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Palm: I'm Ready to Wallow Now (2013)

• hackuser 11y ago
  22,000 words! Does the author, Thom Holwerda, have any special connection to Palm?
  • bebop 11y ago
    No, but OSNews has traditionally been a source of information for BeOS/Haiku and Palm.
• zelos 11y ago
  I miss the Palm days. They did so much right, it was really sad watching it all go wrong. I did a lot of software work for the ill-fated Foleo. It was such a nice device when they first started working on it, but just so badly managed and delayed that it was outdated before they even announced it.
  • pavlov 11y ago
    That's really interesting. I remember the Foleo and how puzzling some of the design choices seemed from the outside (such as requiring a tethered Palm device). Can you tell some more about the development process? When was it originally supposed to ship? Did the product vision change a lot along the way?
    • zelos 11y ago
      It was pretty odd. I was on the outside (we were developing the office software) but it was clear Palm were struggling. I don't know the original plans, but it was our longest running project - 2 years maybe? The platform kept changing and we'd get builds with obvious bugs - they once didn't notice they'd completely removed modal dialogs until we pointed it out. I suspect they'd lost a lot of their experienced developers by then. Towards the end there were delays because someone high up decided the screen resolution was too low and was then overruled I believe. My best guess would be that it was meant to be out a year earlier? Of course, I went from that to WebOS. Maybe I'm software's equivalent of Jonah?