Stuff I Like: Piloting Palm
All Palm OS developers could benefit from reading about the history of the platform. Seeing the original struggles that brought the original Pilot to the market and knowing more about the tradeoffs in its design can only help us understand the platform better and produce products that mesh well with the "Zen of Palm".
The new book Piloting Palm is the first real exploration of the history of Palm and Handspring, following the team from the original Zoomer device build for Tandy and Casio through the release of the original Pilot 1000, and through the split that led to Handspring and the 3Com spinoff of Palm.
I've been reading this in e-book form from Palm Digital Media. E-books are good for everything, but for longer narative works with a good flow, I find it preferable to paper. The big disadvantage to this form is the lack of pictures; the dead tree edition has a section of pictures of the original prototypes. The irony of reading about the birth of the Palm OS platform on an advanced Palm OS device (my CLIE T615C) has raised my eyebrow from time to time.
The book does fail in some little ways. There's not enough discussion of the technology. They focus a lot on the business deals, but almost exclusively from Palm's side of things. Decisions like why Palm chose the original Dragonball and how they got developers onto the platform are only brushed upon. There's no mention of CodeWarrior or Metrowerks in the book, although the team here played a big part in getting developers onto the platform in the early days.
It is interesting reading this from an "insider" perspective. Roger Flores is mentioned as one of the early employees; I lost a game of air hockey against him at PalmSource 2002. A section talks about Palm's attempt to get investment from Motorola's paging group in 1994. I worked with those same people less than a year later in my first job out of school. After reading this book, you'll understand why the taxi cab easter egg became so infamous, and you'll know the reason behind the vchrRonamatic constant in Chars.h.
Update to Object Library Website
The Object Library for Palm OS website has been updated with a new look. They've also posted the 3.25.6 update to the library, this time fixing a grid drawing bug, and they have a new tutorial on using the library to make your own POL-based program.
Send feedback to combee@techwood.org
Copyright © 2004 Benjamin L. Combee
Palm OS is a registered trademark of PalmSource, Inc.
Metrowerks and CodeWarrior are registered trademarks of Metrowerks Inc.
The views expressed on this website/weblog are those of mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of PalmSource or Metrowerks.
qwertYAK / frobnovich
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