[HN Gopher] RePalm
___________________________________________________________________
RePalm
Author : p_l
Score : 422 points
Date : 2023-04-10 11:22 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dmitry.gr)
(TXT) w3m dump (dmitry.gr)
| markb139 wrote:
| Way back in about 2001, I developed a text messaging (sms) and
| phone book management app for palmOS. I bought an m505 and a new
| fangled Bluetooth adapter. For the time it seemed revolutionary
| to be able to sync to a phone in your pocket without having to
| align IR ports
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| PalmOS was killed by its design mistakes and technical
| weaknesses.
|
| 16 bits memory limitation, even at the time that was silly.
|
| Armlets? Extremely hard to write simple native code or to port
| apps and games from other platforms.
|
| No file system, a custom and rather slow database instead...
|
| But they had tons of documents on how to follow their UI/UX
| guidelines.
|
| Basically, they had no real kernel upon which building an OS,
| they tried anyway and it was a mess of epic proportions.
| jacknews wrote:
| IMHO Palm was killed by endless M&A activity and other finance
| shenanigans, which resulted in a lack of long term focus and
| stability to migrate from the original cramped architecture.
|
| And then iphone's multitouch UI drove the final nail.
| indymike wrote:
| I had three different palm phones (a Palm and two Kyoceras)
| and a WindowsCE based MDA before I got my first modern
| smartphone (A Tmobile G1). I think the final nail was simple
| hubris. Everyone thought their established market position
| and share would be enough to defend. The iPhone wasn't viewed
| as a PDA by most incumbents... it was a weird iPod phone
| targeting consumers. Android was starting at zero, and I
| think there was a lot of belief that Palm, RIM and Microsoft
| would have something way better once their touch screen
| options came out. A lot of that belief was fueled by the
| importance of enterprise groupware to corporate buyers at the
| time. I remember having developer reps from Palm and MS try
| to talk us (I owned a small dev shop at the time) out of
| looking at Android and iOS because the next version was going
| to kill them both.
|
| It turned out easier to use, cloud services (Google apps,
| iCloud), maps+GPS (G1 had it, iPhone had it soon after), and
| much better media player features were simply more desirable
| than enterprise groupware. It also turned out that as cell
| phone usage normalized, a lot of employers stopped providing
| cell phones to employees... mostly driven by unlimited
| talk+text+internet plans... which really favored the non-
| enterprise-y Androids and iPhones.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Bad developer experience might have contributed but I think the
| primary cause was the same as what killed Windows Mobile and
| Symbian: The iPhone reset the bar for user experience and at
| the same time Apple changed handset + app distribution models,
| Palm failed to meet the situation. Google figured it out,
| scrapped the Android UX, and managed to be #2. With the high
| per-platform cost of mobile dev there's apparently not room for
| more than two so even Microsoft couldn't catch up.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| PalmOS was already dead when the iPhone was launched.
|
| In fact most players had divested the market at this stage.
| The PocketPC team was a skeleton and Symbian was being eaten
| from inside by competing internal projects.
|
| Apple had a highway.
| brookst wrote:
| All of that and also a lack of a compelling mass market story.
| I bought a couple of them and enjoyed playing with them, but
| they weren't better-enough to change my habits.
| muyuu wrote:
| Canadianfella's reply is dead so I'll reply here.
|
| Eventually Symbian (sp?) was better and when Sony killed
| their Zire division I just have Palm Treo one last chance. It
| was a bit laggy and the battery didn't last long enough.
|
| I always wanted to give Zaurus a try, but the Linux ones not
| the Palm ones.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Symbian OS was much better engineered than PalmOS, but was
| nevertheless full of idiosyncrasies. They had a very short
| stack limit that created tons of bugs and it was not
| possible to build software without their own customized
| toolchain that disallowed some standards C/C++ stuff such
| as static variables.
|
| The best kernel at the time was WinCE, good old Win32 API
| with basic POSIX capabilities for networking, filesystem
| and memory management.
|
| Microsoft had a winner platform on their lap, but for some
| reason they invested very little on the platform, I
| remember talking with someone on the PocketPC team at the
| time and they were less than twelve developers, and
| shrinking.
|
| It was the same era when Intel stopped all their
| investments on the ARM architecture after successfully
| building the most impressive one at the time (the StrongARM
| followed by the XScale)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| WinCE was nice in terms of kernel but it was really
| begging for a decent UI. Palm and Psion did have that
| part covered.
| canadianfella wrote:
| Better than what? What was the competition back then?
| brookst wrote:
| People have kept day planners and contact books since
| forever. Just being electronic isn't enough of a value
| prop.
| jadinvt wrote:
| Day planner, paper, hipster pda:
| https://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-
| hipster... [edit, another e.g.]
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Palm was killed by their inability to evolve the platform in
| the face of quantum leaps from other players -- but that same
| thing caught out pretty much every other mobile platform of the
| era.
|
| In 2004, the Treo 650 was as good as it got. I LOVED mine, and
| there was really no other player in the market that could truly
| best it until Apple landed with the iPhone. (And I say this
| having sampled best-of-breed Windows Mobile stuff in that era
| -- the HTC hardware was slick, but WinMo was useless and
| incredibly dumb.)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| RIM and Palm suffered the same kind of huge technical debt on
| the low-level kernel stuff.
|
| They basically started with something very crude that barely
| did the job, and built stacks on top.
|
| But they had nice frontends, nice hardware, especially the
| Sony Clie series was quite ahead of its time hardware wise.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| RIM's sins were much more serious. Their devices were
| designed in a time when having the horsepower to actually
| run a mail client on them wasn't possible, and so they were
| dependent on an intermediate server.
|
| Using a Blackberry in the absence of BES (and an Exchange
| server) was pretty weak sauce.
|
| Palm, OTOH, had a real platform that worked on its own. My
| Treo could talk directly to my ISP's IMAP server, something
| Blackberries of the era couldn't do. My Treo made it easy
| to separate work and personal mail. My Treo's PIM apps were
| superior to the Blackberry's.
|
| Also, you and I apparently had VERY different experiences
| with the Clie line. I had one. It was physically
| interesting but insanely fragile, and for SOME reason
| needed different sync software than Palm (or Handspring)
| branded Palms.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I was creating software (mostly games) for a wide range
| of handheld devices at the time.
|
| When you're doing that you can quite easily get an idea
| of the weaknesses and strengths of the platform, and I
| can tell you that PalmOS was quite weak but almost OK at
| the very beginning but it quickly deteriorated and at the
| end they could simply not push it forward at all.
|
| Sony did a good job considering, but they simply bet on
| the wrong horse.
|
| To be honest, Android also started in a very weak state,
| not the same kind of mess that PalmOS was, but it was
| riddled with over-engineering and absurd design choices,
| but with a huge effort they managed to fix the worst
| parts and still push it forward.
|
| I was surprised they could pull it off.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I never cared about mobile gaming in the era, so I can
| only go on what I used the device for: communication and
| personal information management. PalmOS was good at those
| things.
|
| To be fair to Sony, there wasn't really any other horse
| to bet on in that era. The problem was their hardware was
| fragile vs. Palm or Handspring devices.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Symbian and WinCE were relatively strong competitors.
|
| And there was an attempt at Linux + Qt made by Sharp with
| the Zaurus and Qtopia.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Er, no.
|
| Symbian had some presence via Nokia devices, but was
| kinda an also-ran in the US in terms of actual viable
| smartphone platforms.
|
| WinCE and WinMo were gawdawful and unusable unless you
| were just really, really drinking the Redmond Kool-Aid.
|
| (Amusingly, if you Google "symbian" now the first link is
| for a thing that is absolutely not related to
| smartphones, but which uses a name that is "symbian"
| without the "m". NSFW.)
| deergomoo wrote:
| > the HTC hardware was slick, but WinMo was useless and
| incredibly dumb
|
| You're not kidding. I had a HTC HD2 and the hardware was very
| futuristic-feeling (one of the first phones with the original
| Qualcomm Snapdragon, and a "huge" 4.3" screen that my friends
| gently mocked for being ridiculously large), but the software
| experience was _leagues_ behind iOS and Android, despite they
| themselves being in relative infancy. It would have been
| pretty nice if it got an update to Windows Phone 7, which was
| promised but never came.
|
| HTC's own customisations were the worst part. Their flashy
| animated home screen was very nice, but the iOS-style
| threaded SMS app couldn't deal with threads longer than about
| 300 messages and would routinely lock up the phone for
| minutes at a time until you deleted your conversation
| history.
|
| In the years after I got rid of it people continued to port
| newer versions of Android to it, but I just remember it being
| shit at texting and browsing the web--the only things I
| actually wanted it for.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| My HTC was branded an 8525 by AT&T. I think that means it
| was a Tytn in other markets.
|
| When it was introduced, there was no iOS yet. And even so,
| it sucked out loud compared to the 800 pound gorillas of
| the era, Palm and (in full deployments) Blackberry. WinMo
| was SO DUMB. I remember discovering the hard way that if
| you left the browser in the foreground, on-page refresh
| directives (like CNN used to use) would still be honored
| even if the device's screen was off. Result? Dead battery
| in no time.
|
| WinMo also had no way to deal with IMAP mail natively. It
| was Exchange or POP unless you bought an aftermarket mail
| client.
|
| True fact: I actually didn't text much until I got an
| iPhone, so I can't speak to texting on the 8525. I think
| lots of people my age only came to texting later, whereas
| if you're like 10 years younger than I am (say, born in
| 1980 instead of 1970) you probably texted on flip phones in
| high school or whatever.
| causality0 wrote:
| Yet somehow using it was far more pleasurable than Pocket PC. I
| could certainly do more things with my beastly 640x480 624mhz
| ipaq, but everything about the UX was better on Palm. Apps
| saved state automatically. I didn't have to open a start menu
| to launch something and I didn't have to open two menus and
| manually close them because Windows Mobile doesn't close
| anything when you hit the X button. The buttons, d-pads, and
| styli all felt better, and the screen didn't waste 20% of its
| real estate with two giant useless buttons across the bottom of
| every app.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Yeah, it's a shame, Microsoft had the better kernel and SDK
| (by a long shot) but their UX was crude and relied too much
| on old Windows paradigms.
|
| They should have kept the kernel and ditched the Shell to
| build something tailored for the form factor and usage.
| causality0 wrote:
| They're still addicted to marketing-first design. Imagine
| what users before 20110 would say if you told them every PC
| now comes with a splash screen that doesn't do anything
| that you have click past to then get to the login screen.
| T3OU-736 wrote:
| I lack the wherewithal to do anything more than to appreciate the
| sheer scope in the most general terms, but nostalgia is kicking
| in quite hard.
|
| Bravo!
| neom wrote:
| I'm with you on the nostalgia kick. What Palm did you have? I
| had a Palm IIIe SE in high school, didn't use it for much
| except sending sub7 to anything with an IR port and play dope
| wars, but still my fav computer I've ever owned.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The IR port could be used for remote control level
| interactions with a LEGO Mindstorms RCX. That was a major use
| case for my high school handspring.
| gjmacd wrote:
| [flagged]
| pantulis wrote:
| I hesitated to post the same question but guess the answer
| would be: "Why not?"
| eddieroger wrote:
| That's usually the answer. Kennedy said it best: "We choose
| to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not
| because they are easy, but because they are hard"
| jjulius wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| njacobs5074 wrote:
| I had the interesting experience to work at Palm in the early
| 2000's on a project that was to compete with the Blackberry.
|
| Needless to say, it never saw the light of day but I still
| remember that we had to ask the PalmOS engineering group to
| create a hardware layer thread so that we could do network I/O in
| parallel with running the user app.
|
| It was an enormously challenging platform to work with.
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| iseanstevens wrote:
| Beyond impressed.
| muyuu wrote:
| As much as I love retro stuff I see no point in reviving Palm.
| It's like bringing back MS-DOS, perhaps you have something ready
| made for that environment and you want to use it as is because
| you don't want to relearn some newer interface. That's ok, it can
| be done with emulation. But other than that why would you want to
| impose yourself a bunch of anachronistic limitations?
| zubiaur wrote:
| For context dmitry was a bit of a legend back wen palm was
| alive. His patches fixed a bunch of stuff palm never bothered
| to. His apps were top notch and pushed the limit on what was
| possible in palmOS.
|
| So, in a way, im not surprised he's done something like this. A
| work of ?love? ?Art?. A testament of deeply knowing the object
| of his passion.
|
| Take a look at his code and admire it for what it is. Read how
| he explains it. It's worthy on its own.
| [deleted]
| h2odragon wrote:
| Art can be worthwhile for its own sake, no?
|
| This has more value to more people than a painting of an apple,
| I'd guess. I don't see much point in either of them myself; but
| I don't have to. I _can_ see the point in them in that they
| gave their creator joy while making them and even more in that
| others can appreciate them, even if i can 't.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > As much as I love retro stuff I see no point in reviving
| Palm.
|
| I see a big opportunity should rePalm be ported to generic low
| cost embedded hardware. ESP32(|ARM|Risc-V) board+LCD+LTE
| module, all costing a dozen bucks each or less, would make the
| basis for a powerful dumbphone for when manufacturers will
| cease any production of them. I would personally love to have
| such a device.
|
| Broadly speaking, PalmOS had filesystems, networking, graphics
| and interface controls, sound, hardware access and more. Who
| cares if I can't watch high resolution movies or play AAA games
| with it, the goal should rather be to use it to do things where
| Linux is not only overkill but also would require hardware that
| cost a lot more. Forget about phones and PDAs, if I want to
| build an I/O panel with buttons and display for some
| instrument, a light OS like this one could help to lower costs
| by doing it on much cheaper hardware.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| FWIW, there was an arm-native video player for the T5, and I
| was able to watch mpeg4/divx encoded movies on it.
| muyuu wrote:
| why would you bother with the overhead to make it Palm-
| compatible though? at most, an emulation subsystem might make
| sense, but having all things including new development run in
| a Palm-compatible system right now makes no sense.
|
| Note that it wouldn't even be a dumbphone by definition if it
| has an OS running arbitrarily installed software on it.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > why would you bother with the overhead to make it Palm-
| compatible though
|
| Not having to design and explain API is a plus
| muyuu wrote:
| yes, then you go for the subsystem route as in MacOS
| Classic or Win32
|
| perhaps worth a shot but I seriously doubt the
| compatibility is going to be worth enough for enough
| people, instead of just running an emulator
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| FreeDOS brought MS-DOS back from the dead. Was it useless? In
| my opinion, far from it.
|
| Yes, Palm is useless and archaic of networked features are your
| #1 use case for a PDA (smartphone) and there's little use
| reviving it. However, if you care about old Palm games, or
| about efficiently organising your life with minimum
| distractions, then IMO not many modern devices will beat a Palm
| OS device.
|
| Analogously to MS-DOS, there is a _huge_ application base that
| you can dip into for most tasks that don't require online
| access, that can still be used today. The UI is miles ahead of
| both iOS and Android, IMO (in both responsiveness and look-and-
| feel), if you are willing to work within its limitations (that
| include using a stylus). Dmitry is even working on Unicode
| support.
|
| I'm glad that RePalm exists. If it didn't, all we'd be left
| with is emulators and devices that are starting to fall apart.
| muyuu wrote:
| FreeDOS is exactly what I was describing. Makes sense to use
| that old software, but not to actually develop for these
| days. Because you'd be imposing weird anachronistic
| restrictions on yourself for no good reason.
| troad wrote:
| > imposing weird anachronistic restrictions on yourself for
| no good reason
|
| It's worth noting that this also describes virtually all
| poetry, the rules of all sports, etc. :)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > Because you'd be imposing weird anachronistic
| restrictions on yourself for no good reason.
|
| Learning to count every byte has value today too, and this
| is practice in that skill
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > can be done with emulation
|
| Funny you should say that. There WAS no emulator for any ARM
| palm devices. Ever. Until I wrote the only one:
| https://github.com/uARM-Palm/uARM
| muyuu wrote:
| Well, that does make sense.
|
| It wasn't a slight at you. I appreciate good work and also
| recreational computing. But is reviving Palm a practical
| endeavour? Nope, sorry.
|
| The emulator is a good idea for whatever abandonware people
| might want to use. I might try it myself.
| voxadam wrote:
| Recently related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35507933
| dctoedt wrote:
| The linked article's title is pretty open-ended, so I looked at
| it with just a scintilla of hope that it might include a Graffiti
| emulator for iOS devices, especially iPad with Apple Pencil.
| Sadly, no joy.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Wrapping grafiti.prc into the bare minimum PalmOS api it would
| need to run isn't hard. A few years back I made a wrapper for
| it that ran on Android Wear. But due to my employment I am
| pretty sure publishing anything for iOS would be a no-no
| HALtheWise wrote:
| This project has some of the most satisfying deep yak shaves of
| any hobby project I know, to the point of writing a custom
| kernel, JIT compiler, and CPU fault emulator.
|
| > Most people would not take on a task of writing a just-in-time
| translator alone. But that is just because they are wimps :) (Or
| maybe they reasonably assume that it is a huge time sink with
| more corner cases than one could shake a stick at)
| devbent wrote:
| As an aside, I would love a brand new Palm device, with modern
| tech it could be obscenely tiny and have good battery life.
|
| Palm devices had physical buttons, one of which immediately (0
| perceivable lag) opened a todo list
|
| When I used to be have a palm, anytime I was feeling idle I'd
| pull out my palm and press the Todo list button and see what was
| next on my schedule. It was literally life changing and every
| smart device since is a laggy piece of shit when it comes to
| physical Todo lists.
|
| The Samsung Note series could have been great if it allows for
| replacing the lock screen with a Todo list that you can interact
| with, but no, the Note cannot be used as a fucking note pad.
|
| I once burst into the office of the PM in charge of the Tasks ui
| for Windows Mobile and asked him why we did such a shitty job,
| but because he had never used a palm before, he didn't even
| realize what we were shipping was garbage.
|
| Ugh.
| tantalor wrote:
| Long article. What is it about?
|
| Don't see any intro or summary. Just "history" and then diving
| straight into the details.
| billiam wrote:
| Amazing project, one that will seemingly go on for the
| foreseeable future. This is quite a labor of love, and it shows.
| It is very interesting to see the bifuracted comments: either but
| why (these are the people, probably mostly younger who just don't
| see the point) or PalmOS-based were so cool (cleaner, simpler,
| etc). I think Dmitri's project makes clear that there was a huge
| difference between the experience of PalmOS as products and the
| way they were created as software and hardware. Yes, many of the
| shortcuts and hacky looking design decisions taken 20+ years ago
| seem inexplicable today. Many were made based on the constraints
| of the time (supply chain, expertise on the team,
| bloodymindedness, etc) but ultimately the biggest driver was a
| great PDA experience, more a portable, always on digital
| replacement for paper that could do several things well, rather
| than everything you could imagine. Great ideas for power
| management, sophisticated kernel not so much.
| omneity wrote:
| I've been wishing for a computing reboot using low power MCUs
| such as the RPI 2040 and the ESP-32 and much simpler OSes.
| Projects like this one give me hope.
|
| Basically can we create a secure computing & networking stack
| from scratch that can work on these devices, and build a useful
| ecosystem around it? For example the Gemini protocol could be a
| great starting point for an internet-like connected experience.
|
| One can always dream. In the mean time, thank you for doing the
| Lord's work Dmitry!
| bioemerl wrote:
| This is amazing. I would leap at the chance to build a simple
| palm device with a 3D printed case, modern hardware that lasts an
| absolute eternity.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Same here. I can still write Graffiti without thinking, and
| something I could use as a notepad would be great.
| mcguire wrote:
| I get mocked for using Sigma instead of E. :-)
| troad wrote:
| Could something like this be implemented as an iOS keyboard,
| I wonder?
| rcarmo wrote:
| It was. Amazingly enough, there was one that did that, but
| it's gone.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Working on it. Standby. Sadly might be months. Hobby project
| takes back seat to job and life...
| e-_pusher wrote:
| What a teaser! Can't wait to see it. Anything you can share
| right now about what you are building?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I wired up higher density screen support into the OS's
| blitter, so a modern very-hi-dpi screen with smooth fonts
| works. Utf8 support is a work in progress (palm did not
| have it). Modern wifi is easily provided by an ESP32, and a
| modern-ish browser engine is being ported (slowly)
| troad wrote:
| This is an incredibly cool write-up, demonstrating a level of
| technical skill far beyond me. Kudos!
|
| I am a little confused by all the "but why" comments here.
| Because it's fun! Because it's cool! Because it's full of
| weirdness, archaisms, and edge cases - working through those is a
| playful challenge, and conquering them all gives a wonderful
| feeling of mastery. It doesn't need to be any more 'useful' than
| any other hobby or game.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think there are two kinds of "but why" questions:
|
| 1. Derisive, insinuating that the project is silly or a waste
| of time.
|
| 2. Inquisitive, actually wanting to know what motivated the
| creator to do something that most people don't see a value for,
| and/or would never have thought to bother with.
|
| We should discourage the former, but IMO we should _encourage_
| the latter.
| acyou wrote:
| I think the "Motivation" section is the most important
| section of documentation. Why is this great and why should we
| keep reading?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Also true, but I don't think we need to enforce that kind
| of standard for personal hobby projects. You're not under
| any obligation to convince people that your project is
| worth being interested in, unless you specifically want
| other people to start using it.
| acyou wrote:
| You are right, it's not something that needs to be
| enforced or demanded on a personal hobby project.
|
| You can write documentation and software for yourself,
| and share it for no particular reason, or write
| documentation/software for other people, and share it to
| help others. If it's the latter, you might care that
| other people read the documentation, because you think it
| will be useful and helpful and you want to help them.
|
| As a non-expert, I like having the main and most relevant
| use cases and underlying motivations of authors and users
| made obvious. For me, having specific use cases in mind
| makes documentation easier to read and interpret. If I
| were an expert in a field and felt the motivation for the
| documentation was obvious and self-explanatory, I might
| not feel the need to have it explicitly articulated.
|
| When I write documentation, I often need to refer to the
| Motivation to stay motivated and stay on target. What are
| all the great outcomes that are going to come about as a
| result of the documentation existing? If I didn't have
| those in mind from the outset, I might not want to write
| the docs.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I do the same in my brain dumps when coding.
|
| For me it stops my mind from wandering and describes to myself
| why I am writing that function.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is such a great idea for people who have trouble staying
| focused. It can help you decide whether to actually spend
| time on whatever you're doing, or to just dump some ideas to
| a scratchpad (or your Zettelkasten!) and get back to the
| actual work at hand.
| ghodith wrote:
| Funny, this is the exact workflow I settled on. During
| pomodoro cycles I brain dump all unrelated things I want to
| think about into a scratchpad, and then afterwards transfer
| the ones I'm still interested in into my Zettelkasten.
|
| It's been significantly impactful; I actually get work done
| when I can feel like I don't have to address an idea right
| away out of fear of forgetting it.
| rtpg wrote:
| For people that do these kinds of projects, I always wonder how
| much progress is getting made in an average night of poking
| around. I'm only able to make big leaps on things by just eating
| up evenings. Are some people just really good at picking things
| up and making progress?
| wvenable wrote:
| I'm working on a few of these kinds of projects and progress is
| highly variable. Some days, I might only get a few lines of
| code done. Hardly enough to make a difference but then other
| nights, in maybe the same amount time, I'll build out some
| massive subsystem.
|
| I think big progress will eat up an evening but I think the
| important point is that it's not a job -- so when it eats up an
| evening it should be fun and when you've not other
| important/interesting things to do. I almost never know when
| I'm going to make progress when I start.
| codetrotter wrote:
| According to the main page of the linked article, this RePalm
| project has been ongoing since at least Dec 30 2018. How often
| and how much the author works on this particular project at a
| time I don't know. But from this I think it is safe to assume
| that it takes time, and perseverance above all is key.
| Probably.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I started work on this in 2018. It's been five years. A few
| projects (side-quests) came out of this one, like
| m0FaultDispatch and the PIP diss play driver discussed here
| yesterday. On an average night, not really any progress. Long
| weekends and long plane rides do produce more progress.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I don't claim to be in the same league as OP but I can tell you
| from my experience. I have a demanding job (CTO of Cloudflare)
| and I have a partner with whom I like to spend time.
|
| One of the projects I am currently working on is restoring an
| IBM ThinkPad 701CS (https://blog.jgc.org/2023/03/repairing-
| tiny-ribbon-cable-ins...) which has required a total teardown
| and rebuild. I started this project in early January and
| currently have a working machine that's in parts. I work on
| this when I have time. Which might be for two or three hours a
| week maximum. Basically, I decided to get satisfaction from
| small improvements. So, one time when working on this I just
| cleaned up the battery contacts, another time I replaced the
| CMOS battery and saw that it was retaining RAM size, another
| time I repaired the keyboard, another time I just sat down and
| figured out which parts of the case I needed to 3D print to
| replace, etc. etc.
|
| I usually have two to three projects ongoing and just pick them
| up when I have time and inclination.
| tylerscott wrote:
| This is great advice. I also try to make incremental gains in
| projects as it is the one way I've experienced consistent
| progress. This includes things like learning handstands as a
| project. A little bit of forward progress is better than no
| progress. I've heard it said it's like putting pennies (or
| similar currency) into a savings account. It never seems like
| much but over time it adds up. The hardest thing for me was
| recognizing the value in those pennies. Ego, insecurity, etc
| want the big cathartic jump in progress.
| epilys wrote:
| I read that article when it was published, very cool. I was
| wondering, if the grafting failed could you replace the
| ribbon with something standard e.g. from mouser/digikey?
|
| > I have a demanding job (CTO of Cloudflare)
|
| Please use your influence to bring sturdy, repairable laptops
| with great keyboards back! I'd buy a cloudflare branded
| thinkpad clone.
| stavros wrote:
| Buy a Framework laptop?
| epilys wrote:
| Doesn't ship to Greece. (yet). Also the keyboard is less
| than ideal.
| stavros wrote:
| I quite like the keyboard, but then again I'm not very
| picky with keyboards. I got mine reshipped from Germany,
| so that's a route you can go.
|
| If you want a repairable laptop with a good keyboard,
| getting a Framework now gets you much closer than hoping
| someone makes one. Also, you enable and encourage the
| company that already makes a repairable laptop to
| eventually sell a great keyboard, which giving your money
| to Apple or Dell doesn't do.
| epilys wrote:
| I will wait a bit more in case they expand their
| shipping.
|
| What do you think of the monitor by the way? Does it
| compare to e.g. a Macbook even a little bit?
| stavros wrote:
| I really like the laptop in general, but, again, I'm not
| very picky. I have an old MacBook Air and the Framework's
| monitor is just as good (though much higher res). My only
| issue is that it's a little dim in sunlight.
|
| Also, obviously Intel can't compare to an M1, but I hope
| the new AMD processors will improve on that somehow.
| tcrenshaw wrote:
| I work on my projects the same way. Enjoy the little wins
| when I get them; put it down in favor of another project for
| a while if I get bored.
| bluGill wrote:
| Some people are better than others. If you are single with no
| kids that leaves a lot of time. If you have a relationship that
| takes time (assuming you want to maintain it), and kids are a
| large time sink (well worth it, but not if you count time or
| money). Of course different relationships have different needs.
| And different people have different budgets, if you are born
| rich maybe you don't need to work and so this isn't an evening
| hobby. Retired people also have more time for projects like
| this.
|
| If you make it a point though most everyone can find an hour
| every day to do something like this despite the above. However
| for most of us it is easier to turn on the TV/youtube/read
| books/.... Even the more productive things like learn a foreign
| language, politically support a candidate, and the like. There
| is lots of competition for your limited time and most people
| won't make projects like this a priority. Some of the things
| above are worth doing on their own, some are just a waste of
| time. (though if you are nearly burned out you probably don't
| have the energy to spend on more than TV)
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Really fascinating...General question: Is this an example of the
| type of tech job that users of LLMs will find way more difficult
| than average coding jobs?
|
| (Seems this particular example doesn't equate to a paid job but
| there are certainly analogs in the career world)
| ckz wrote:
| Side note: Dmitry (creator of RePalm) is a treasure and his
| impact on the Palm community cannot be understated. He has a
| world-class depth of knowledge of the inner workings of these
| things and is one of the key players in extending PalmOS device
| capabilities today (patching ROMs, new hardware, etc.).
|
| He also contributes regularly to apps the community is
| developing, teaching us hobby devs new tricks. :)
|
| As someone who still uses PDAs regularly, I can't express enough
| gratitude.
| tgmatt wrote:
| Out of interest, and a genuine question, why do you use PDAs
| when smartphones exist? Surely they do everything the PDAs did
| but better?
| Lammy wrote:
| They don't spy on you
| ckz wrote:
| A totally valid question! I did adopt the smartphone for
| many, many years. My father had a gen-1 iPhone which captured
| my imagination. At the same time, I've also never really let
| them run my life. I've habitually always maintained the old
| (Apple?) hub-and-spoke model where the PC is the core and
| everything else is a mobile extension of it.
|
| I do own some, but they don't get used for much (browser-on-
| the-go, mostly).
|
| Smartphones are definitely better all-rounders, but what I've
| come to adopt in recent years is a hobby of finding whatever
| tech/concept seems "best" to me (from any period in time) and
| then using that. Sometimes that means hardware from 1920,
| sometimes from today (e.g. I have a current-gen GPU to join
| the AI arms race). Sometimes that means a modern evolution of
| the concept without losing the spirit.
|
| Easy examples:
|
| * iPod -> Music player w/ FLAC + 1TB SD
|
| * Gameboy -> Analogue Pocket (or sometimes original hardware)
|
| * A modern standalone camera, etc.
|
| It's sort of like living in the dream version of 2002 where
| tech stayed hopeful and fun (not sure if that's good or bad).
| Definitely brought me the most joy in tech I've had in years.
|
| PDAs (and a _lot_ of tech from <2010) have the advantage of
| still being built entirely to serve the user. For my needs, I
| basically view it as day-planner or complement to a notepad
| and don't expect it to be a smartphone. My opinion is that
| these devices basically "solved" the digital calendar by
| ~1999 and that almost every calendar feature since (except
| maybe sharing) usually serves some other business need in
| addition to the user, or is just clunkier.
|
| A PDA just wants to take good notes, manage the day's work,
| and be a simple extension of your mind. Most modern tasks
| (that don't require a network connection to be useful) have
| apps that still exist and don't spy on you: Food journals,
| encrypted notes, flashcards, project management, ebooks,
| cached news, Wordle, period trackers...
|
| So, if your life today doesn't _depend_ on a specific vision
| of modernity, you don't miss out on much of it while
| benefiting from some forgotten UX benefits: Offline-first,
| great UI, week-long batteries (AAA if so inclined), Graffiti
| input, etc. :)
| tgmatt wrote:
| That seems reasonable. I did pick up an old colour screen
| CompaQ a number of years ago for nostalgia reasons but
| haven't really fiddled with it much yet. I really should..
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I aspire to implement this vision of modernity on my life
| as well. Perhaps it's time to dust off an old UX40/UX50 and
| finally make this happen.
| ornornor wrote:
| Wait until you see the prices on these for a working one.
| sho_nuff wrote:
| > * iPod -> Music player w/ FLAC + 1TB SD
|
| Out of curiosity, which Music player did you settle on? I
| am in the market for one and looking for options (currently
| leaning towards a FiiO M11).
| ckz wrote:
| Currently a FiiO M3K and I've been super happy with it.
| Might be discontinued now, however.
|
| The thought process for the purchase was that I wanted a
| standalone DAP without a touchscreen (iPod-esque),
| without wireless connectivity, with expandable storage,
| and not running Android. The M3K also has good Rockbox
| support including dual-boot, so I swap between that and
| the native Linux firmware at times.
|
| I _am_ considering getting a second device of some kind
| with Bluetooth because there are occasional but
| persistent times where it honestly would be nice. Ideally
| it 'd still be running a pretty basic OS, though.
| rsync wrote:
| "I've habitually always maintained the old (Apple?) hub-
| and-spoke model where the PC is the core and everything
| else is a mobile extension of it."
|
| This is the model I use in my own life but with a slight
| variation:
|
| My server at the datacenter is the core and everything else
| is a mobile extension of it.
| slim wrote:
| I see a lot of value in having the "smart" airgapped away
| from the modem
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| They have a much better stand-by battery life on AAA
| batteries, and they are not as distracting because they are
| offline-first (or even offline-only, for the early models).
| Or, you can just use them if you find them neat (which I do).
| But ckz's answer is a very good glance into the kind of
| mindset that I share for the most part as well.
| Tor3 wrote:
| I can't even find anything which works as the simple Palm
| "ToDo" application. No free ones at least. PalmOS had this
| developer requirement that nothing should take more than 3
| clicks. I used the ToDo tool as a shopping list. I kept all
| my common groceries in that list and used a single tap to
| indicate that I was out of something, and a single tap when I
| bought something I was out of. Whatever I try to do on a
| phone is just too much hassle so I end up not using it. My
| old Tungsten T3 was easier in so many respects.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Strongly agree that so many more features lead to more
| friction and the tool becoming less useful. The original
| Palm devices were really awesome. Dedicated todo button,
| push it, and your todos instantly come up, one tap to drop
| down the category selection, and one more to select a
| category, and you're there.
|
| The iPhone has historically been really bad at this, and
| even regressed. A year ago I had to wake the phone, point
| it at my face, wait a second, then go to the home screen,
| open the app, wait a couple of seconds, then navigate to
| where I wanted to.
|
| Recently, lock screen widgets, shortcuts, and even some
| siri features have started to make this a little better.
| mek6800d2 wrote:
| In 2018, I read James M. Tabor's _Blind Descent: The Quest to
| Discover the Deepest Cave on Earth_ (pub. 2010), which
| particularly focused on Bill Stone 's and ALexander
| Klimchouk's respective explorations. (Contrary to perhaps
| popular understanding, as evidenced by an answer I saw on
| Quora that asserted that the temperature got hotter and
| hotter the farther Klimchouk's team descended in "their"
| cave, Stone's and Klimchouk's teams started out high in the
| mountains and temperatures were freezing throughout the
| descents; furthermore, Stone's and Klimchouk's deepest
| descents still ended above sea level. [The Quora _question_
| had something to do with digging deep into the earth.])
|
| Anyway, this was the first I'd read much about caving and, in
| browsing around the web, I discovered that Palm Pilots
| were(/are?) used by serious cavers for mapping caves. Auriga
| (https://auriga.top/) was the most frequently referenced Palm
| app I saw; its latest update was in December 2022. Obvious
| advantages as I understand them are: (1) long battery life
| coupled with _replaceable_ AAA batteries; (2) a display that
| can be read in low light without battery-draining
| backlighting. Phone and wi-fi are useless underground. (I
| vaguely recall reading somewhere that ~80Khz radios for use
| in caves were being developed; equally vague memory: I
| believe initial prototypes were based around audio amplifiers
| that happened to reach up into that frequency. Okay, a 2018
| Hackaday has links to more information, although not about
| what I [mis]remembered: https://hackaday.com/2018/07/11/ham-
| designed-gear-used-in-th...)
|
| Also, sometime I saw an article about automotive performance
| afficianados using a Palm App to interact with their engines'
| onboard computers -- in the PalmOS Emulator (POSE) on Windows
| laptops. Obviously they liked the app and I imagine they had
| a considerable intellectual investment (e.g., historical
| experimental settings and performance results, etc.) that
| made them loathe to switch to more modern apps.
|
| But yeah. I cleaned the battery crud out of my Palm M105 last
| month, put fresh batteries in, and the digitizer is shot. So,
| back to my phone ... :)
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| I don't use non-smartphone PDAs anymore, but I really miss:
|
| 1. Their ability to do absolutely everything offline. No need
| to worry that I won't be able to access something because
| somewhere without data service
|
| 2. The ability to have all the PDA features at my fingertips
| without being hooked up to the world's biggest attention-
| killing distraction network.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| Also the "search entire device" feature. It used to be so
| easy to find something across contacts, calendar, and
| memos.
| MikusR wrote:
| you just described an ordinary smartphone with wifi/data
| turned off.
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| I wish that were true, but unfortunately some apps do not
| seem to be designed well in the case of data being turned
| off.
| mcguire wrote:
| 3. For the "big 4" applications at least, the Palm was
| significantly faster and significantly more usable than
| anything I've seen on smartphones.
| walterbell wrote:
| Is there a recommended Palm device for modern use? What
| software do you use on Linux/Mac/Windows to sync the PDA?
| Cosi1125 wrote:
| http://www.jpilot.org/
| throwawayapples wrote:
| take your pick on Ebay but jPilot is still maintained and is
| a clone of the original Palm Pilot desktop. be sure to sign
| up for the mailing list.
| ckz wrote:
| Palm Desktop still works fine today on modern Windows, just
| have to grab USB drivers: https://palmdb.net/help/hotsync-
| setup
|
| On Linux there's pilot-link (command line) or J-Pilot (GUI on
| top of that). I don't love the UI for J-Pilot, admittedly,
| which feels a little rougher than Palm Desktop. A Windows VM
| is also a common approach.
|
| For devices, there's a dividing line between 68k and ARM.
|
| A 68k will feel more "classic" and will often get you things
| like AAA batteries and LCD grayscale screens with a bit of an
| e-ink vibe. Some models like Handsprings are expandable with
| more "modern" (for 2001) capabilities like extra storage, a
| camera, or GPS. Some Palm/Sony devices have SD slots too.
| Most devices of this age involve feature tradeoffs, however.
| You'll often find color, or AAA, or 16MB of RAM, but not all
| 3. For a 68k daily driver, you probably want something
| running OS3.5 or OS4 to avoid the limitations of the super
| early versions.
|
| ARM models (Tungstens, various Clies, Treos, etc.) close the
| gap with smartphones much more--and some literally were.
| Color, higher resolutions, lithium, media support, SD,
| bluetooth, wifi, etc. These run OS5+ and having ARM under the
| hood unlocks an additional class of apps the older ones can't
| run.
|
| A reminder also to definitely tune one's expectations to the
| era. Truly modern connectivity requires fiddling and having
| no-to-rudimentary HTTPS support can make these feel more
| disconnected today than they originally were. Still, you
| might also be surprised at how many daily tasks today were
| achievable 20 years ago in a way that's generally familiar to
| us now.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| > cannot be understated
|
| Seeing this a lot recently[1]. I guess you mean the opposite of
| what this implies ("his impact is less than you could state"),
| but I'm curious how this has ended up being almost as commonly
| used as the "correct" form[2]. Is it an in-joke or reference
| I'm not getting?
|
| 1:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cannot+be+understated%22+...
|
| 2:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=%22cannot+be+overstated%22+s...
| ckz wrote:
| Oof, and it's too late for me to go back and fix it (unless
| Dang would be so kind, for posterity).
|
| Definitely meant the positive version and I have no idea how
| I transposed those two! Apologies for contributing to the
| mess and appreciate you catching it. :)
| ttctciyf wrote:
| Oh, well your meaning is obvious from context, didn't mean
| to nitpick you but was just curious about the trend I seem
| to be observing, so apologies back :)
| lampiaio wrote:
| I parsed "cannot be understated" as "must not be
| understated", or "we cannot allow it to stay understated". I
| took it to mean a call to action, "this cannot be x!".
| user3939382 wrote:
| This is amazing! I'm super excited. I loved PalmOS.
| erkkonet wrote:
| Great writeup. For those interested in the subject there is also
| PumpkinOS (https://github.com/migueletto/PumpkinOS) with
| accompanying blog posts going in to details.
| c-smile wrote:
| I think that porting WinCE in the same manner would be more
| promising.
|
| That OS had was really a solid foundation, I have no idea why MS
| abandoned the project. To make modern UI layer on top of it and
| it may fly.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| From my experience "WinCE" and "solid" doesn't really belong in
| the same sentence. It felt like hodgepodge of various pieces
| outsourced to lowest bidder, with atrocious documentation. I
| don't know, maybe it was late stage decline and it was actually
| better in early versions (I only used WEC7). Why would they
| want to keep developing this instead of migrating to NT?
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Do it. sounds cool!
| c-smile wrote:
| I did UI part of it.
|
| Up until last year my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) worked on
| WinCE.
|
| Dropped support after my last customer that was using WinCE
| decided to drop support of that OS.
|
| WinCE had pretty solid and stable core runtime and API.
| Graphics was limited by GDI (no antialiasing and alpha
| channel) but that was the only major problem.
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