It's the whole idea of 'apps' before smartphones became a thing. It's also the simplicity of how these worked, forget multitasking, just focus on one thing at a time.

No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing.

And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole build system worked.

Zen of Palm

Mobile app developers, if you haven't read Zen of Palm, I highly recommend this piece of art. You can download the PDF for free. Nothing beats Palm for its simplicity, responsiveness, and (perhaps subjectively) ease of use, even to this day.

I wrote a series of blog posts about it nearly two decades ago, and later translated some parts into English: https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1-preface

It was probably nowhere near as good as I remember, but I remember it being damn near perfect. I lovingly kept my Trio(s) well into the age of the touchscreen smartphone.

The amount of energy and creativity. I had an orange Handspring Visor. By default it did not have any networking. It had a cradle that you would sync up with your desktop, but the desktop software could pull stuff from the Internet. So indirectly, the Handspring Visor could access content from the Internet that had been previously retrieved. There was an amazing app that was kind of like Yelp. You could enter your location by specifying two cross streets, and then you could search businesses and read reviews. I used this PDA to manage my calendar and my contacts. With a limited amount of email. In the year 2000 I was using this thing exactly the way we all use our smart phones today. And the games were so much fun. It was truly a machine that could do anything.

The OS itself I'm not sure of.

Developing for is was a fun challenge. I had a device that had 4MB of memory total. This was RAM, Data, and application space. I created an "app" that had plugins. When you ran the HotSync is asked which plugins you wanted to "install", then based on which ones were installed it copied over the data you needed.

I loved the documentation. It might be the only SDK documentation I read with joy. It just clicked with me.

Gremlins. I liked this program as well. I don't recall if it was a simulator only or if it ran across on device. You could tell it to just wreck havoc on your app. I would set it up to run over the evening or weekend and I would just fix any bugs that occurred during that time. It would click every button, add weird text to all input boxes, just smash everything. It found many issues for me. When I came back over the weekend and there were no issues, I shipped my app. I still had users running it up until 2010.

https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/ is a great option too (works in the browser, but even better as a PWA on iOS/Android).

I miss playing SubHunt (https://palmdb.net/app/subhunt) and I can't find any remakes for other systems.

It's easy to get it going in an emulator, but I'm surprised games of that type never caught on, in their own right.

Space War was great! Briefly in high school a few of my friends and I all had Palm OS devices.

I taught myself to crack palm apps and games, and with Space War I modified the strength of my ship. The IR multiplayer had no validation of parameters so I pranked my friends in an IR multiplayer match by one-shotting them all and zooming across the whole map in one turn! Great times.

I think I mentioned it in an earlier blog post, Space War was actually the big inspiration to make this game hex-tile based. Happy to see I'm not the only one that remembers that game! (found it: https://quarters.captaintouch.com/blog/posts/2025-05-06-2025...)

I know, right!? I have fond memories of my communicator.

Insaniquarium was wild!

Whoa, did not expect to see a Sony Clie reference today. I had one in college! I loved taking notes with a folding keyboard, listening to music while playing games on the shuttle bus, and taking pictures with my friends. Oh man, memories.

Yes, nostalgia. This teleported me mentally back to the 1990s as I love seeing the old things resurface, that pattern and cycle thing that always holds true.

I recall sitting in board meetings playing games between other tech members as we had written simple games using the earliest means of direct connect device communication well before this was common. With the introduction of the Palm VII having the first mobile cellular smart device available and being a payment processor to large dotcoms at the time we of course we would also move into mobile payments on that Palm VII. This was yet another idea well before its time but it was fun working through the engineering issues of doing payments over cellular as well as satellite long ago. I still have NIB Palm VIIs with NIB payment cradles on my tech shelf of history, maybe some day I will dig them out again to play for inspiration and curiosity.

Stay Healthy!

Wish granted: https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=27.%20rePalm

I've been porting it to various devices, eg: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1980508960538099856, https://www.hackster.io/news/def-con-32-s-raspberry-pi-rp235...,

and possibly soon: https://x.com/dmitrygr/status/1978263373012717592

Now that Pebble is coming back why not bring Palm back too? I miss my circa 1999 PalmPilot so bad. I even had a gigantic ugly wireless modem for it that I used to check e-mail.

I remember it well - thank you!

Oh cool Warfare Inc, that's quite the impressive game! Definitely remember that, it gets mentioned on the PalmDB discord quite often.