Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf](cs.uml.edu) |
Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf](cs.uml.edu) |
I have noted many times that I had a slab phone with full screen color icon grid general purpose os with internet and countless 3rd party apps for every conceivable purpose,... 7 full years before the iphone. 8 years before the iphone had 3rd party apps.
And it wasn't Android it was a Samsung SPH-i300 running PalmOS.
It was great that there was not really much of an app store, you got apps individually more or less like desktop os apps. There might have been app stores that collected apps but I don't remember ever using any.
I had apps for everything the same as today. Even though the screen was only like 160x240 and the internet was 14.4k, I had browser & email of course, but also ssh, irc, I even had a vnc client! Audible.com player, countless random things like a netmask calculator, resistor color code app, a few different generic db apps where you design your own fields and input/display screens etc. 3rd party phone dialer that integrated the contacts db. I must be forgetting a hundred other things.
The OS wasn't open source but at least the apps could be, so pretty much like windows & mac.
All in all I'd prefer Android where the entire system is open, except Google has somehow managed to make the real world life with Android less open than PalmOS was, even though PalmOS wasn't open source and I think even the development system wasn't free either.
I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.
Metrowerks CodeWarrior was the original development system for PalmOS and was indeed not free (in either sense).
However a bunch of enthusiasts cobbled together some free development tools: the main parts were adapting the GCC and binutils m68k targets to PalmOS's constrained PIC runtime environment (it was constrained even by m68k standards); a tool to convert the resulting COFF or ELF executable to PalmOS's .prc database format; and a text-based resource compiler for generating UI elements using its own home-grown description language to express what CodeWarrior users were using a graphical UI editor to make.
That mostly still exists as it was back in the PalmOS days at <https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net>. And if you hunt around on GitHub you'll find a few people who've kept the code compiling with stricter more modern compilers.
(And see also <https://pilrc.sourceforge.net> for the resource compiler.)
I don't think this in itself is the cause. Basically every Linux distribution has an "official repository" which is really just an app store by another name, but the system is still open. Having an integrated distribution channel is really useful!
But somehow google play is different, which is why I added the highly integrated part.
I think fdroid actually helps google play by going so far the other direction that it excludes most apps, so you cannot have fdroid as your only app store. (to be clear I highly approve of fdroids policy and would not change it)
But there are even other app stores that cover both bases, allowing all the non free apos from play store and yet not being google. But then the problem is trust. I trust the apps in say the ubuntu repos and in fdroid, but say Aurora store? ehh, maybe? I would normally not even slightly consider installing apks from a 3rd party like that, but I got an eink tablet that can't install google play, so was more or less forced to try it just on that device. But that's not my phone. I don't have or do anything important or sensitive on it.
So while I am still sure that Google is doing multiple things that keep play store practically unavoidable necessity, it's probably also a combination of other, kind of coincidental factors too like fdroids strict principles and no obvious basis to trust any other store. Maybe some of those other factors are not immutable.
Maybe it's just an impression thing or a failure of marketing and Aurora is exactly the answer and exactly as trustworthy as any official major linux distro repo, and I just don't have that impression for some reason.
There are 2 principle reasons for this project: 1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE) 2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)
Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.
PalmOS designers & engs (along with MS WebTV / Danger Sidekick folks) ended up working on early Android (Astro Boy / Bender / Petit Four etc), and there's a lot of parallels between the two.
Calling Mark: (power on) (phone key) M-A (send) - hitting the phone key automatically brought up the dialer, which did double duty as contact search.
Adding a new event to the calendar: (power on) (calendar key) (enter) - and just start typing; you could navigate the fields with the up and down arrows.
Opening the calculator: (power on) (home key) C-A (enter) - the launcher was filterable with the keyboard.
I had a Treo 600 and and then 650 from around 2003 until 2007 when the iPhone came out. The 600 was among the best devices I've ever had. Rock solid, did exactly what it said it did. The 650 would crash randomly just sitting there. Not quite as bad as a Windows phone of the era, but a substantial regression.
“Minimize Taps
Most information about that data should be accessible in a minimal number of taps of the stylus — one or two.
Desktop user interfaces are typically designed to display commands as if they were used equally. In reality, some commands are used very frequently while most are used only rarely. Similarly, some settings are more likely to be used than others. On Palm Powered handhelds, more frequently used commands and settings should be easier to find and faster to execute.
• Frequently executed software commands should be accessible by one tap.
• Infrequently used or dangerous commands may require more user action.”
https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424...
iOS shares many similarities with Palm OS, such as the home screen layout of app icons, the use of full-screen apps without windowing, the absence of an explicit "quit" action, no exposed file system (obvious today, but bold back in those days), a single hardware button to return "home", and so on.
What iOS added is true preemptive multitasking, memory protection, multitouch gestures, physics-based scrolling and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
I remember the Giraffe game to learn it.
Apple could put the technology for Apple Pencil in iPhone, but probably not worth the cost for number of people who would use it.
If I were to design a smartphone for stylus use, I think it'd look something like an iPad mini, with its squarish ratio and thicker bezels, shrunken down by ~20%.
But now I am feeling the same way about my iPhone. You can have my iPhone when you take it from my cold, dead…
By high school I was writing apps that followed this hig with a fold up keyboard, designing the ui and compiling code on board the device. PalmOS 4 and 5 could be tricked out to be a whole computer, capable of working offline for a week and also could get you up all night on IRC and ebooks. it's hard to imagine using my smartphone offline for a week now....
and most of the apps implemented this hig and were straightforward to use because it was the defeult builtin toolkit largely the same its entire life, progressively enhanced GUIs from 1bit 160x160 to full color 320x480 responsive design... nowadays I'm building a Material3 app in my evenings and i know some day google is gonna make a material4 so that my app looks scuffed up
> Gaffiti power writing software was another design decision affected by the battery selection. During the design of the first Palm handhelds, users were clamoring for natural handwriting recognition. However, natural handwriting recognition would require a more powerful processor and more memory, which together required bigger batteries. Adding all these things to a handheld would have weighed it down and made it cost too much for the market. Instead, the Palm designers bet that users would settle for good-enough handwriting recognition if the result was long battery life.
It accurately describes the key differences between designing for desktop and mobile, which explains why PalmOS was so much easier to use than the various Windows-based mobile formats from Microsoft at the time. I even wrote a whole blog series about this book two decades ago (https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1).
I switched from a Dell Pocket PC to a Treo 650, and it was such a revelation. IMHO, this little phone is still one of the best in terms of simplicity, even today.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7hh5uzoaj2x7zq60yv9vz/palm_ti...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/palm-os-and-the-devi...
> Your product needs enough features for the optimal user experience and no more
https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdoc...
https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Designing-Interactions-Press-Bil...
ETA: One thing I forgot to mention is how playful MacOS was (and to an extent still is). They recognised that the easiest way to learn something is by messing with it and seeing what happens. It also caused it to be very approachable through what I like to call 'professional unprofessionalism'. It wasn't afraid to use silly metaphors or graphics to get a point across without crossing the line into seeming out of place in a work environment or feeling infantilising
That's not to say that it needs to be in constant flux or to be full of radical ideas. If anything, it'd be nice to see more DEs settle into a design and feature set and chase stability, efficiency, and performance over shinies. Rather, I think it would be better if more Linux DEs were built around coherent, opinionated design philosophies that cleanly set them all apart from each other. Even if that design philosphy is just "N platform's desktop, refined to its ultimate form", it's better than the "aimless bag of features" direction that's most common.
To really break free you have build all the programs too, with the new UI paradigm.
contact info is my user name here at aol.com
2) You still use AOL? Is it just you've had it long enough to not want to switch or do you actively choose to use it for some reason I might've missed?
So many options placed seemingly at random. Similar options like lockscreen, login screen and desktop background settings spread out over 3 different main categories.
Customization options so extensive and granular one can only wonder about their purpose. Even in their latest release blog post they chose to brag about the new ability to change intensity/thickness of frames. I don't think most people care about stuff like this.
Until recently defaults were straight up insane like single click to open folders/launch programs, touchpad scroll being inverted etc.
If you navigate to Settings -> Sound you'll be presented with some options but also buttons in the top right that will open a mostly empty screen with a few additional options. Why not split the whole page into parts and present everything on a single screen? Why not tabs?
Sometimes those buttons in the top right have different behavior. Some will open a whole new page ansd sometimes it's just a popup and other times it's a dropdown.
And oh man just navigating Settings sucks. Main list consists of single and two level options with two level options opening another, mostly empty vertical pane so the actual size of the right pane changes with top text jumping around depending on what you press. So why some settings have two levels and some have tabs and some have those junky top right buttons that need their own back button to show up in the interface whenever they're pressed? I'm not for or against any of those design choices but why all of them at random? I just want some goddamn consistency.
Cherry on top is the bloat most distros choose to install alongside Plasma desktop. Dragon Player? kMail? Does anyone even use these? I dislike Gnome a lot but at least their preinstalled software is minimal, elegant and actively supported/developed. Most KDE programs look like they stopped receiving updates in 2008.
I still think it's a great DE but there's much room for improvement.
I remember spending hours customising the KDE 5 task bar clock, trying to correct the padding. Eventually I gave up customising it and switched to GNOME.
KDE app customisation is also a mess compared to something like foobar2000.
I think emacs does a very good job at this. You can configure most of the settings people need to be productive in a text editor from the menu bar while leaving the extremely rich customization of emacs to the options menu and elisp config files
The simple black and white interface reduces cognitive load and decision fatigue. Modern UI like skeumorphic, material, drop shadows, 3d interface, aero, glass etc are high cognitive load for some individuals.
A text heavy interface and GUIs that are explicit, not implicit and learnt through discovery is easier for me.
A link to the an article. The picture shows that the IBM CUA works for both terminal and Windows 2.0 type GUI in simple black and white.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-cua-today-enduring-legac...
You get the tiling without the config that comes with Hyprland, with the added option of toggling between tiled or floating. Settings are minimal but they are slowly adding more when there is enough demand. IDE-style theming is done at system-level so that applications match.
What do you find "dumbed down" and unusable about it?
Press ctrl-alt-T, and a terminal appears. Begin typing.
Press the flag key and a kind of menu thing you can type the name of apps into appears. Type "firefox" or "vscode" as appropriate, begin typing.
It could hardly be made any more straightforward.
it's insane
Before the Treo, I had a VisorPhone. Wonderful device, and fit a specific need (no phones allowed in school - great, I can slide the phone out of the back, and continue to use it as a PDA). The thing that killed the VisorPhone for me was PalmOS 3.5's lack of memory protection, combined with a bug in the SMS app. Anybody sending me an MMS message instantly crashed it, requiring me to pull the batteries. Sometimes I hadn't realized it happened for hours, and missed phone calls. MMS messages (group texts, etc) only became more and more common, and when this became a multiple-times-weekly occurrence, I made a move.
*as many as we have found
GNOME and KDE sit on extreme opposite ends of the minimalist/maximalist spectrum.
The most immediate are pull-down menus at the top of the screen. They work good on a 9 inch screen, they are awful with 27 inch displays.
Another related change are modal dialog boxes. When you have a 9 inch screen you're fundamentally looking at one document in one app at a time. When you got 2 27's that's not true anymore.
But yes. The only way you can resize windows through System 7 is the resize widget. You cannot grab anywhere else and drag. They couldn't afford the extra chrome pixels, again, on a 512 x 342 screen.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_goPenPointeb91_1197014...
2. Yes, I was a charter member (who unfortunately, was broke when they offered the chance to buy stock), and it's easy to remember, and everything online account-wise is tied to it, and if I could still be paying for it and having my member FTP/webspace, I would.
- When you load it, and there’s unread mail…does it still tell you in the most glorious way?
- Do they comply with modern encryption? I haven’t exchanged email with an AOL or AIM address in 15 years, it seems!
think i3bar if you need a unix-style equivalency
There's a clock at the top of the screen in Gnome.
It's all the icons next to the clock, placed there by applications that run in the background but need occasional interactivity.
It's the thing at the bottom right of every Windows since Windows 95, and the top right of every Mac since Mac OS X. KDE has always had it in the Windows position. Gnome had it in the Mac position from Gnome 2 (2002) until recently (Gnome 4?).
Something that every desktop OS considers important enough to show, except Gnome, which insists your computer is a bad iPad for some reason.
Why would I care about what the network is doing?
> I guess you'd have to have used Windows to miss it then.
I don't understand what you mean by this. For most of the past 30 years, every major OS had something analogous to a system tray. Win, Mac, KDE, Gnome all had icons next to the clock, that gave access to software running in the background or system functions. Virtually all still do, Gnome (apparently?) does not.
I find it deeply implausible you've never seen or interacted with a system tray.
I don't get why it would be useful.