bradhaak
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Registered: Oct 2000
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Posts: 380 |
I kind of agree with the original post. Apps are getting very large. I'm a developer and the programs that I am currently working on are all in the 150 - 250 KB footprint range. I think that this is hilarious since I started out writing BIOS code where everything had to fit in 32K. If more features were needed, something else had to come out.
After I first looked at this thread last night, I went off to do some thinking. This has led me to a number of conclusions about the state of Palm software and PDA use in general.
When Jeff Hawkins first came up with the concept of the Pilot, he envisioned it as a device that would be used in conjunction with a desktop PC. Any complex processing or intensive input would be done on the PC. An example of this type of thought is the Expense program that still comes with most new devices. It doesn't even provide any kind of totaling or reporting. These are tasks that are left to the desktop computer. Another example is the type of games that came out initially. Look at landmines, or sub-hunt. Neither had any kind of AI. they are just mechanical processes that you interact with. Not much processor or memory required. That's a good thing since the first Palm device that I owned had a whopping 128KB of memory.
Today, things have changed. My Prism has a 33 Mhz processor, much faster memory access, 8 MB of RAM (64 times as much as my first Pilot 1000), and expansion so that I can store even more programs and data. If you look at it from a desktop perspective, in all aspects except screen resolution, a Prism compares very favorably with a Macintosh 2 of ten or twelve years ago (except that it has more memory). On similar computers (I used PCs, even though I work at Apple now), we played fairly advanced games, did word-processing and desktop publishing, and used complex mathematical software.
Today, as the Palm OS computer (call it a computer since that is really what it is), has moved into the mainstream, the things that we do with it have become much more complex. We expect the software that we use to be comparable to what we use on "real" computers. People want word-processors like WordSmith and complain that they don't handle tables, There are real spreadsheets with graphing. Games are complex, graphics intensive simulations with complex AI features. We can print. We have 65536 colors (more colors than pixels on the screen).
As many people have observed, the former organizer is the future computer. We are seeing the beginning of this change and things will continue to move that way. Even the manufacturers are helping it along. When PalmOS v4 comes out in a couple of months, it will provide a standard set of APIs to allow programmers to directly access add-on storage for program data (sounds kind of like a hard-disk doesn't it?). When PalmOS v5 comes out in a year-and-a-half, it will include a multitasking, multithreading kernel and higher resolution. The devices that it runs on will use StrongArm processors and there is no reason to believe that they won't be as much as ten-times as fast as the Prism. I hate to tell you this, but you don't need this in an organizer. This is quickly moving towards a desktop replacement.
Sorry for getting long-winded, but that's what you get for making me think. I know I haven't really said anything new, it's mostly just distilling a whole bunch of information and history. If you disagree, that's great. Let's get a good discussion going with lots of raised voices and name calling. We need something like that since the election ruckus is finally settling down.
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03-11-2001 08:36 PM
I agree 100%
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