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PumpkinOS, a Re-Implementation of PalmOS
- Terretta 3y agoGraffiti: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amigueletto%2FPumpkinOS+graffiti&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amigueletto%2FPumpkinOS+gr...
- Terretta 3y agoI see downvotes on the code search for whether this includes Graffiti, the best pen/stylus input for writing ... Other than "fitaly", which was even better: https://the-gadgeteer.com/1998/08/22/fitaly_review/ https://the-gadgeteer.com/1998/08/22/fitaly_review/
- duskwuff 3y agoAlso possibly of interest: rePalm, a project to run PalmOS on ARM microcontrollers like the RP2040 - http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm
- sillywalk 3y agoMore HN discussion on PumpkinOS PumpkinOS / 3 years ago|52 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28466858 Related discussion on rePalm: PalmOS on Raspberry Pi 169 points by Tijdreiziger on Sept 10, 2021 | 86 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28487817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28487817
- verdagon 3y agoThis PumpkinOS project is pretty incredible. I can't imagine how much effort it would take to be compatible with all the system calls that the average Palm app would expect. I remember Palm did some truly weird things with memory: anything moderately large would need to be put into a special memory block that the OS could rearrange at will, and one would need to lock the block's handle to keep it stable while accessing it. Stuff like that must have been challenging (and fun) to implement in PumpkinOS. This brings me back. I used to make little games for Palm OS, and I was so excited for the next version of the OS which would let one use the (then new) Palm OS Development Suite to make programs. It was also the last OS I've used where an app had a central event loop. Everything else today has UI frameworks that handle it for you. Things are easier now, but I still miss it.
- jsheard 3y ago> anything moderately large would need to be put into a special memory block that the OS could rearrange at will, and one would need to lock the block's handle to keep it stable while accessing it Didn't 16-bit Windows and classic Mac OS do something similar? If you're doing multitasking on a system without an MMU then I think that kind of live heap defragmentation would have been practically required.
- wmf 3y agoPalm was started by ex-Apple people and borrowed a lot of ideas and mistakes from the Mac.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lproven 3y agoMore saliently than that, Palm started out as a vendor of Newton apps, before it started making its own Newton-killer hardware. Palm's Graffiti started out as an alternate text input system for the Newton. It was an Apple software vendor long before it was an Apple rival, and its design is influenced by the Newton more proximally than the Mac.
- memsom 3y agoWell - it is even more than that. They basically used Apple style code resources to define PalmOS apps. You used to be able to compile Think Pascal code on a Mac, and some guy has worked out how to use that code resource to convert it in to a PalmOS app with just tweaking the code resources in the compiled MacOS code. It was quite mind bending to me as a 20-something PalmOS fanboy with a day job doing Delphi. This was in like, 1998/1999 or so. I even went as far as emulating MacOS just to play with it. I don;t know if his code still exists online, but the tool was called SARC (Swiss Army Resource Compiler) is anyone cares to search for it. I don't think Palm did a lot to change the exe format in the early days. And they used the same CodeWarrior 68K compiler that also targeted MacOS at the time.
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- tensor 3y agoI remember investing in Palm thinking that they'd eventually be the ones to build something like the iphone. Sadly, they didn't and when apple did that was it for them.
- mrbluecoat 3y agoYeah, the GPL license cracked me up on this one. Can't imagine there's a danger of commercialization here..
- seszett 3y agoGPL isn't about commercialization though, it allows commercialization. It's all about preventing closed-source forks.
- ianburrell 3y agoOne big problem is that Palm split into PalmSource for software and Palm One for hardware. PalmSource went off to design Linux-based OS, got acquired, and disappeared. Palm One, renamed back to Palm One, made some early smartphones with PalmOS. But PalmOS was pretty obsolete by then, with 16-bit apps running on 32-bit OS. Then Palm developed webOS, which made some weird hardware decisions and couldn't compete with iPhone and Android. But it could have been a contender, better than Blackberry and Nokia that didn't make jump to capacitive screens. I think Palm's problem was being too late, but if they hadn't split and made PalmOS successor, they would have missed capacitive smartphones.
- tensor 3y agoWebOS is great, at least it lives on in LG products for now. I far prefer it to android, despite the vastly smaller ecosystem.
- hedgehog 3y agowebOS was really nice, a lot of ideas that didn't come to iOS and Android until much later were present and nicely implemented back in 2010 or so.
- tangus 3y agoAlso of interest: CloudpilotEmu - Palm emulator in your browser https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ When I installed it and could play Vexed again... ahh, the happiness!
- lxgr 3y agoCloudpilot is amazing, one of the most sophisticated PWAs I'm aware of! I haven't heard of Vexed, but for me, bringing back Space Trader made me very happy.
- anthk 3y agoYou can play it freely (as in Freedom) under Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.brucelet.spacetrader/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.brucelet.spacetrader/
- lxgr 3y agoAh yes, I think I even bought that at some point (didn't realize there was a free build on F-Droid!), but part of the nostalgic appeal to me are the native Palm OS UI widgets and buzzer sounds :) Compiling Space Trader for Palm OS (it was open source too) was actually something I've repeatedly tried in the early 2000s but unfortunately never managed to pull it off – CodeWarrior was way out of my pocket money budget at the time, and I couldn't figure out how to do it using gcc and PilRC.
- AstroJetson 3y agoI was a Sprint customer from the start of the Palm phone era. Up until 2 years ago I was using colored Treo’s for my phone. I loved that mechanical keyboard it was so nice to use. ( I have slightly deformed fingers that make it hard for touch screens.). Merger with T-M killed the radio part. So sad to see it go.
- smm11 3y agoI think I used to work with you. You stated the Pre was the "iPhone killer" about six months after the iPhone came out, and Android phones appeared. You showed our deparment's first iPhone user the non-awesome stuff the Pre did by comparison, then stated that Palm's millions of users would show me. They sure did.
- AstroJetson 3y agoNope, I was the guy that had Palm Pilots, got my whole Architecture group Palm pilots and we used to beam messages at each other in meetings. I became good at graffiti writing, my printing today looks like it. The Palm phones was a natural extension of that. My first one was the 180 model, with the flip front cover. I did a quick check, I had my first Palm Phone in 2002-3, iPhones came out in 2007.
- smm11 3y agoHa! I was the Handspring guy ...
- thot_experiment 3y agoSo hype to lose some hours playing Space Trader. I had a Palm Vx in middle school and I have some very fond memories of playing that game under my desk in class.
- alsobrsp 3y agoI have two Palm Vx in the garage. I love that game too.
- anthk 3y agoFor Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.brucelet.spacetrader/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.brucelet.spacetrader/
- angst_ridden 3y agoI worked with Peter Spronck and created the last add-ons and a few quests to Space Trader (e.g. The Scarab). I miss those days!
- homero 3y agoWould be fun on Android
- ethanpil 3y agoWhat would it take to get this on modern (or even last generation) phone hardware? I bet we could do everything we want with tremendous simplicity and out of this world battery life... Probably would make a PinePhone feel like a Rolls Royce.
- fragmede 3y agothat is one helluva nerdsnipe
- redundantly 3y agoIt would be nice if more effort was put into the optomisation and stabilisation on modern mobile operating systems.
- smith7018 3y agoAccording to the README, it runs natively on ARM but it looks more like a program than an OS. So I'm sure it can be updated to run on Android or iOS if the GUI code is rewritten with their respective frameworks but making a bootable OS seems more difficult. The author wrote an article last year about making it a bootable OS by using a barebones x86 kernel and QEMU so I'm sure it could probably be repurposed for ARM devices. [1] https://pmig96.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/pumpkinos-busybox-and-linux/ https://pmig96.wordpress.com/2023/02/24/pumpkinos-busybox-an...
- frellus 3y agoNothing made me feel older than going to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA and seeing a Palm Pilot in the display case. It should be illegal to show things which were an integral part of your life, a short 30'ish years ago, as if they were uncovered in the ruins of some pre-civilization. Not fair at all.
- codezero 3y agoI still have my original PalmPilot in a box in the attic. Its existence was a huge life lesson for me. I asked my boss to pay for it (he did) but he said: do you use anything to organize your life and projects right now? If you don't, I don't think a PalmPilot will help you. He was so right.
- astrange 3y agoI read a lot of ebooks on mine.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y agoWe used to put ebooks on it to help us during university exams. I pretended it was a calculator. I know, I’m ashamed, but it was for a boring course on economics.
- bayindirh 3y agoI was the opposite. I used it as a calculator, without adding any ebooks on top, but my professors were uneasy about it. Then I got a calculator to curb their anxiety.
- 0xEF 3y agoI remember when calculators were the Forbidden Fruit because, according to maths teachers, we were "not going to be walking around with calculators in our pockets all the time."
- rkagerer 3y agoMy heart thumped faster when I read this headline. Please make it work on Android so I can 'replace' my daily driver and go back to a better time!
- finaard 3y agoI still miss the calendar and contact apps from the Palm. I stuck with Palm up until the Centro - and haven't found contact/calendar apps I'm as happy with as the Palm versions yet. They're either missing some simple basic features, or the UI is needlessly complicated.
- anthk 3y agoIt uses SDL so it would be easy to port.
- aagha 3y agoYou can have Graffiti! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_company.graffiti_pro&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...
- nerpderp82 3y agoYou could run the whole thing in Wasm and have Palm apps running everywhere. It would be like how people are running DOS apps in webpages non ironically
- yoelier23 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DXXTHLOVESU 3y agoSo palm OS was an old mobile operating system, introduced around 1996, coded in C++... later extended to support smartphones? Can someone please explain more to me about this OS as it seems pretty interesting, and I have never heard of it.
- amaccuish 3y agoWeird to think that Amazon's kindle format used to be based on .mobi, itself based on the Palm's database file type.
- PaulRobinson 3y agoI love this project existing and prolonging the life of all that software that would otherwise never have a chance to execute again, but is this about nostalgia or about a real need/desire for that software? Given how much people wax lyrical about Palm, Blackberry, Psion, outside of niche applications (I know IMAX needs Palm emulators to run bits of that stack), do people genuinely yearn for going back to the old days? I was looking around for a "modern" Psion 5, and spotted some of the team had come up with the Gemini PDA which looks a bit like one, but is Android based. Some reviewers definitely find this a drawback. You can imagine a new EPOC operating system with support for modern connectivity would be a slam dunk for them, but then I found myself thinking I'd mostly run Linux on it (if I could find a new one in stock anywhere with a UK keyboard). But then, do we all really want that? There has been a lot of progress in the last 20+ years, and I can't help but feel if most people were offered PalmOS instead of Android or iOS as their daily driver it would be frustrating enough they'd hand it back within a week. What's the killer feature that makes that statement false?
- layer8 3y agoI miss the weeks-long battery life, the simpler app designs, and the page-up/down buttons.
- rrix2 3y agoi've been looking forward to seeing this come together for a while now, very cool!