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Thanks to a fellow Gemini user (~kelbot), I rediscovered my love for Palm OS devices. Today I fired up an old IDE and started coding for them.
As a kid, I somehow came into possession of a Palm Pilot m150 (at least I think that was the model number). I also had a folding Palm keyboard,
that communicated with the device via infrared. I of course used the device for games (Kyle's Quest and DragonBane II were amazing), but
I also found numerous on-device IDEs that utilized the BASIC and C programming languages.
I spent a ton of time sitting in the back of the family car on road trips, typing away on my Palm, keyboard and device precariously spread
out on the back seat, coding apps and games. I even sold a few copies of one app on PalmSource (honestly I pity the person that bought 100
copies of a Pythagoras Theorem calculator made by me).
Eventually my parents realized how much fun I had with the Palm, and upgraded me to a Tungsten E. It had an amazing COLOR display, that was
a much higher resolution. I still have the device today, although the screen is about 1/5 dead.
A few weeks ago I picked up a Tungsten T3 and a replacement battery. I chose the T3 mostly because of the cool sliding screen it has haha.
Since then I've been reliving my childhood by packing it with old games I used to love (Sim City on Palm is a lot of fun, even if extremely basic).
Tonight I took it a step further by finding a Palm Pilot IDE to start creating some apps with. I choose Handheld Basic++ for Windows thanks to PalmDB.
The IDE runs perfectly on Linux via Wine. I also grabbed a Palm OS ROM for the emulator, and loaded up the HB++ docs with the WayBack Machine. Through
a combination of the docs from 2006 and the included sample apps, I've started to piece together a working app (going with a simple weight tracker for) my
first app.
HB++ IDE in Wine with Palm simulator
It's been a ton of fun playing with the old device again, and writing code for it feels great! It's definitely a challenge figuring stuff out (the docs only
get you so far), but hopefully I'll have something worth releasing soon.
My weight tracker app running on a Palm T3
