A CSS framework to recreate Windows 7 GUI

That's the worst part of W10 for me. I have a tablet that was unusable until I learned about WuMgr because every day it would reinstall a broken touchscreen driver.

Also look at the era: OSX wasn't yet released and Mac OS 9 was a tire fire (worse than Windows 98). Windows ME was somehow worse than Mac OS 9. BeOS was awesome but pretty much a failed company by that point plus lacked a lot of software one needs day to day. And Linux was pretty buggy as a desktop -- usable but a long way from being polished. Windows 2000 wasn't just a good OS by it's own standards of the hardware at the time. It was an incredible OS by the standards of everything else available at the time.

By contrast, when Windows 7 was released, Linux was still faster and had several well polished desktop environments by that time. FreeBSD made a decent desktop too. OSX was in its prime. Windows 7 was only good by comparison of what it followed: Vista. But it was a long way from competing with the competition on anything bar AAA game support.

Palm m500 is a very early device. Resistive screens did get better. I remember the pain of using fingernails on early devices but the kinds of PDAs I fell in love with had were full colour screens running Windows CE / Mobile rather than monochrome displays and could run Tomb Raider in landscape mode with virtual buttons on the screen that were clearly only possible to use with your fingers. A version of it you can see here: https://youtu.be/ZJ1GR9mQamI?t=1070 -- but it looked and played soooooo much better on my device.

Bare in mind the first iPhone was released ~2007 vs ~2000 for the Palm m500. That's a lot of years for screens to improve.

> I know but people weren't too happy with them. They need both hands, and easy to loose.

That's true for the largest generalisation but you'd be surprised just how many people do prefer a stylus. I've even seen people use styluses with modern capacitive screens -- which I really don't get because those things are just as fat as fingers so always struck me as the worst of both worlds.

> I have doubts. Resistive touch screens is very old tech, yet before the first iPhone came out they were mostly used by geeks and corporations.

I know you're trying to disagree with me but you're actually making the same point: they were mainly used by geeks and corporations because the UIs were unattractive. The innovation of the iPhone wasn't the capacitive screen, it was the touch-centric interface. And as I said before, Apple weren't the only ones working on it. In fact they weren't even the first to market.

Go back and read some publications of the era, or design magazines. They all criticise Windows CE / Mobile for it's poor touch UI. It was a common known problem at the time. So much so that Microsoft had several attempts at fixing it. But nobody really knew how to do it right because it was a very young problem. Think of it like 80s home computer systems, how everyone was trying to get personal compact computers right and people largely fell on different implementations of the same idea before the computing landscape ended up with a duopoly of Macs and IBM-clones. That's largely how early smart phone and PDA UIs were too.

> Apple is much better at selling their stuff. And I think they had better product too, despite not even a smartphone (app store launched much later). They did have good features like a unique data plan not available on any other phones, web browser which worked with normal web, and iTunes with all the music.

Apple certainly are. But for what it's worth, smart phones and PDA's prior to the iPhone also supported a browser which worked with normal web (I'd used my one of my Windows CE PDA devices as a mobile internet terminal when on a road trip around Europe in the early to mid 00s). And Winamp ran on the thing so my main usage of my PDAs were music. I even had a compact flash microdrive (which still works actually) in an early model around the same time iPods also had microdrives.