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Ask Slashdot: Where Can I Find Resources On Programming For Palm OS 5?
First time accepted submitter baka_toroi (1194359) writes I got a Tungsten E2 from a friend and I wanted to give it some life by programming for it a little bit. The main problem I'm bumping up against is that HP thought it would be awesome to just shut down every single thing related to Palm OS development. After Googling a lot I found out CodeWarrior was the de facto IDE for Palm OS development... but I was soon disappointed as I learned that Palm moved from the 68K architecture to ARM, and of course, CodeWarrior was just focused on Palm OS 4 development.
Now, I realize Palm OS 4 software can be run on Palm OS 5, but I'm looking to use some of the 'newer' APIs. Also, I have the Wi-fi add-on card so I wanted to create something that uses it. I thought what I needed was PODS (Palm OS Development Suite) but not only I can't find it anywhere but also it seems it was deprecated during Palm OS's lifetime. It really doesn't help the fact that I'm a beginner, but I really want to give this platform some life. Any general tip, book, working link or even anecdotes related to all this will be greatly appreciated.
Now, I realize Palm OS 4 software can be run on Palm OS 5, but I'm looking to use some of the 'newer' APIs. Also, I have the Wi-fi add-on card so I wanted to create something that uses it. I thought what I needed was PODS (Palm OS Development Suite) but not only I can't find it anywhere but also it seems it was deprecated during Palm OS's lifetime. It really doesn't help the fact that I'm a beginner, but I really want to give this platform some life. Any general tip, book, working link or even anecdotes related to all this will be greatly appreciated.
Don't waste your time. Learn iOS, Android or some other platform that isn't dead.
PalmOS is a rather antiquated system. No memory protection, no native multitasking, clunky APIs...
Depending on your personality type and the coding experience you have, it's either going to be a TON of fun, or you're going to want to smash and break things on the very first night.
Or maybe both. :) I don't have any pointers, but as a former Palm OS user, godspeed.
(Palm IIIxe from 2000-2005, Palm Treo 650 from 2005 to 2009)
http://www.rahul.net/flash/spu...
http://forums.delphiforums.com...
http://bit.ly/1As0ktG
Just let it go and sell it, and buy a raspberry pi with a touchscreen, its a lot of fun. Open source and a lot of docs.
Where can I learn how to send smoke signals?
It's hideously slow and limited by today's standards, the standards are horribly out of date (802.11b anyone?) the ten year old battery is surely shot, and the platform is dead, dead, dead.
If you're looking for a cheap hackable device, get a no-frills Android tablet. If you're looking to get into mobile development, get any decent smartphone.
Still, if you really want to work on that old Palm, you should still be able to find the Garnet OS Development Suite.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Writing ARM-native code on Palm OS 5 was never easy. I used prc-tools and Peal to write pssh (which needed ARM-native code for fast crypto and terminal emulation).
http://prc-tools.sourceforge.net
http://sealiesoftware.com/peal/
http://sealiesoftware.com/pssh/README.code
My local libraries all have tons of outdated (5- to 15-year-old) books on a variety of computer subjects. You just might get lucky and find the one you need at yours.
Or, check Amazon. Lots of people list lots of useless old books for basically nothing plus shipping. First hit for "palm os programming" is this meaty tome, from 2002, for 30 cents plus $3.99 shipping. Bang, zoom, $4.29 later, you're set. Palm OS Programming for Dummies, 22 cents plus $3.99. Whatever version you need is out there somewhere.
And they usually come with interactive CD-ROMs. Interactive, my friend. Check the descriptions on Amazon and make sure they're included.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Only one letter difference!
Put it in a museum.
You are 100% right in criticizing me. Actually, I wasn't expecting this to get to the frontpage.Nonetheless, I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?). I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.
Don't get me wrong, maybe they're right and I shouldn't spend/waste my time learning about a dead platform, but at least I'd like to hear their rationale.
I'm not an expert, but I thought Palm OS became webOS when HP took over... webOS isn't dead, lots of folks still coding for it and there are several phones still using it. and the good old hp touchpad uses(d) it. apps are still being written for it. I also seem to recall webOS going to open source shortly after HP dumped the tablet (http://www.openwebosproject.org/) . my suggestion is to look into that. then once you've filled up no that go check into iOS, and Android. then make your own choice about what to code... :D
You are 100% right in criticizing me. Actually, I wasn't expecting this to get to the frontpage.Nonetheless, I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?). I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.
Don't get me wrong, maybe they're right and I shouldn't spend/waste my time learning about a dead platform, but at least I'd like to hear their rationale.
Front page news.. lol
From an old limerick: ...
Latin is a dead language, dead as can be.
Some previous posts mention other current platforms. Try those. Palm is dead.
side note. a 2E that sill works? Mine died years ago.
NS Basic is still around and should be supported. Not free, but simple and powerful enough...
I'm pretty sure they were written in cuneiform on clay tablets, so you might want to learn the language of the Anunnaki
I might be wrong. Maybe they were written in Middle Egyptian on papyrus.
Either way, you could start by asking a very very old nerd. If you can find an old pay phone, wait for someone with long greasy grey hair to pick it up and start whistling into it. Make sure you have some jelly worms on hand, but not the green ones.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Come back in 10 years when it can be called a "classic" platform.
It was great in it's time (esp the Palm III in 1999)
But it's time is over it is really hard to program compared to more modern systems.
I moved onto Windows Mobile and later Android years ago.
You should too.
If you want to work on something that is 'different' might I suggest SL4a or Android NDK.
Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?).
The Amigas are outdated. However the stories are warmly recieved, because Amiga has been popular, and lots of people still have one in their basement. Palm OS wasn't this popular. People love their Amigas, Amiga became a part of culture. This has many reasons, not just popularity. The fanboy group for Palm OS is smaller but I doubt it doesn't exist. Its not mainstream culture though.
I don't know why you shouldn't "waste" your time learning about a dead platform. As long as you see it as your hobby. Some people like reenactments, and dress in historic uniforms to "play" historic battles. Others know every part of the steam engines used from 1860 to 1892 by Santa Fe. So why not Palm OS?
I had the same happen with Codewarrior for Sharp Zaurus. Metrowerks was sold and Freescale erased all traces of it. Can't be found anywhere, legit or warez. I even contacted Freescale and they said they looked everywhere they could, but they said it was nowhere. Gone forever
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
If someone would code that for iOS i'd pay. It was the best to-do list application ever.
Apple's Reminder's is so useless I can't imagine why any effort was expended coding it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Reach out to me.
Once my phone went off and an older man next to me began roaring with laughter when he heard the Treo ring tone. Ah well, it was great in its day.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
See, old stuff that *they* like is important. Working on that stuff is a great idea.
Working on old stuff that they don't care about is clearly a waste of time.
Anyhow, here's a start for you: GCC PRC-Tools Which is likely what you want. Ron's Obsolete Palm OS Computing Information Page has a working link to HotPaw, which is better than nothing.
You'll also want to take advantage of the Wayback Machine to see what's behind all the dead links you're surely running in to.
Required reading for internet skeptics
http://libgen.org/get.php?md5=B658CD6D4A26F599478993F83079894C
http://libgen.org/get.php?md5=F4D0F2F5AC2DB3555FEDBC7DF89F0EEF
http://libgen.org/get.php?md5=a93f90a844c7f3441e654c5d07b26502
http://libgen.org/get.php?md5=0BA17A0070FE2E28F0B89E67B61F8479
http://libgen.org/get.php?md5=2c4ae6771b743bd1db165899d3398548
You are 100% right in criticizing me. Actually, I wasn't expecting this to get to the frontpage.Nonetheless, I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?). I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.
Don't get me wrong, maybe they're right and I shouldn't spend/waste my time learning about a dead platform, but at least I'd like to hear their rationale.
Because Amiga, C64, Early DOS and UNIX's were great and successful. For me, all that stuff was my childhood and messing around with it is like going to a garage sale and finding my old favorite GI Joe figure or something. PalmOS5 failed right out of the gate. There's nothing to be nostalgic about.
If you want to do some cool hobby stuff (and I don't blame you, I do that sort of thing all the time) I recommend the following:
RaspberryPI or one of the several 3rd party variants out there: It's basically a small PC with a UART (hardware interface with buttons) You can turn it into a media player, an Audio DSP, a "car computer" whatever you can think of.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Arduino is a micro controller. Not to be confused with the RPI. An arduino will teach you how to solder :-)
You can run scripts written in C, and control lights, relays, sensors, etc... You can build something that automatically waters your garden, turns on your lights, feeds your pets... basically anything you can script.
http://www.arduino.cc/
AX84 is a website that has a host of amplifier projects. They are all tube based. Why tube? Well a lot of us think it sounds better, but that's a long argument. Even if they don't, it's how electronics started and if you want to know how things were done originally... and why that lead to how things are done now, Tubes are a great way to start. It's like learning to build a campfire by rubbing 2 sticks together. Yea, you could just throw a road flare on a dead tree, but somethings are just worth doing the old way. If you're not a musician, there's a Stereo amp near the bottom.
http://www.ax84.com/sel.html
Then there's steam engines... There's no collective site for that, but I've done them and they are fun. No codding involved unless you count the valves ;-)
These are super fun though. Imagine a device that can generate power from any source of heat. Even mirrors reflecting the sun. I recommend starting on youtube.
Anyways, there are lots of "useless" projects you can do that will have a far larger community and be far less of a waste of time in the end. Good luck.
If you have to go to Slashdot to use Google for you, you'll never be capable of mastering the toolchain, much less learn the arcane bullshit necessary to run native ARM code on a Palm device.
NT: Let it go man. It is over.
Thats an OSNews kind of question. Ask it there, you'll get a better response.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Come on, if they do the job, who cares. It's like wanting Mozart over Bach because Mozart is "newer". They are both dead worm food. (Please, no music "decomposing" jokes.)
Table-ized A.I.
This is a really great post, I really appreciate it. Even though I've read about the RPI and Arduino I never thought about doing something with them. The Arduino particularly interests me but I'm not sure what I would do with it. Thanks!
It's free from http://windows.novellshareware... . There are also other app-building tools out there. When I had a Palm, I used several programs from Tealpoint Software. Their web page is dead tonight, but the Google cache copy from yesterday shows dates from 2013. Perhaps your question provoked a huge run on Palm software and their server couldn't handle the load. https://webcache.googleusercon... Palm had the best calendar program (DateBk, not to be confused with DateBook) I've ever used on any platform.
Since you're a C guy, there's http://onboardc.sourceforge.net/ that compiles right on the Palm Pilot. A bit tough by modern standards, if there's an API call you want that's not in the standard header file you have to find the ROM address for it and put it in yourself.
Much easier but of course limited is http://smallbasic.sourceforge.net/ which runs on Palm OS and has a lot of little games in the forums.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
The palm os is good and dead, kinda too bad palm chased their tails for so long increasing performance to what people wanted. That e2 is worth a couple bucks at best. As I remember the best things for it was Dreadling (port of wolfenstein), and the liberty gameboy emulator (gambit). Programming is going to be very very painful. If you want to program on some "vintage 1990" electronics, maybe try a arduino and learn some c++. The old 8bit atmega has a great 1990 feel to it.
At first I was like, not worth it. Go get Android.
Then I thought that lots of people would say that. And it sounds a little dickish.
Then I googled the Tungsten E2. Released: 2005. Ugh. Not worth it. Go get Android.
Then I thought hey, maybe this guy just wants to do some tinkering/fun programming. Like I used to do back in the day. And that distant little of spark excitement alights.
Then I thought: Holy shit, somebody is actually using Slashdot for its intended purpose!
I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?).
That's nostalga kicking in. The Amiga was an amazing piece of technology back in the day; a powerful, multimedia capable, grown-up computer for those who cut their teeth on the Commodore 64 and Vic-20 computers. A last generation, PalmOS 5 based PDA is not going to tug at the nostalga heartstrings. Furthermore, the warmly received stories are about people who have accomplished something with the old hardware, who have gotten their machines to do something above and beyond what people thought they were capable of; not stories about noobs who dug their dad's old computer out of the attic and are trying to get it going again.
I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.
I think there is a parallel phenomenon to XKCD's Today's Ten Thousand. It is a lot easier to say "You're doing it the wrong way", than to try to understand what you might be trying to actually do, and provide guidance accordingly. Sadly, when people do that, both you and they miss out on a little piece of life.
Consider why you are doing what you want to do. I know it can be exciting to get a free whatever, and spend lots of time trying to get that whatever running. It can seem like a golden opportunity, but it can be a really easy way to waste a boatload of time. If you are not locked in to getting the Tungsten E2 going; if it is just an excuse to get into programming something, perhaps you should consider something like the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino, or the BASIC Stamp. These systems are meant for hacking, have active user and developer communities, boast loads of open source software, and are relatively cheap, as opposed to the closed source, unhackable Tungsten E2.
Having said that, I don't have any concrete advice to give you. I have never done any programming for portable devices, although I used a Handspring Visor regularly up until a few years ago when the case fell apart. PalmOS was already considered dead before that point. Perhaps you could try the Wayback Machine for some leads.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I don't know why you shouldn't "waste" your time learning about a dead platform.
I think the only reason why not is that time is a finite and limited commodity and if you spend it on one thing then you can't spend it on another thing.. people are saying if you're going to learn something new and arcane you might as well learn something that they deem more applicable. this is ultimately them speaking about their own life limitations like kids or what not; obviously you (you, the submitter not you the parent) are the only one who can make that decision about yourself. But I believe that this answers the question that you (you, the GP, also you, the submitter) posed about the rationale.
my personal reaction is that it's a horrifically extravagant use of precious spare time, much like buying solid gold cat toys is an extravagant use of discretionary income. but I'm speaking from my own life situation.
And a lot of the comments on slashdot nowadays are just graduates of digg or reddit or what have you.
This has the exact same nostalgia factor as a c64, amiga, apple ii, old atari, bbc micro, etc.
Additionally the lack of memory protection will likely make you less sloppy than the average java 'hack' here, since if they fuck up their app crashes, but if you fuck up the whole system goes down.
Additionally: This is one of the few recent Ask Slashdot's that really emphasizes what Ask Slashdots used to be: Crowdsourcing help for something that was esoteric enough that the only way you'll pull it off is getting lucky and grabbing some institutional knowledge or maybe code/developer resources from people who... *ACTUALLY DEVELOPED FOR IT*.
As to the rest of you, thanks for bringing slashdot down to the level of the rest of the internet, 'editors' included :)
To defend the Amiga: People held on to their Amiga's as long as possible.
This was not true of any PDA. Sure I can still turn on my Windows CE devices and maybe goof around with a gameboy emulator on it, but the amount of effort required just to get it into working shape is substantial (1. Sync software, 2. Proprietary cables) just to get started may require loading a virtual machine with Windows 95, and you'd need a USB to Serial port cable.
Where as to get the Amiga running, you just flip the switch, and assuming the CRT monitor still works, off you go. Your only other option is a CRT TV with analog connections.
The thing is, technology moves on, becomes less power intensive, and more powerful. People still hang on to PC's with 5.25" drives because they *might* want to retrieve data they worked on 20 years ago, or they kept their tax records on, or something of that nature. But for all intents, you may as well just copy all the data from all the disks to a flash drive, and re-copy to new drives every 3 months if you have your heart set on preserving it forever. Then just emulate the original hardware. You can emulate anything up to a Pentium 200Mhz on a modern PC without needing virtualization extensions. Then there is also M-disc http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/ which will last quite a while, but is only supported by drives using LG's parts, and LG's pretty awful at reliabilty. If you're going to save stuff to mdisc, you may as well buy two drives, and never open one of them.
You misspelled the word 'cult' in your post.
It's true that the PalmOS devices weren't owned by a lot of people in their adolescence, and the developers for PalmOS were much more similar to those into Mobile development (in it for the money, not the enjoyment of hacking code), so PalmOS don't have the same sort of cachet.
PalmOS in earlier versions would be much easier to find resources for; the Dragonball processor was fairly popular in it's day, and you can reach out to all the 68K platforms to a degree. Still, a Dragonball developer I knew back then referred to it as "Draggin' Balls."
The Arduino is cool because you can 'steal' from it's software stack so easily. That is, you can buy one of the low end boards that has a socketed Atmel processor and treat it like a development board/part burner. Then, the stuff you 'develop' on it you can fork off from the overpriced Arduino hardware by just unplugging the processor chip out of the board and onto your own perfboard circuit.
Just to be clear: my intention wasn't to bash the Amiga, at all. I never owned it but most of the stuff I saw on it was mind-blowing for the technology of that time. I love listening to Module files (MODs).
I don't know why you shouldn't "waste" your time learning about a dead platform.
I think the only reason why not is that time is a finite and limited commodity and if you spend it on one thing then you can't spend it on another thing.. people are saying if you're going to learn something new and arcane you might as well learn something that they deem more applicable. this is ultimately them speaking about their own life limitations like kids or what not; obviously you (you, the submitter not you the parent) are the only one who can make that decision about yourself. But I believe that this answers the question that you (you, the GP, also you, the submitter) posed about the rationale.
my personal reaction is that it's a horrifically extravagant use of precious spare time, much like buying solid gold cat toys is an extravagant use of discretionary income. but I'm speaking from my own life situation.
It's not *your* "spare time" he's wasting, is it? How often do you watch TV? What a waste of "precious spare time". Do you have other hobbies, surf, ride a bike, etc? What a waste of "precious spare time" you could be using to write new software for iOS or Android (both of which might be gone themselves in a decade - geez, what a waste of precious spare time...).
Honestly, there must be something else you could do in your precious spare time rather than programming... you could volunteer at the local homeless shelter, help an old lady across the street, etc.
perhaps time is cyclical good luck
A quick search shows that, at one point at least, you could run linux on it. Not very useful, but it's still mildly interesting.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
As an "old" mobile developer from the early Palm days who still has CodeWarrior on his Windows XP VM so I can still compile old Palm code if necessary I say, "Hell no!". I loved Palm development in its day and I can't bring myself to delete the VM that holds it, but you'd have to pay me $200 an hour to develop with it again.
Try onboardc which is an onboard c compiler for palm... basically you can program the palm in c from the palm. How cool is that ?
Linkedin http://in.linkedin.com/in/robinsaikatchatterjee
I think much like many tech groups I "grew up with", slashdot has gone from a large number of high school and university students hacking stuff in their basement to predominately professionals working out in industry. Some of the "hacker spirit" has vanished and been replaced by practicality, and you see these kinda responses to projects we all probably would have found cool 10 years ago.
I'll admit that even I have fallen into this kinda thinking. I find myself approaching my hobby stuff the same way I approach a problem at work, and sometimes it worries me. I miss the old me who thought he could rewrite everything "a billion times better".. the current me that acknowledges maturity as a vital component of systems engineering is kinda dull at times.
I too have a tungsten E2, and I even did a little programming for it. As others have said, it's a really shitty platform and equally shitty device. That said, sometimes it's fun to get old stuff working for the hell of it. The problem you will run into is exactly what you are seeing.. the documentation, tools, and community that would have helped immensely is mostly gone. Don't really have much in the way of advice. Archive.org might help, but chances arr you are going to have to re-learn or just plain discover on your own how to make shit work.
Check out Code Project - lots of great articles on Palm programming: http://www.codeproject.com/sea...
Go to Sourceforge - it may take a while to pick through the weeds, but you should find some useful projects to examine the code:
http://sourceforge.net/directory/os%3Apalmos/?q=palm&sort=update
C programming for Palm: http://onboardc.sourceforge.ne...
http://www.vb-helper.com/review_palm_ides.html -- a review of Palm IDEs - may give you some ideas
http://porganizer.sourceforge.net/ -- Palm Organizer has the essential files for creating a Palm program if you look at the bottom of the page
Try the 1stSource forums, check out the menu on the left for various Palm models and you'll be sure to find some useful info:
http://www.1src.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=156
For some fun - and perhaps some code to review:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phoinix/ -- Gameboy emulator for Palm
http://sourceforge.net/projects/palmapple/?source=recommended -- Apple II emulator for Palm
More emulators to consider: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2004/...
http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.html -- Atari ST emulator
http://frodopalm.sourceforge.n... -- commodore 64 emulator
Good luck and have fun!
Also, look at the beagle bone. These are about $50 and they come with analog i/o and digital i/o, but unlike a micro controller, they run a full operating system (linux). Lots of fun!
from 1998!!
--Good morning fellas; Hand me that thing; Boy, this work's hard; Guys, break's over.
Take a look at some Palm code.
If the hideous restrictions and limits there don't put you off, then find out what they recommend to compile.
Flashy IDE's probably aren't going to be easy to find, there weren't many around in the first place and the majority of stuff I know is just command-line compilers which can plug into any IDE (if you're brave enough).
All I remember of Palm coding was having to break C files into tiny parts, jam them together and hope the individual object files never went over a certain size because the linker had to play all kinds of tricks to load them.
Take a look at something like this:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org...
The base code of which is generally easy to port (Simon Tatham's PORTABLE Puzzle Collection). That Palm version is quite a pain to compile even with the right tools.
SDK available here:
http://gl.access-company.com/p...
Perhaps next time you will read the acquisition history for the software you are trying to find in the Wikipedia article, and then go to the OpenSource/Downloads section of the company website for the current owner of the technology yourself?
Why not short cut it even further and buy a $10 including shipping clone from China?
They're all over ebay and aliexpress
and unlink the Raspberry Pi, it has a modern Cortex ARM CPU instead of a 12 year old ARMv6, and a PRU to do real-time hardware interfacing if you need it.
or get a girlfriend. Oh wait, this is slashdot.
I found a copy of the Palm 5r3 SDK here:
http://www.mediafire.com/downl...
Didn't download this myself, so I don't know if the docs are in there too.
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.
I would really have liked a PalmOS cart for my Nintendo DS ; the form factor would have made it an awesome little organizer, it had a touch screen, etc, and the CPU power would probably have been good enough to run the original OS ROMs in an emu.
There were rumours of it happening (maybe I even started them by discussing it on BBs...) but alas, it never came to be.
One thing I really liked about the PalmOS stuff, which other software suites took ages to catch up with, was the way they all integrated. Some of the things that make me go "Oh, cool!" in Android apps now are the sort of things that PalmOS had 16 years ago.
> You are 100% right in criticizing me
No. If you have a Palm and want to code for it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that - and I find the reactions here very strange and un-slashdotlike. It doesn't matter if it's a good machine or not, or if you have fond childhood memories of it or not. If you happen to have something that can be explored and programmed, and you feel like doing it, great. How is reading a book or trying out some other hobby (as others suggested) in any way "better"?
Why strange? I had a Palm, and it was basically a piece of crap even back in the day. Once the novelty wore off, and after losing all the metrics of a project, and on top of that, having a netbook issued by the company, it was basically a deadweight. Back in the day, I did not even understand why my consulting firms was burning resources developing for it.
but if you want wifi, the Raspberry Pi works, the Beagle is a crapshoot because they got the impedance of the usb port wrong.
Maybe it isn't rotten yet.
He is trying to learn a language. It is just a dead language!
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
PalmOS was more popular than the Amiga. At one point about 90% of smartphones were based on Palm software, and by 2000 they had already sold more than 7 million units--compared to roughly 6 million Amigas across its entire lifetime.
The only Commodore computer that outsold Palm was the Commodore 64, with 22 million units. The main reason Amiga seems like a much larger influence than Palm is that overall computer sales were so much smaller when it was active. 6M computers in the late 80's/early 90's was a lot. Smartphones are already shipping over 250M units a year.
The main difference in OS5 was the addition of "PNOlets", chunks of native ARM code. Chapter 14.
It's still tricky. When I ported Palm's OS4 emulator to Android, I had to do some library coding and tracking down sample source code was... nontrivial. Definitely look for open-source Palm programs, like pssh, and learn from them.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
A fairly complete API reference: http://icmp.ru/man/programming...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I wrote an app almost 10 years ago . Just looked through the code a bit. It says "Build with PRC-Tools 2.0 and Palm OS SDK 4.0 or better". Written all in C++. Most of my work I did in a simple text editor. Not in an IDE. And I used makefiles I wrote myself and a command-line to compile the lot. I remember compiling for the m68k mostly because that would cover all our potential customers. But there was already ARM support in the works... until we just dropped it. We had too few sales to warrant further development. Not that our version for WinCE PDAs was doing any better, by the way. A couple of years later the first IPhone was released. And for that platform we still develop and sell.
There was partial support for C++ in 'recent' versions of PRC tools... classes and use of new and delete, and if you really wanted them, exceptions and RTTI. But no STL, streams... I wrote a file io and string class to keep the back-end code compatible (we had a significant chunk of back-end code already written in C/C++ and used it in apps for many platforms).
Also you had to manually segment your code for Palm OS because there was a fixed code segment size (my app used five code segments and I had to specify for each function in which code ). Long function calls were used to make the segments interact and you had to keep in mind to use them as little as possible because, although the compiler did the work of adding those long function calls for you, they still incurred a performance hit.
I finally retired my company Palm M515 two years ago when I got a second hand HTC HD2 from a friend (and promptly updated it with CyanogenMod). I managed to save most of my (calender, notes, contacts) data and it's now part of the Google cloud...
It was fun to program for that platform, I learned a lot from it but I would say, in this day and age, it's utterly useless to start a new project for it. I would recommend Android over iOS, if you just want to make a mobile app. Although Apple's tools (XCode) are better IMHO, you can do a lot more with Android and the apps you make for them before you have to spend money on it (AFAIK the only thing Google asks is a $25 one-time fee if you want to publish on the play store and you can always side-load for 'homebrew'). And you can develop and compile an Android app on a variety of computer hard- and software platforms, while a recent Apple (i)Mac(book/mini) is required to make iOS apps.
If you're really adamant to create a PalmOS app, get yourself PRC-tools, cygwin and a 'recent' PalmOS SDK and you might actually manage to get a working app. Time-stamps of my versions are of april 2004 so I do not have the final versions... Also, the PalmOS 4 emulator and/or PalmOS 5 simulator, with roms and of course the full Palm desktop suite installed on your machine so you can make backups and install .PRC's on your PDA. Did I forget anything else (except for the fact some of these are a bit difficult to find on the 'net).
Ow, yes, there is a PalmOS developer suite for PalmOS 5 and 6, using Eclipse and a lot of integrated goodies. A 250MB sized beastie... but I haven't got the faintest clue where to get it nowadays.
If a developer is scared to cross to any platform because they don't want to be multi-lingual, they're doing it wrong.
An application can be separated into logic and presentation, or model and view, however your framework prefers to describe them. A program may require separate presentation for each platform, but versions of a program for multiple platforms should ideally share the logic. But some platforms strongly recommend or even require use of certain languages. How can a programmer follow the rule of not repeating yourself to share logic across languages? Say I developed a game in Java or Objective-C but I want to port it to a Microsoft platform that allows only C#. (In theory it allows any language that compiles to verifiably type-safe .NET Compact Framework bytecode, but in practice that means C#.) How would I go about making and maintaining that port so that fixes to defects in the logic of the version on the original platform propagate to the version on the Microsoft platform ?
Don't waste your time with that old piece of junk. Get a new piece of junk instead, with a community behind it.
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Oh, you're the author of that ?
Thank you, man.
I used your soft back then and liked it !
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There are people who can help, but they're not on slashdot. Try usenet (comp.sys.palmtaops, perhaps) or IRC (#hairypalms). A lot of niche groups have a presence but not on the web and definitely not on slashdot.
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I've used OrbForms - it's a pretty easy to use IDE with simple GUI development. It is much easier than CodeWarrior (which I have also used). www.orbworks.com
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Care to explain why you think it was a piece of crap back in the day? I found 2 reasons: lack of stability and really bad web browser, but I also reckon most mobile browsers were bad. Windows Mobile (6.5 and downwards) was much worse in my opinion.
Windows mobile/CE is much worse, I actually threw a Windows CE based GPS out of the window of my car, and bought another Linux based on the very same day. As for Palm, ugly, slow, cumbersome use except for the writing recognition, no command line interface ;) and really no incentive to program the darn thing; no manuals...I was used to have all the ROM listings, Spectrum, XT, AT, name it. And losing everything due to battery failure was not funny. I also ended up backing it up with linux in command line, as the official software was horrible. Nevertheless the thing lasted for ages, and it was the first time, with it paired with my phone that I used IRC and www while in the go.
We have all the resources needed for OS/2 Warp. http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Main_Page
If you wanted to write code for a clumsy dead platform, why not the Apple Newton? Far cooler and more interesting. At least the Newton is the same CPU architecture.... just with a much better OS, 2 PCMCIA slots and a bigger screen.
Hell, even the Atari 8-bit is more interesting than a piece of crap from Palm.
Seriously, PalmOS sucks. I've written a couple things for it in the past and I wish I hadn't.
You know I hate to burst your fanboy bubble but Palm was easily 10x more popular than commodores, just by looking at sales numbers. I've got various Ataris(8/16b jag lynx) myself, but even though I LIKE them, the palm is just more practical/useful today. I've got some old 68030 and early ppc macs as well and even though some of those are more useful than ataris/commodores/apple //s I don't really use them much but plan to eventually when I have room dedicate a room for them to be up and potentially running and usable. So to date I haven't bought much beyond stock or what I had for the ones that I had from when I was kid, now IF I had them setup today, sure those various compact flash adapter boards and ethernet boards for some of them(that don't already have OTS boards or builtin support) I might be interested, but actually using them to program or anything? Nah. Their day is done. I haven't even bothered to emulate them in years.
Additionally, arguably a palm(well, let's say back to the IIIs) are still a useful portable device.
Did alot of q&d prototyping with onboardc. There's onboardpascal as well.
They also had some pretty nifty database applications as well, and the device served me as my first(and only) ereader for many many years(nice mono screen, the nice backlight, LENGTHY batt life on alkalines(I too only got maybe 2w with the oldschool NiMHs)). I'd probably still be using a palm IIIx as an ereader had I not dropped it a few years back and cracked a corner of the screen even though I also had various "dedicated" devices, ebookman(backlit 16MB version), rocket(RCA) reader, sony prs505, kobo touch/wifi, B&N nook touch, and finally a kindle paperwhite(not really unless you blast the backlight in a DARK room o.w. it's just same old eink w/a bit higher res). The eink readers are nice, but bulky compared to the palms and I don't care for color screens for reading for a variety of reasons, primarily utterly useless is sunlight/very bright light.
Of course now with dedicated eink devices being so much cheaper today the cheap value of breaking a palm(plus extent of supply although it looks like someone found a good stock of m100s/105s/etc and Txs but...) v. an ereader(remember I'm talking when they were $2-300 a pop not the $90 paperwhite(or even much less used) and the like...).
I even tried other non-reader specific devices such as various older wince, VTECH Helio, Agenda VR3s, etc. but always ended back up with my trusty Palm IIIx until that fateful day(took me a few years to get around to tracking down and buying a decent condition replacement IIIx as I either couldn't find the replacement screens that were available for a while or they weren't quite as nice as the original screen been a while).
Forth: Quartus: are they nuts?! $100 for it?!
It is a special kind of hell. With embedding ARM binaries into MC68K code, creating special call gates with endian conversion to call it, and pretty much being unable to call back into MC68K code. Palm OS 5 is a huge pile of excrement.
So then add a short USB cable. If you're building something for production, then make a custom board. Beagle Bone is a fine product to have fun with.
You can use "Pocket C" which was made for earlier versions of PalmOS but works on later ones.
I used it for a quick serial port talking program.
http://www.orbworks.com/pcpalm/
Lots of advice instead of actually answering his question.
As a general comment... it's pretty funny that this wouldn't be an issue, since they complied with the GPL as they were required to do, and published their sources.
Only the politics of Open Source is such that the projects that they published the changes for were not updated to include the changes, because they felt that it was not their responsibility to update their projects to include someone else's changes to their projects. They felt, instead, that it was the responsibility of the people making the changes to join their projects, and then make the changes with the editorial oversight of the community.
This is somewhat ironic, since they wouldn't have published the sources in the first place, if it hadn't been for the license.
So it's interesting to me that you can more or less not comply with the license by complying with it, and that the license is only effective for however long your product and company are around, and, if not picked up by the community to be carried forward, get lost after a short period of time, even if the company continues to exist.
I guess I wonder if it's legal to sell remaindered product (or used product) without offering the sources, per the terms of the license, or if, after that period of time, the products become illegal to transfer the binary licenses, since the originators are no longer around, and you cant appeal to them in order to get around your personal obligation, as the seller/reseller, to make the sources available any more (but you, as the middleman, failed to take advantage of the offer while it was possible to do so).
Probably, projects need to be a little less pissy about integrating third party changes, fixes, and extensions back into their main line.
[Online games and offline apps] are mutually exclusive.
True. Should I have instead split the two scenarios into separate comments?
An offline application can't know that validation has changed or there is an app update because it's offline. At that point, what do you do, toss out any data the user entered while they were offline?
In the case of an application with a substantial offline component, the server would handle the current version of the client and at least one previous version.
Even if I follow your approach, when the client and server versions mismatch because the user was offline they'll get the same pages of errors.
Granted, the user may see a few errors when server version n communicates with client n - 1, mostly related to the (hopefully small) schema changes between n - 1 and n. But ideally, this should introduce far fewer errors than if there had been no client-side pre-validation at all.
Boy, I hope your QA team has a large alcohol budget and the world's largest whiteboard for their validation testing matrix.
It's a bit easier when the testing matrix is a band matrix. If X is the client version and Y the server, the server only needs to gracefully handle a small number of client versions.
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http://adventure.howstuffworks... Well, you did ask... ;)
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