I think that porting WinCE in the same manner would be more promising. That OS had was really a solid foundation, I have no idea why MS abandoned the project. To make modern UI layer on top of it and it may fly.
Do it. sounds cool!
RePalm
101–110 of 151 posts
Re: RePalm
#102Earlier 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.
3. For the "big 4" applications at least, the Palm was significantly faster and significantly more usable than anything I've seen on smartphones.
Re: RePalm
#103This is amazing. I would leap at the chance to build a simple palm device with a 3D printed case, modern hardware that lasts an absolute eternity.
Same here. I can still write Graffiti without thinking, and something I could use as a notepad would be great.
I get mocked for using Sigma instead of E. :-)
Re: RePalm
#104Earlier 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?
A totally valid question! I did adopt the smartphone for many, many years. My father had a gen-1 iPhone which captured my imagination. At the same time, I've also never really let them run my life. I've habitually always maintained the old (Apple?) hub-and-spoke model where the PC is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it. I do own some, but they don't get used for much (browser-on-the-go, mostly).…
> * iPod -> Music player w/ FLAC + 1TB SD
Out of curiosity, which Music player did you settle on? I am in the market for one and looking for options (currently leaning towards a FiiO M11).
Re: RePalm
#105Earlier 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?
A totally valid question! I did adopt the smartphone for many, many years. My father had a gen-1 iPhone which captured my imagination. At the same time, I've also never really let them run my life. I've habitually always maintained the old (Apple?) hub-and-spoke model where the PC is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it. I do own some, but they don't get used for much (browser-on-the-go, mostly).…
"I've habitually always maintained the old (Apple?) hub-and-spoke model where the PC is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it."
This is the model I use in my own life but with a slight variation:
My server at the datacenter is the core and everything else is a mobile extension of it.
Re: RePalm
#106Earlier 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 can't even find anything which works as the simple Palm "ToDo" application. No free ones at least. PalmOS had this developer requirement that nothing should take more than 3 clicks. I used the ToDo tool as a shopping list. I kept all my common groceries in that list and used a single tap to indicate that I was out of something, and a single tap when I bought something I was out of. Whatever I try to do on a phone i…
Strongly agree that so many more features lead to more friction and the tool becoming less useful. The original Palm devices were really awesome. Dedicated todo button, push it, and your todos instantly come up, one tap to drop down the category selection, and one more to select a category, and you're there.
The iPhone has historically been really bad at this, and even regressed. A year ago I had to wake the phone, point it at my face, wait a second, then go to the home screen, open the app, wait a couple of seconds, then navigate to where I wanted to.
Recently, lock screen widgets, shortcuts, and even some siri features have started to make this a little better.
Re: RePalm
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
why would you bother with the overhead to make it Palm-compatible though? at most, an emulation subsystem might make sense, but having all things including new development run in a Palm-compatible system right now makes no sense. Note that it wouldn't even be a dumbphone by definition if it has an OS running arbitrarily installed software on it.
> why would you bother with the overhead to make it Palm-compatible though Not having to design and explain API is a plus
yes, then you go for the subsystem route as in MacOS Classic or Win32
perhaps worth a shot but I seriously doubt the compatibility is going to be worth enough for enough people, instead of just running an emulator
Re: RePalm
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
RIM's sins were much more serious. Their devices were designed in a time when having the horsepower to actually run a mail client on them wasn't possible, and so they were dependent on an intermediate server. Using a Blackberry in the absence of BES (and an Exchange server) was pretty weak sauce. Palm, OTOH, had a real platform that worked on its own. My Treo could talk directly to my ISP's IMAP server, something Bla…
I was creating software (mostly games) for a wide range of handheld devices at the time.
When you're doing that you can quite easily get an idea of the weaknesses and strengths of the platform, and I can tell you that PalmOS was quite weak but almost OK at the very beginning but it quickly deteriorated and at the end they could simply not push it forward at all.
Sony did a good job considering, but they simply bet on the wrong horse.
To be honest, Android also started in a very weak state, not the same kind of mess that PalmOS was, but it was riddled with over-engineering and absurd design choices, but with a huge effort they managed to fix the worst parts and still push it forward.
I was surprised they could pull it off.
Re: RePalm
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
RIM's sins were much more serious. Their devices were designed in a time when having the horsepower to actually run a mail client on them wasn't possible, and so they were dependent on an intermediate server. Using a Blackberry in the absence of BES (and an Exchange server) was pretty weak sauce. Palm, OTOH, had a real platform that worked on its own. My Treo could talk directly to my ISP's IMAP server, something Bla…
I was creating software (mostly games) for a wide range of handheld devices at the time. When you're doing that you can quite easily get an idea of the weaknesses and strengths of the platform, and I can tell you that PalmOS was quite weak but almost OK at the very beginning but it quickly deteriorated and at the end they could simply not push it forward at all. Sony did a good job considering, but they simply bet on…
I never cared about mobile gaming in the era, so I can only go on what I used the device for: communication and personal information management. PalmOS was good at those things.
To be fair to Sony, there wasn't really any other horse to bet on in that era. The problem was their hardware was fragile vs. Palm or Handspring devices.
Re: RePalm
#110Amazing project, one that will seemingly go on for the foreseeable future. This is quite a labor of love, and it shows. It is very interesting to see the bifuracted comments: either but why (these are the people, probably mostly younger who just don't see the point) or PalmOS-based were so cool (cleaner, simpler, etc). I think Dmitri's project makes clear that there was a huge difference between the experience of PalmOS as products and the way they were created as software and hardware. Yes, many of the shortcuts and hacky looking design decisions taken 20+ years ago seem inexplicable today. Many were made based on the constraints of the time (supply chain, expertise on the team, bloodymindedness, etc) but ultimately the biggest driver was a great PDA experience, more a portable, always on digital replacement for paper that could do several things well, rather than everything you could imagine. Great ideas for power management, sophisticated kernel not so much.