December 1998
Intermediate to advanced
482 pages
12h 14m
English
Content preview from Palm Programming: The Developer's GuideBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. The Palm Solution
Palm Computing has single-handedly defined the handheld market with the PalmPilot and Palm III pocket organizers—people just go nuts over them. The question is why. Why did this little company succeed when so many giants failed? The answer is that they got the magic formula right—they figured out what customers really wanted and how much they were willing to pay for it.
Understanding how to design an application for this platform requires a bit of backpedaling and a look at the history of these devices. Helping you understand that history and what made Palm such a skyrocketing success will help you know how to design good applications for them. We want you to attack the design of your application with the same magic formula that Palm Computing used. Design does not happen in a vacuum. If you ignore the features and characteristics that made Palm a success, your application will bomb.
Why Palm Succeeded Where So Many Failed
Not everybody knows that the PalmPilot was hardware born out of software, and not even system software, at that. Its origins are in Graffiti, the third-party handwriting recognition software developed for Newton and other Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
In 1994, Palm Computing came out with some handwriting-recognition software that promised accuracy and speed in recognition on PDAs at the price of a little bit of shorthand. Many industry experts thought such software was doomed to fail, as it required too much work from the user. ...
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