whether to actually spend time on whatever you're doing, or to just dump some ideas to a scratchpad (or your Zettelkasten!) and get back to the actual work at hand.
It's been significantly impactful; I actually get work done when I can feel like I don't have to address an idea right away out of fear of forgetting it.
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?