Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]

I'm adding this to my repertoire of HIGs to study for a new desktop environment project I'm working on. I'm trying to synthesize the best parts of every computer interaction method, primarily focusing on desktops but looking at mobile designs as well.

There are 2 principle reasons for this project: 1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE) 2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)

I miss the whole Palm ecosystem.

I have noted many times that I had a slab phone with full screen color icon grid general purpose os with internet and countless 3rd party apps for every conceivable purpose,... 7 full years before the iphone. 8 years before the iphone had 3rd party apps.

And it wasn't Android it was a Samsung SPH-i300 running PalmOS.

It was great that there was not really much of an app store, you got apps individually more or less like desktop os apps. There might have been app stores that collected apps but I don't remember ever using any.

I had apps for everything the same as today. Even though the screen was only like 160x240 and the internet was 14.4k, I had browser & email of course, but also ssh, irc, I even had a vnc client! Audible.com player, countless random things like a netmask calculator, resistor color code app, a few different generic db apps where you design your own fields and input/display screens etc. 3rd party phone dialer that integrated the contacts db. I must be forgetting a hundred other things.

The OS wasn't open source but at least the apps could be, so pretty much like windows & mac.

All in all I'd prefer Android where the entire system is open, except Google has somehow managed to make the real world life with Android less open than PalmOS was, even though PalmOS wasn't open source and I think even the development system wasn't free either.

I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.

I still remember using Palm OS for the first time and having my little mind blown away because there was no save buttons (at least in the version and apps I was using). You edited a document and that's it, it was saved. Like writing on paper.

Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.

To me the best thing about Palm OS was the rule that you’re never more than two taps or a button press away from where you want to be. (I think that’s how I remember it). The beloved early GUIs were all on machines that didn’t do much, comparatively speaking. The problem with modern GUIs is that there’s just too much to learn and remember if it’s presented as symbols rather than text.

Very interesting to see guidelines for UI on such constrained devices. Also terrible realizing that functionally, my so-very-2026 css3-reactjs-tailwind app is also tabs with rows and toolbars.

I really miss this era. Everything was straight and to the point by design, no processor cycles or memory were (or even could be) wasted. Less layers of abstraction, the entire stack from physics to application could be understood by a single person.

I didn't know the impetus for the graffiti writing was actually hardware limitations, that's fascinating:

> Gaffiti power writing software was another design decision affected by the battery selection. During the design of the first Palm handhelds, users were clamoring for natural handwriting recognition. However, natural handwriting recognition would require a more powerful processor and more memory, which together required bigger batteries. Adding all these things to a handheld would have weighed it down and made it cost too much for the market. Instead, the Palm designers bet that users would settle for good-enough handwriting recognition if the result was long battery life.

I still miss my palm treo, the stylus, and physical keyboard. 20 plus years later and I still cannot use an apple pencil on my iphone... >:(

My favorite detail of the Palm story is that the founder carried around a block of wood and pretended it was a PDA in order to work out details of the interface.

https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424...

sigh palm, we all miss you.

> Your product needs enough features for the optimal user experience and no more

https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdoc...