Posts tagged: PALM

I bought my Palm TX in December 2005, a few months after it came out. In my blog post where I weighed the pros and cons of the device and the platform, I grumbled that “Palm has successfully crushed any optimism I might have had for fixes appearing in the form of a free, downloadable OS upgrade.” My grumpy intuition was right – in fact, the Palm platform has pretty much just stagnated since that time, punctuated with spastic feints toward Linux that you can read about elsewhere or in my old Palm-related posts.

Palm has announced the Foleo laptop-ish-device, which they are pitching as a smartphone enhancer. Interesting turnabout from the days of the original Pilot, which was pitched as a “Connected Organizer” that was dependent on your computer. The Foleo is a computer designed to be dependent on your phone.

I’m adding a reminder alarm (into my Palm TX, naturally) for 3 years from today, to go buy one of these on eBay for $75 and put Linux on it!

I’ve created an updated Plucker version of the Python Library Reference for Python 2.5. It weighs in at 1.7MB, a bit fatter than the last one mostly because I tweaked the spidering depth to keep deeply nested pages from being skipped. All twelve of you who have an interest in such a thing can find it here:

It took me about a year to get around to it, but I finally set up that nightly cronjob to fetch the Django documentation into a Plucker file. (Note that if you don’t have a handheld with a Plucker reader, or aren’t closely following Django, this is of no use to you. Sorry. The intersection of those two sets is not very large.)

In addition to the current documentation pages, it includes the Trac Timeline, posts from the Community page, and the latest Django Book chapters. (Django team, let me know if I’m spidering anything I shouldn’t be.)

Today, ACCESS, a Japanese company that acquired PalmSource (not to be confused with Palm, which… oh, never mind) earlier this year, announced that they will be absorbing the PalmSource brand. Probably a good thing.

I’ve been a Palm user for about seven years now, and have done my share of pontificating and pondering their fate, but I hadn’t really read up on the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP). The summary on their website mostly made my eyes glaze over (“standards-based software architecture … best-in-class … combined technology portfolios …”) until I got to this part:

As a Palm-wielding Python guy, I took news of the Python port for the iPod as another cruel slap. I use Pippy, but being Python 1.5.2 it’s pretty limited. The increased power (and screen real estate) of the TX over previous Palms I’ve had has made me more desirous of having an actual programming environment. There are ports for Zaurus, EPOC, and Nokia Series 60 phones (which I mentioned last summer). It’s sinking in that things aren’t likely to change until the faraway Linux-based PalmOS arrives.

I’m living happily with my Palm TX, but I’m already thinking about what comes next. (It would be nice to have a multitasking operating system.)

There has always been a lot of overlap between the Mac and Palm worlds. The original developers were Apple refugees. I know this is facile, but as I look at what has passed and what’s been announced for the future, I start drawing parallels between Apple’s operating systems and Palm’s: