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RePalm

dmitry.gr

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Re: RePalm

#121

Post by c-smile »

dmitrygr wrote: post #101
c-smile wrote: post #53

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!

I did UI part of it.

Up until last year my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) worked on WinCE.

Dropped support after my last customer that was using WinCE decided to drop support of that OS.

WinCE had pretty solid and stable core runtime and API. Graphics was limited by GDI (no antialiasing and alpha channel) but that was the only major problem.

Re: RePalm

#122

Post by garaetjjte »

c-smile wrote: post #53

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.

From my experience "WinCE" and "solid" doesn't really belong in the same sentence. It felt like hodgepodge of various pieces outsourced to lowest bidder, with atrocious documentation. I don't know, maybe it was late stage decline and it was actually better in early versions (I only used WEC7). Why would they want to keep developing this instead of migrating to NT?

Re: RePalm

#123

Post by mek6800d2 »

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?

In 2018, I read James M. Tabor's Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth (pub. 2010), which particularly focused on Bill Stone's and ALexander Klimchouk's respective explorations. (Contrary to perhaps popular understanding, as evidenced by an answer I saw on Quora that asserted that the temperature got hotter and hotter the farther Klimchouk's team descended in "their" cave, Stone's and Klimchouk's teams started out high in the mountains and temperatures were freezing throughout the descents; furthermore, Stone's and Klimchouk's deepest descents still ended above sea level. [The Quora question had something to do with digging deep into the earth.])

Anyway, this was the first I'd read much about caving and, in browsing around the web, I discovered that Palm Pilots were(/are?) used by serious cavers for mapping caves. Auriga (https://auriga.top/) was the most frequently referenced Palm app I saw; its latest update was in December 2022. Obvious advantages as I understand them are: (1) long battery life coupled with replaceable AAA batteries; (2) a display that can be read in low light without battery-draining backlighting. Phone and wi-fi are useless underground. (I vaguely recall reading somewhere that ~80Khz radios for use in caves were being developed; equally vague memory: I believe initial prototypes were based around audio amplifiers that happened to reach up into that frequency. Okay, a 2018 Hackaday has links to more information, although not about what I [mis]remembered: https://hackaday.com/2018/07/11/ham-designed-gear-used-in-th...)

Also, sometime I saw an article about automotive performance afficianados using a Palm App to interact with their engines' onboard computers -- in the PalmOS Emulator (POSE) on Windows laptops. Obviously they liked the app and I imagine they had a considerable intellectual investment (e.g., historical experimental settings and performance results, etc.) that made them loathe to switch to more modern apps.

But yeah. I cleaned the battery crud out of my Palm M105 last month, put fresh batteries in, and the digitizer is shot. So, back to my phone ... :)

Re: RePalm

#124

Post by ubermonkey »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #115
ubermonkey wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Symbian and WinCE were relatively strong competitors. And there was an attempt at Linux + Qt made by Sharp with the Zaurus and Qtopia.

Er, no.

Symbian had some presence via Nokia devices, but was kinda an also-ran in the US in terms of actual viable smartphone platforms.

WinCE and WinMo were gawdawful and unusable unless you were just really, really drinking the Redmond Kool-Aid.

(Amusingly, if you Google "symbian" now the first link is for a thing that is absolutely not related to smartphones, but which uses a name that is "symbian" without the "m". NSFW.)

Re: RePalm

#125

Post by omneity »

I've been wishing for a computing reboot using low power MCUs such as the RPI 2040 and the ESP-32 and much simpler OSes. Projects like this one give me hope.

Basically can we create a secure computing & networking stack from scratch that can work on these devices, and build a useful ecosystem around it? For example the Gemini protocol could be a great starting point for an internet-like connected experience.

One can always dream. In the mean time, thank you for doing the Lord's work Dmitry!

Re: RePalm

#126

Post by tonyarkles »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #59
tgmatt wrote: post #31

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?

They have a much better stand-by battery life on AAA batteries, and they are not as distracting because they are offline-first (or even offline-only, for the early models). Or, you can just use them if you find them neat (which I do). But ckz’s answer is a very good glance into the kind of mindset that I share for the most part as well.

I wish I could remember which phone it was, but there was something absolutely magical about using IrDA to connect a Palm to a cellphone and get a 56kbit Internet connection on the go. In my mind it was a Nokia 3310, but it seems those didn’t have IrDA.

Re: RePalm

#127

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #120
hedgehog wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad developer experience might have contributed but I think the primary cause was the same as what killed Windows Mobile and Symbian: The iPhone reset the bar for user experience and at the same time Apple changed handset + app distribution models, Palm failed to meet the situation. Google figured it out, scrapped the Android UX, and managed to be #2. With the high per-platform cost of mobile dev there's apparently n…

PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched. In fact most players had divested the market at this stage. The PocketPC team was a skeleton and Symbian was being eaten from inside by competing internal projects. Apple had a highway.

>PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched.

It was declining but not dead. Palm's swan song, Palm Centro, released in 2007, was a big success. They sold at least 2 million units[1]. According to AdMob, in terms of web traffic, at some point it was the second most popular smartphone in the US (7th worldwide)[2].

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20080805094357/http://blog.palm....

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20080913073944/http://www.admob....

Re: RePalm

#128

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

> To start with, Linux kernel lacks some API that PalmOS simply needs, for example ability to disable and re-enable task switching. Yup... PalmOS sometimes asks for preemption to be disabled.

The POSIX port of FreeRTOS (FreeRTOS running on top of Pthreads) has a way to emulate this behavior. All tasks are threads and all but one stays suspended at any given time. The FreeRTOS scheduler can switch out which task is allowed to run by sending signals to their respective thread. This allows the tasks to operate as if the FreeRTOS scheduler is in control as normal and the Linux scheduler only has an opportunity to run the one thread flagged by the signalling mechanism.

Re: RePalm

#129

Post by JenrHywy »

ttctciyf wrote: post #57
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…

> cannot be understated Seeing this a lot recently[1]. I guess you mean the opposite of what this implies ("his impact is less than you could state"), but I'm curious how this has ended up being almost as commonly used as the "correct" form[2]. Is it an in-joke or reference I'm not getting? 1: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cannot+be+understated%22+... 2: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cannot+be+overstated%22…

I imagine it's much like "I could care less" - the phrase is the literal opposite of its proper form "I couldn't care less" but both have evolved to be used synonymously.

Re: RePalm

#130

Post by stephc_int13 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #124
stephc_int13 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Symbian and WinCE were relatively strong competitors. And there was an attempt at Linux + Qt made by Sharp with the Zaurus and Qtopia.

Er, no. Symbian had some presence via Nokia devices, but was kinda an also-ran in the US in terms of actual viable smartphone platforms. WinCE and WinMo were gawdawful and unusable unless you were just really, really drinking the Redmond Kool-Aid. (Amusingly, if you Google "symbian" now the first link is for a thing that is absolutely not related to smartphones, but which uses a name that is "symbian" without the "m"…

Symbian was a contender in Europe, many mobile gaming companies in Europe started on this Platform, especially in Finland/UK. Remember the Ngage?

It was nothing compared to what came later, but if you were in this business at that time, Symbian was a thing.

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