StarGrid: A new Palm OS strategy game

There are all kinds of retro stuff that I still love. What is it about Palm OS that you love?

It's the whole idea of 'apps' before smartphones became a thing. It's also the simplicity of how these worked, forget multitasking, just focus on one thing at a time.

No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing.

And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole build system worked.

Zen of Palm

Mobile app developers, if you haven't read Zen of Palm, I highly recommend this piece of art. You can download the PDF for free. Nothing beats Palm for its simplicity, responsiveness, and (perhaps subjectively) ease of use, even to this day.

I wrote a series of blog posts about it nearly two decades ago, and later translated some parts into English: https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1-preface

It was probably nowhere near as good as I remember, but I remember it being damn near perfect. I lovingly kept my Trio(s) well into the age of the touchscreen smartphone.

Are the Z-Machine games (Infocom text adventures and the ones from the 90's made with Inform6 and 7 in the 00's) really playable with a stylus input?

When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.

Unfortunately that link to the Zen of Palm PDF is broken (at least from my work machine). I couldn't find it in the Internet Archive either. Any suggestions?

EDIT: Disregard, found it: https://archive.org/details/zen-of-palm

The amount of energy and creativity. I had an orange Handspring Visor. By default it did not have any networking. It had a cradle that you would sync up with your desktop, but the desktop software could pull stuff from the Internet. So indirectly, the Handspring Visor could access content from the Internet that had been previously retrieved. There was an amazing app that was kind of like Yelp. You could enter your location by specifying two cross streets, and then you could search businesses and read reviews. I used this PDA to manage my calendar and my contacts. With a limited amount of email. In the year 2000 I was using this thing exactly the way we all use our smart phones today. And the games were so much fun. It was truly a machine that could do anything.

The OS itself I'm not sure of.

Developing for is was a fun challenge. I had a device that had 4MB of memory total. This was RAM, Data, and application space. I created an "app" that had plugins. When you ran the HotSync is asked which plugins you wanted to "install", then based on which ones were installed it copied over the data you needed.

I loved the documentation. It might be the only SDK documentation I read with joy. It just clicked with me.

Gremlins. I liked this program as well. I don't recall if it was a simulator only or if it ran across on device. You could tell it to just wreck havoc on your app. I would set it up to run over the evening or weekend and I would just fix any bugs that occurred during that time. It would click every button, add weird text to all input boxes, just smash everything. It found many issues for me. When I came back over the weekend and there were no issues, I shipped my app. I still had users running it up until 2010.

There were many keyboard accessories for Palm OS devices!

I had a foldable one with (almost?) full-sized keys that I really enjoyed using. It connected via infrared, which was a bit strange but made it compatible with different generations of device connectors.

I loved that you could freely beam apps from one device to another via the infrared port. I remember sharing apps with my friend and my mom at one point, sending and/or receiving.

I posted this 24 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395479

"I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction."

From looking at my old hoarded palm files I think that the interpreter was PalmPilotFrotz, still available on the if-archive: https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreter...

Uhm, the context menu on words was a thing on the ZMachine (v3) port for the Game Boy too. I launched Tristam Island under a Chinese Game Boy Colour clone and some rewritable USB cartridge. The games where playable enough with patience.

On smartphones, FDroid for Android had the Anysoft keyboard with a swipe option, it works great, much better than typing. There's also some grafitti 'keyboard' input at FDroid, but I prefer the swiping one as it's far superior.

On the old T9 phones, OFC a Frotz port exists for J2ME, but I didn't try it.