From: RossO (newton_at_ordersomewherechaos.com)
Date: Fri Aug 29 2003 - 22:57:05 PDT
On Friday, August 29, 2003, at 02:50 PM, David Deranian wrote:
> Could the newest Palm Operating System be that bad?
At it's heart, the Palm was created to be the bare minimum for
information presentation and gathering. It was and has always been used
as an adjunct to a user's primary computer. The Palm OS was built
*very* well to support the absolute minimum in terms of RAM and
processor speeds. However, it's now weighed down by that legacy: So
much of the Palm's interface is still based around having 4 or 5 very
simple programs--the ones that are built in.
In my opinion, The Palm OS is a lot like the Commodore 64 OS, it was a
great OS that fit its hardware perfectly. But it's hardware has
changed, and the OS hasn't kept up.
On the other hand, the UI for WinCE was based around metaphors that
hardly worked well for a desktop and are nearly antithetical to
handheld, stroke-based computing. The amount of screen space *wasted*
on *drop-shadows* (?!?!?!) is ridiculous.
The NewtonOS was built to be a computer OS for a stroke-based platform.
Each upgrade in hardware made the OS shine even more. Forget space
wasting drop shadows--the Newton doesn't even have 'borders' around
things, just dividers _between_ things.
Nothing I haven't said before...
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=newtontalk&m=105578608915609&w=2
(IMHO: The only way we have any hope of having a true successor to the
NewtonOS is something like GNUton running on a some open source
platform hardware, with a port of Self or something similar.)
...Ross...
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