7 ms·

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]

203 points by spiffytech 7mo ago

SunshineTheCat 7mo ago
I still miss my palm treo, the stylus, and physical keyboard. 20 plus years later and I still cannot use an apple pencil on my iphone... >:(
- weezing 7mo ago
  It puzzles me why there is no proper stylus for an iPhone considering how big some versions are.
  - RGamma 7mo ago
    In fact my keyboard is still broken from that "misdetected keyboard button press" bug they introduced some time in iOS26. Gotta see whether that's fixed in 26.3. Embarrassing!
  - cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
    Typical smartphone aspect ratios are too awkward to be great for use with a stylus in my opinion, and is exacerbated by bezels having been all but eliminated. If I were to design a smartphone for stylus use, I think it'd look something like an iPad mini, with its squarish ratio and thicker bezels, shrunken down by ~20%.
  - ianburrell 7mo ago
    You can buy styluses for iPhone (or any smartphone) but they have round squishy tips for the capacitive touch screen. They aren't any better than a finger, probably cause the display is tuned for a finger. I only use mine when phone or tablet is on stand. Apple could put the technology for Apple Pencil in iPhone, but probably not worth the cost for number of people who would use it.
- guide42 7mo ago
  The Graffiti. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) I remember the Giraffe game to learn it. https://palmdb.net/app/giraffe https://palmdb.net/app/giraffe
- cbdevidal 7mo ago
  I carried a Palm Treo 700p until about five years ago. Only as a PDA, no phone or internet access. I used to swear I’d be buried with a Palm in my pocket. But now I am feeling the same way about my iPhone. You can have my iPhone when you take it from my cold, dead…
  - kmoser 7mo ago
    I still use Palm Desktop (4.1.4, not even 6.2.2!) to manage my contacts.
mghackerlady 7mo ago
I'm adding this to my repertoire of HIGs to study for a new desktop environment project I'm working on. I'm trying to synthesize the best parts of every computer interaction method, primarily focusing on desktops but looking at mobile designs as well. There are 2 principle reasons for this project: 1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE) 2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)
- jim180 7mo ago
  would you mind sharing your library of HIGs?
  - mghackerlady 7mo ago
    I can give a list of ones I'm studying CUA (87 and 91 versions) Awaita Breeze Material (primarily 3, but also 2 and 1) Apples HIG Microsofts HIG and Motifs HIG Some of these aren't technically HIGs and are rather "design-systems" but they all contain the commonality of trying to set up a consistent model for user-interaction in their environment
- cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
  I'll be keeping an eye out for your DE. For a long time now, the Linux desktop space as a whole has been rather uninspired in my opinion. A few interesting ideas have surfaced within it but failed to become popular for one reason or another, making for a rather stale environment. That's not to say that it needs to be in constant flux or to be full of radical ideas. If anything, it'd be nice to see more DEs settle into a design and feature set and chase stability, efficiency, and performance over shinies. Rather, I think it would be better if more Linux DEs were built around coherent, opinionated design philosophies that cleanly set them all apart from each other. Even if that design philosphy is just "N platform's desktop, refined to its ultimate form", it's better than the "aimless bag of features" direction that's most common.
analog31 7mo ago
To me the best thing about Palm OS was the rule that you’re never more than two taps or a button press away from where you want to be. (I think that’s how I remember it). The beloved early GUIs were all on machines that didn’t do much, comparatively speaking. The problem with modern GUIs is that there’s just too much to learn and remember if it’s presented as symbols rather than text.
- Apocryphon 7mo ago
  Perhaps it's natural then that when Palm went on to make WebOS they included the cards system for quick accessibility.
- lxgr 7mo ago
  Symbols are already a best-case scenario. Too often, modern UIs require hovering over this button or making that swipe gesture to perform a certain action. The antithesis of affordance.
- Someone 7mo ago
  FTA: “Minimize Taps Most information about that data should be accessible in a minimal number of taps of the stylus — one or two. Desktop user interfaces are typically designed to display commands as if they were used equally. In reality, some commands are used very frequently while most are used only rarely. Similarly, some settings are more likely to be used than others. On Palm Powered handhelds, more frequently used commands and settings should be easier to find and faster to execute. • Frequently executed software commands should be accessible by one tap. • Infrequently used or dangerous commands may require more user action.”
- don-code 7mo ago
  This is one of the reasons I hung onto my Treo for so long. It was so much faster to do... well, basically anything that the device was capable of. With the physical keyboard, you actually didn't need to take the stylus out very often, either. Calling Mark: (power on) (phone key) M-A (send) - hitting the phone key automatically brought up the dialer, which did double duty as contact search. Adding a new event to the calendar: (power on) (calendar key) (enter) - and just start typing; you could navigate the fields with the up and down arrows. Opening the calculator: (power on) (home key) C-A (enter) - the launcher was filterable with the keyboard.
silveira 7mo ago
I still remember using Palm OS for the first time and having my little mind blown away because there was no save buttons (at least in the version and apps I was using). You edited a document and that's it, it was saved. Like writing on paper. Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.
- ignoramous 7mo ago
  > Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used. PalmOS designers & engs (along with MS WebTV / Danger Sidekick folks) ended up working on early Android (Astro Boy / Bender / Petit Four etc), and there's a lot of parallels between the two.
crims0n 7mo ago
I really miss this era. Everything was straight and to the point by design, no processor cycles or memory were (or even could be) wasted. Less layers of abstraction, the entire stack from physics to application could be understood by a single person.
snozolli 7mo ago
My favorite detail of the Palm story is that the founder carried around a block of wood and pretended it was a PDA in order to work out details of the interface. https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424d2ffe4 https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424...
jcalvinowens 7mo ago
I didn't know the impetus for the graffiti writing was actually hardware limitations, that's fascinating: > Gaffiti power writing software was another design decision affected by the battery selection. During the design of the first Palm handhelds, users were clamoring for natural handwriting recognition. However, natural handwriting recognition would require a more powerful processor and more memory, which together required bigger batteries. Adding all these things to a handheld would have weighed it down and made it cost too much for the market. Instead, the Palm designers bet that users would settle for good-enough handwriting recognition if the result was long battery life.
- Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
  I still do my 'v's backwards.
Brian_K_White 7mo ago
I miss the whole Palm ecosystem. I have noted many times that I had a slab phone with full screen color icon grid general purpose os with internet and countless 3rd party apps for every conceivable purpose,... 7 full years before the iphone. 8 years before the iphone had 3rd party apps. And it wasn't Android it was a Samsung SPH-i300 running PalmOS. It was great that there was not really much of an app store, you got apps individually more or less like desktop os apps. There might have been app stores that collected apps but I don't remember ever using any. I had apps for everything the same as today. Even though the screen was only like 160x240 and the internet was 14.4k, I had browser & email of course, but also ssh, irc, I even had a vnc client! Audible.com player, countless random things like a netmask calculator, resistor color code app, a few different generic db apps where you design your own fields and input/display screens etc. 3rd party phone dialer that integrated the contacts db. I must be forgetting a hundred other things. The OS wasn't open source but at least the apps could be, so pretty much like windows & mac. All in all I'd prefer Android where the entire system is open, except Google has somehow managed to make the real world life with Android less open than PalmOS was, even though PalmOS wasn't open source and I think even the development system wasn't free either. I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.
- andrewf 7mo ago
  I worked for a company that published a PalmOS app. Palmgear.com was a very important distribution channel, but so was our own website, I forget the exact ratios.
- jomar 7mo ago
  > I think even the development system wasn't free either. Metrowerks CodeWarrior was the original development system for PalmOS and was indeed not free (in either sense). However a bunch of enthusiasts cobbled together some free development tools: the main parts were adapting the GCC and binutils m68k targets to PalmOS's constrained PIC runtime environment (it was constrained even by m68k standards); a tool to convert the resulting COFF or ELF executable to PalmOS's .prc database format; and a text-based resource compiler for generating UI elements using its own home-grown description language to express what CodeWarrior users were using a graphical UI editor to make. That mostly still exists as it was back in the PalmOS days at <https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net>. And if you hunt around on GitHub you'll find a few people who've kept the code compiling with stricter more modern compilers. (And see also <https://pilrc.sourceforge.net https://pilrc.sourceforge.net> for the resource compiler.)
gelstudios 7mo ago
sigh palm, we all miss you. > Your product needs enough features for the optimal user experience and no more https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdocs/zenofpalm.pdf https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdoc...
- datawars 7mo ago
  [dead]
agumonkey 7mo ago
Very interesting to see guidelines for UI on such constrained devices. Also terrible realizing that functionally, my so-very-2026 css3-reactjs-tailwind app is also tabs with rows and toolbars.
felixding 7mo ago
I can’t recommend another excellent free ebook enough: Zen of Palm. It accurately describes the key differences between designing for desktop and mobile, which explains why PalmOS was so much easier to use than the various Windows-based mobile formats from Microsoft at the time. I even wrote a whole blog series about this book two decades ago (https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1 https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1). I switched from a Dell Pocket PC to a Treo 650, and it was such a revelation. IMHO, this little phone is still one of the best in terms of simplicity, even today.
- aidenn0 7mo ago
  My wife still misses her Centro. She held onto it until Google Maps removed the API that the maps app on it used.
rkagerer 7mo ago
I've been seriously contemplating reviving my old Palm device. No notifications / nagging, no ads, in many cases better apps, hardware buttons and a security posture exotic enough to basically not be worth targeting.
lateforwork 7mo ago
Palm OS does not get enough credit as the progenitor of modern handheld experience, including especially iOS. iOS shares many similarities with Palm OS, such as the home screen layout of app icons, the use of full-screen apps without windowing, the absence of an explicit "quit" action, no exposed file system (obvious today, but bold back in those days), a single hardware button to return "home", and so on. What iOS added is true preemptive multitasking, memory protection, multitouch gestures, physics-based scrolling and so on.
- nofriend 7mo ago
  The first three are presumably just hardware advancements? Apple certainly deserves credit for refining the concept and making it into a neat package.
Daub 7mo ago
I wrote some teaching material on the rise and fall off Palm for which I produced a graphic showing how the palm split and merged over the years. Quite honestly it's one of the most complex and insane graphics i have ever made. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7hh5uzoaj2x7zq60yv9vz/palm_timeline.eps?rlkey=0n5rfo12t7hltrtgrmc8q8udl&st=zz3nejsf&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7hh5uzoaj2x7zq60yv9vz/palm_ti...
aquova 7mo ago
Ars did a retrospective on the Palm line-up that I occasionally go back and re-read. I never got into the ecosystem, although my dad had a Palm III(?) when I was younger. Had I been a decade older I think I would've been infatuated with them. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/palm-os-and-the-devices-that-ran-it-an-ars-retrospective/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/palm-os-and-the-devi...
zombot 7mo ago
That was when we still had user interfaces. All we have now are ad billboards.
rrix2 7mo ago
My first personal computer was a Palm and my earliest programming experiences came with reading these docs, how fun. For a young person whose parents' custody arrangement led to almost every night of sleep under a different roof, a wifi enabled OS with a great applicaton library that was always with me was really powerful and ended up being quite impactful on the arc of my life. By high school I was writing apps that followed this hig with a fold up keyboard, designing the ui and compiling code on board the device. PalmOS 4 and 5 could be tricked out to be a whole computer, capable of working offline for a week and also could get you up all night on IRC and ebooks. it's hard to imagine using my smartphone offline for a week now.... and most of the apps implemented this hig and were straightforward to use because it was the defeult builtin toolkit largely the same its entire life, progressively enhanced GUIs from 1bit 160x160 to full color 320x480 responsive design... nowadays I'm building a Material3 app in my evenings and i know some day google is gonna make a material4 so that my app looks scuffed up
Western0 7mo ago
I like computers that can run for several days or weeks on a single charge. Today, better processors and better screens could make this possible. Add solar panels and we would have weak computers that work like calculators. No power from the wall!

203 points by spiffytech 7mo ago

I still miss my palm treo, the stylus, and physical keyboard. 20 plus years later and I still cannot use an apple pencil on my iphone... >:(

weezing 7mo ago
It puzzles me why there is no proper stylus for an iPhone considering how big some versions are.
- RGamma 7mo ago
  In fact my keyboard is still broken from that "misdetected keyboard button press" bug they introduced some time in iOS26. Gotta see whether that's fixed in 26.3. Embarrassing!
- cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
  Typical smartphone aspect ratios are too awkward to be great for use with a stylus in my opinion, and is exacerbated by bezels having been all but eliminated. If I were to design a smartphone for stylus use, I think it'd look something like an iPad mini, with its squarish ratio and thicker bezels, shrunken down by ~20%.
- ianburrell 7mo ago
  You can buy styluses for iPhone (or any smartphone) but they have round squishy tips for the capacitive touch screen. They aren't any better than a finger, probably cause the display is tuned for a finger. I only use mine when phone or tablet is on stand. Apple could put the technology for Apple Pencil in iPhone, but probably not worth the cost for number of people who would use it.
guide42 7mo ago
The Graffiti. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) I remember the Giraffe game to learn it. https://palmdb.net/app/giraffe https://palmdb.net/app/giraffe
cbdevidal 7mo ago
I carried a Palm Treo 700p until about five years ago. Only as a PDA, no phone or internet access. I used to swear I’d be buried with a Palm in my pocket. But now I am feeling the same way about my iPhone. You can have my iPhone when you take it from my cold, dead…
- kmoser 7mo ago
  I still use Palm Desktop (4.1.4, not even 6.2.2!) to manage my contacts.

mghackerlady 7mo ago

I'm adding this to my repertoire of HIGs to study for a new desktop environment project I'm working on. I'm trying to synthesize the best parts of every computer interaction method, primarily focusing on desktops but looking at mobile designs as well. There are 2 principle reasons for this project: 1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE) 2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)

jim180 7mo ago
would you mind sharing your library of HIGs?
- mghackerlady 7mo ago
  I can give a list of ones I'm studying CUA (87 and 91 versions) Awaita Breeze Material (primarily 3, but also 2 and 1) Apples HIG Microsofts HIG and Motifs HIG Some of these aren't technically HIGs and are rather "design-systems" but they all contain the commonality of trying to set up a consistent model for user-interaction in their environment
cosmic_cheese 7mo ago
I'll be keeping an eye out for your DE. For a long time now, the Linux desktop space as a whole has been rather uninspired in my opinion. A few interesting ideas have surfaced within it but failed to become popular for one reason or another, making for a rather stale environment. That's not to say that it needs to be in constant flux or to be full of radical ideas. If anything, it'd be nice to see more DEs settle into a design and feature set and chase stability, efficiency, and performance over shinies. Rather, I think it would be better if more Linux DEs were built around coherent, opinionated design philosophies that cleanly set them all apart from each other. Even if that design philosphy is just "N platform's desktop, refined to its ultimate form", it's better than the "aimless bag of features" direction that's most common.

analog31 7mo ago

To me the best thing about Palm OS was the rule that you’re never more than two taps or a button press away from where you want to be. (I think that’s how I remember it). The beloved early GUIs were all on machines that didn’t do much, comparatively speaking. The problem with modern GUIs is that there’s just too much to learn and remember if it’s presented as symbols rather than text.

Apocryphon 7mo ago
Perhaps it's natural then that when Palm went on to make WebOS they included the cards system for quick accessibility.
lxgr 7mo ago
Symbols are already a best-case scenario. Too often, modern UIs require hovering over this button or making that swipe gesture to perform a certain action. The antithesis of affordance.
Someone 7mo ago
FTA: “Minimize Taps Most information about that data should be accessible in a minimal number of taps of the stylus — one or two. Desktop user interfaces are typically designed to display commands as if they were used equally. In reality, some commands are used very frequently while most are used only rarely. Similarly, some settings are more likely to be used than others. On Palm Powered handhelds, more frequently used commands and settings should be easier to find and faster to execute. • Frequently executed software commands should be accessible by one tap. • Infrequently used or dangerous commands may require more user action.”
don-code 7mo ago
This is one of the reasons I hung onto my Treo for so long. It was so much faster to do... well, basically anything that the device was capable of. With the physical keyboard, you actually didn't need to take the stylus out very often, either. Calling Mark: (power on) (phone key) M-A (send) - hitting the phone key automatically brought up the dialer, which did double duty as contact search. Adding a new event to the calendar: (power on) (calendar key) (enter) - and just start typing; you could navigate the fields with the up and down arrows. Opening the calculator: (power on) (home key) C-A (enter) - the launcher was filterable with the keyboard.

silveira 7mo ago

I still remember using Palm OS for the first time and having my little mind blown away because there was no save buttons (at least in the version and apps I was using). You edited a document and that's it, it was saved. Like writing on paper. Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.

ignoramous 7mo ago
> Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used. PalmOS designers & engs (along with MS WebTV / Danger Sidekick folks) ended up working on early Android (Astro Boy / Bender / Petit Four etc), and there's a lot of parallels between the two.

crims0n 7mo ago

I really miss this era. Everything was straight and to the point by design, no processor cycles or memory were (or even could be) wasted. Less layers of abstraction, the entire stack from physics to application could be understood by a single person.

snozolli 7mo ago

My favorite detail of the Palm story is that the founder carried around a block of wood and pretended it was a PDA in order to work out details of the interface. https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424d2ffe4 https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424...

jcalvinowens 7mo ago

I didn't know the impetus for the graffiti writing was actually hardware limitations, that's fascinating: > Gaffiti power writing software was another design decision affected by the battery selection. During the design of the first Palm handhelds, users were clamoring for natural handwriting recognition. However, natural handwriting recognition would require a more powerful processor and more memory, which together required bigger batteries. Adding all these things to a handheld would have weighed it down and made it cost too much for the market. Instead, the Palm designers bet that users would settle for good-enough handwriting recognition if the result was long battery life.

Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
I still do my 'v's backwards.

Brian_K_White 7mo ago

I miss the whole Palm ecosystem. I have noted many times that I had a slab phone with full screen color icon grid general purpose os with internet and countless 3rd party apps for every conceivable purpose,... 7 full years before the iphone. 8 years before the iphone had 3rd party apps. And it wasn't Android it was a Samsung SPH-i300 running PalmOS. It was great that there was not really much of an app store, you got apps individually more or less like desktop os apps. There might have been app stores that collected apps but I don't remember ever using any. I had apps for everything the same as today. Even though the screen was only like 160x240 and the internet was 14.4k, I had browser & email of course, but also ssh, irc, I even had a vnc client! Audible.com player, countless random things like a netmask calculator, resistor color code app, a few different generic db apps where you design your own fields and input/display screens etc. 3rd party phone dialer that integrated the contacts db. I must be forgetting a hundred other things. The OS wasn't open source but at least the apps could be, so pretty much like windows & mac. All in all I'd prefer Android where the entire system is open, except Google has somehow managed to make the real world life with Android less open than PalmOS was, even though PalmOS wasn't open source and I think even the development system wasn't free either. I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.

andrewf 7mo ago
I worked for a company that published a PalmOS app. Palmgear.com was a very important distribution channel, but so was our own website, I forget the exact ratios.
jomar 7mo ago
> I think even the development system wasn't free either. Metrowerks CodeWarrior was the original development system for PalmOS and was indeed not free (in either sense). However a bunch of enthusiasts cobbled together some free development tools: the main parts were adapting the GCC and binutils m68k targets to PalmOS's constrained PIC runtime environment (it was constrained even by m68k standards); a tool to convert the resulting COFF or ELF executable to PalmOS's .prc database format; and a text-based resource compiler for generating UI elements using its own home-grown description language to express what CodeWarrior users were using a graphical UI editor to make. That mostly still exists as it was back in the PalmOS days at <https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net>. And if you hunt around on GitHub you'll find a few people who've kept the code compiling with stricter more modern compilers. (And see also <https://pilrc.sourceforge.net https://pilrc.sourceforge.net> for the resource compiler.)

gelstudios 7mo ago

sigh palm, we all miss you. > Your product needs enough features for the optimal user experience and no more https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdocs/zenofpalm.pdf https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdoc...

datawars 7mo ago
[dead]

agumonkey 7mo ago

Very interesting to see guidelines for UI on such constrained devices. Also terrible realizing that functionally, my so-very-2026 css3-reactjs-tailwind app is also tabs with rows and toolbars.

felixding 7mo ago

I can’t recommend another excellent free ebook enough: Zen of Palm. It accurately describes the key differences between designing for desktop and mobile, which explains why PalmOS was so much easier to use than the various Windows-based mobile formats from Microsoft at the time. I even wrote a whole blog series about this book two decades ago (https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1 https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1). I switched from a Dell Pocket PC to a Treo 650, and it was such a revelation. IMHO, this little phone is still one of the best in terms of simplicity, even today.

aidenn0 7mo ago
My wife still misses her Centro. She held onto it until Google Maps removed the API that the maps app on it used.

rkagerer 7mo ago

I've been seriously contemplating reviving my old Palm device. No notifications / nagging, no ads, in many cases better apps, hardware buttons and a security posture exotic enough to basically not be worth targeting.

lateforwork 7mo ago

Palm OS does not get enough credit as the progenitor of modern handheld experience, including especially iOS. iOS shares many similarities with Palm OS, such as the home screen layout of app icons, the use of full-screen apps without windowing, the absence of an explicit "quit" action, no exposed file system (obvious today, but bold back in those days), a single hardware button to return "home", and so on. What iOS added is true preemptive multitasking, memory protection, multitouch gestures, physics-based scrolling and so on.

nofriend 7mo ago
The first three are presumably just hardware advancements? Apple certainly deserves credit for refining the concept and making it into a neat package.

Daub 7mo ago

I wrote some teaching material on the rise and fall off Palm for which I produced a graphic showing how the palm split and merged over the years. Quite honestly it's one of the most complex and insane graphics i have ever made. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7hh5uzoaj2x7zq60yv9vz/palm_timeline.eps?rlkey=0n5rfo12t7hltrtgrmc8q8udl&st=zz3nejsf&dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7hh5uzoaj2x7zq60yv9vz/palm_ti...

aquova 7mo ago

Ars did a retrospective on the Palm line-up that I occasionally go back and re-read. I never got into the ecosystem, although my dad had a Palm III(?) when I was younger. Had I been a decade older I think I would've been infatuated with them. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/palm-os-and-the-devices-that-ran-it-an-ars-retrospective/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/palm-os-and-the-devi...

zombot 7mo ago

That was when we still had user interfaces. All we have now are ad billboards.

rrix2 7mo ago

My first personal computer was a Palm and my earliest programming experiences came with reading these docs, how fun. For a young person whose parents' custody arrangement led to almost every night of sleep under a different roof, a wifi enabled OS with a great applicaton library that was always with me was really powerful and ended up being quite impactful on the arc of my life. By high school I was writing apps that followed this hig with a fold up keyboard, designing the ui and compiling code on board the device. PalmOS 4 and 5 could be tricked out to be a whole computer, capable of working offline for a week and also could get you up all night on IRC and ebooks. it's hard to imagine using my smartphone offline for a week now.... and most of the apps implemented this hig and were straightforward to use because it was the defeult builtin toolkit largely the same its entire life, progressively enhanced GUIs from 1bit 160x160 to full color 320x480 responsive design... nowadays I'm building a Material3 app in my evenings and i know some day google is gonna make a material4 so that my app looks scuffed up

Western0 7mo ago

I like computers that can run for several days or weeks on a single charge. Today, better processors and better screens could make this possible. Add solar panels and we would have weak computers that work like calculators. No power from the wall!