A MiniGolf game for Palm OS • Hacker News Board

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#31

Post by kstrauser » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 10:23 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #24

kstrauser wrote: post #12

This is beautiful! And now I'm nostalgic for my IIIxe. Through the rose colored glasses of poor remembrance, that might've been peek productivity in a handheld. It had enough functionality to remember all the things I cared to have on my person at all times, but was utterly lacking in notifications about distractions. It took me a while to quiet my iPhone so that it's not always pestering the hell out of me, but Palm…

I feel the same. I loved my IIIxe. I'm guessing we'd be horrified at the UX now if we could go back, but at the time it was a huge boost in productivity. The handwriting language was really great. I actually wrote papers on that thing! It was great, I could work on papers while on the bus or travelling, without having to lug around a laptop. Remarkable devices.

I played with an emulator (https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/) recently and it's honestly not that bad at all. The resolution is bad by today's standards but the basics are all there. It even has a system-wide search that looks for the input string in all your apps and lets you tap right into those records. That's pretty handy!

I like my phone too much to go back, but if I had to, I could make do.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#32

Post by harikb » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 10:33 PM UTC

I have the Original PalmPilot, hardware upgraded to 3.0, as part of a beta program. I also have a few Palm 3's. Is there a compiled PDB available?

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#33

Post by eichin » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 10:38 PM UTC

nanna wrote: post #13

Is there an app store for palm is, or somewhere you can browse different apps at least?

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_palm is a good place to start (and you can just run them in-browser via cloudpilot.)

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#34

Post by tomcam » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 10:45 PM UTC

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games.

Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal.

When she asked how long it would take to even get started, I estimated about 18 months to learn C++ properly, another six months to learn Microsoft foundation classes. The six months after that to learn the windows API if she worked really hard at it. At the time I thought maybe there was a place in the Windows game market for a mini golf game.

She took less than a week to create a working, bug-free prototype, but then lost interest.

I hate people like that! Everything takes forever for me to learn.

Luckily she blessed me with a passel of pretty much bug-free and absolutely hilarious children, so I’m giving her a pass.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#35

Post by smabie » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 10:56 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #34

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games. Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal. When she asked how…

If you're laser focused on a end product then learning can happen remarkably quickly.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#36

Post by ok_dad » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 10:58 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #34

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games. Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal. When she asked how…

> bug-free children

I know you didn't mean anything by it, and it was a pretty funny joke, but children with bugs are pretty cool as well :)

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#37

Post by tomcam » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 11:00 PM UTC

ok_dad wrote: post #36

tomcam wrote: post #34

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games. Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal. When she asked how…

> bug-free children I know you didn't mean anything by it, and it was a pretty funny joke, but children with bugs are pretty cool as well :)

SO SO TRUE

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#38

Post by urbandw311er » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 11:09 PM UTC

I love it! Quick suggestion: allow a moment to show the ball dropping into the hole before loading the next level. It might be frustrating denying the player that satisfaction.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#39

Post by snozolli » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 11:09 PM UTC

I wrote code for PalmOS back around '99. One thing that stands out in my memory is the way that applications were tested. I think it was a feature of the emulator, which would fire events at your software. I forget the details, but if you could make, say, 1,000 events without crashing, it was passable, 10k was good, and 100k was excellent.

Well, I thought I was a reasonable competent C++ programmer and I was shocked at how quickly my application would crash using this tool. It was an extremely humbling experience that really opened my eyes. I often think of how effective that simple tool was at revealing bugs, but it's obviously not something that works in today's multitasking, Internet-connected devices.

The other thing I remember is CodeWarrior being the first IDE I used that had a drop-down box with all the functions in the current source file. That was a pretty big step forward in productivity.

Incidentally, I was still using a Palm Tungsten as late as 2010, when I was in Japan. There was a very simple Japanese dictionary application for Palm. Once you learn the basic rules for stroke order and direction, you could mimic any character you see using the stylus and do a dictionary search for matching Kanji. I was able to figure out a lot of navigation just by mimicking unknown Kanji that I saw on signs.

Re: A MiniGolf game for Palm OS

#40

Post by tomcam » Wed, Sep 11, 2024, 11:14 PM UTC

smabie wrote: post #35

tomcam wrote: post #34

Let me hijack this with a hate story about my wife and minigolf games. Back in 1996 she thought maybe she needed a hobby. She was a housewife and we didn’t have any children yet. She said maybe she could do a game. At the time I was working in Microsoft C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes framework, building Windows apps. She had never programmed a language more challenging than Turbo Pascal. When she asked how…

If you're laser focused on a end product then learning can happen remarkably quickly.

Yeah no. I am an atrociously slow learner.