4 ms·

Are you sure? If they took all the trouble to write software to simulate how palm form inputs are rendered, why wouldn't they just create a new UI?

by gzalo 3y ago

KMnO4 3y ago
From the article, the design “mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists”
- iwanttocomment 3y ago
  Yeah, and the article also quotes IMAX as stating "IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator". You can certainly have a true emulator that also "mimics the look and feel" of the thing it's emulating. If you have any actual evidence that the IMAX tool is not truly an emulator other than conjecture, we'd all be very interested.
  - rkagerer 3y ago
    There are PalmOS emulators out there, wouldn't make sense for them to roll their own instead of licensing one of those. I had one on my last Android phone that was a treat for using my beloved old Palm apps. I suspect the HN crowd's interpretation is correct that they merely replicated the look and feel. Which makes sense - Palm is still the best GUI I've ever been fortunate enough to use.
    - ndiddy 3y ago
      It's likely that whatever emulators already existed didn't support whatever custom hardware is in place to interface the Palm Pilot with the IMAX projection hardware.
      - rkagerer 3y ago
        Fair enough. But I still can't seeing them committing the resources to build an emulator from scratch. It would take ages to achieve stability and work out all the bugs. Anyone doing this would go find a platform that's already 85% of the way there and tailor to fit.
usrusr 3y ago
To skip operator retraining? At least that's how I read team "it's only look and feel, not an emulator". My objection to that would be that a hypothetical outcome of a modern UI with identical menu layout not being good enough would be one of those things that you only ever learn the hard way. But who knows, perhaps it was a new UI that was vetoed out by someone in a very powerful position and then they had to skin it up. But the far more likely explanation is that they had software, were running out of hardware devices to put in projection time until someone tried their hand on running one of the numerous palm emulators in existence on an RPi or similar.

Are you sure? If they took all the trouble to write software to simulate how palm form inputs are rendered, why wouldn't they just create a new UI?

by gzalo 3y ago

Are you sure? If they took all the trouble to write software to simulate how palm form inputs are rendered, why wouldn't they just create a new UI?

KMnO4 3y ago

From the article, the design “mimics the look and feel of a PalmPilot to keep it simple and familiar for IMAX film projectionists”

iwanttocomment 3y ago
Yeah, and the article also quotes IMAX as stating "IMAX Engineering designed and manufactured an emulator". You can certainly have a true emulator that also "mimics the look and feel" of the thing it's emulating. If you have any actual evidence that the IMAX tool is not truly an emulator other than conjecture, we'd all be very interested.
- rkagerer 3y ago
  There are PalmOS emulators out there, wouldn't make sense for them to roll their own instead of licensing one of those. I had one on my last Android phone that was a treat for using my beloved old Palm apps. I suspect the HN crowd's interpretation is correct that they merely replicated the look and feel. Which makes sense - Palm is still the best GUI I've ever been fortunate enough to use.
  - ndiddy 3y ago
    It's likely that whatever emulators already existed didn't support whatever custom hardware is in place to interface the Palm Pilot with the IMAX projection hardware.
    - rkagerer 3y ago
      Fair enough. But I still can't seeing them committing the resources to build an emulator from scratch. It would take ages to achieve stability and work out all the bugs. Anyone doing this would go find a platform that's already 85% of the way there and tailor to fit.

usrusr 3y ago

To skip operator retraining? At least that's how I read team "it's only look and feel, not an emulator". My objection to that would be that a hypothetical outcome of a modern UI with identical menu layout not being good enough would be one of those things that you only ever learn the hard way. But who knows, perhaps it was a new UI that was vetoed out by someone in a very powerful position and then they had to skin it up. But the far more likely explanation is that they had software, were running out of hardware devices to put in projection time until someone tried their hand on running one of the numerous palm emulators in existence on an RPi or similar.