Let me put my lick in here!
I go back to Windows development on VC++ 1.0 and now consider myself an
"Ex-Windows" developer finding myself coding for only Palm devices for
over a year. You can measure "ease" of programming in many subjective
manners. I like the measurement of how many layers of code are you from
the actual silicon.
Too little support software and you find yourself in assembly land
looking at the schematics and memory maps all too often. Too much
support and you find yourself in an isolated and abstracted world where
you are living in a pod out of the movie "The Matrix". The former you
have specialization and performance and on the latter you have
portability and reuse.
My attitude is that Palm hit just the right middle ground of abstraction
vs. reality for this type of device.
WinCE is too abstract of an API for efficient use and development on a
handheld. I think the biggest mistake every done in this OS'es
implementation was the AutoPC. Here, addressing all hardware required a
COM interface where the CPU is killed by messaging overhead just
connecting to a USB array.
Newton API was even worse (they never released the C compiler and you
were stuck with binary scripts). It still kept you in that pod where
you could never work with hardware quickly to get the job done. This
made the overhead of doing any hardware development very, very lengthy
and drawn out. Anyone trying to do third party wireless on the Newton
can attest to this.
Most of all, there wasn't much in portability to justify this level of
abstraction. (Java advocates, feel free to flame. I find it amusing.)
Things like the Newton, WinCE and the old Zoomer falls into these
categories.
Then there were notebook organizer with microcontroller that didn't even
have a C compiler. They are too numerous to mention here. For a while,
anything with a cheap LCD, keypad and microcontroller in an injection
mold case called itself a PDA or handheld computer. Worst, there was no
real third party developer program.
So here I am coding Palm. It has the calls to quickly do stuff so you
don't have to dive into the schematic and memory map but yet, the
"protected mode" is not there if you have a project where you really
need to do something unorthodox to get the job done.
One quote heard a while ago, "'Protected mode' is called that to keep a
third party developer from easily developing a competing technology."
In a way, we are back to the glory days of DOS on an 8086 where lots of
very kewl products were developed like DoubleDOS and a ton of PC cards
that took only three months and two engineers to get to market.
Steve
Todd Cary wrote:
> I have read in many articles that the PalmPilot is easier to program
> than the CE based units. Not being a programmer for either, I would
> like to get some first hand input from those who are programming the
> PalmPilot.
>
> How well do the PalmPilot units handle email?
>
> Curious.......
>
> Todd
>
> --
> Todd Cary
> Ariste Software
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
