By David Gewirtz
In this month's editor column, we discuss the similarities between the PalmPilot of today and the Macintosh of yore. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz ends the column by nominating a PowerBoard Host of the Month.
I recently read an excellent article in Wired News called "How PalmPilot Became a Hacker Cult", by Chris Oakes. There were a number of sentences in the article that, taken together, began to make the hairs on the back of my neck rise up and tingle. Let me share them with you:
The PalmPilot has spawned an intense, emotional, and fanatical developer following not seen since the glory days of the Mac.
PalmPilot shares a chip family with the early Macintosh line - Motorola's 680X0.
"[Metrowerks] CodeWarrior was the leading Mac development tool," said Purmal. "They were already using it, so it became the first platform for development." With that, she said, the PalmPilot naturally attracted the Mac fanatic element.
Alan Jay Weiner has written a fine introduction to PalmPilot programming, so you'll be able to read more about CodeWarrior. But, given the current sorry state of the Mac industry, any time I hear the phrase "Mac fanatic element", I get nervous.
Mr. Oakes of Wired isn't alone in noticing the similarities. Rob Myers wrote the following in the November 20th issue of The Detroit News:
It comes with one meg of memory installed, no floppy disk drive, and only a tiny, black-and-white monitor. But its radically innovative interface is making waves throughout the industry and endearing a legion of fanatic followers. No, it's not the 1984 Macintosh I'm talking about. It's the 1997 PalmPilot PDA.
Is PalmPilot the next Macintosh? Is that good? Or is it something to worry about?
How PalmPilot is similar to Macintosh
Let's look at some of the similarities. Some of them are to be expected, and some are downright eerie (and yes, I'll probably have left some out--that's what the PowerBoards are for):
- In the PalmPilot, 3Com has introduced a form factor and set of functionality and Microsoft has decided to clone it with the PalmPC. The similarity here, of course, is to the Macintosh interface and Windows.
- Both the PalmPilot and the original Macintosh sport the same processor and both use CodeWarrior as a principle development environment. PalmPilot developers are as zealous as Mac developers were in it's heyday.
- The PalmPilot has some highly usable user interface (UI) enhancements that, on retrospect, seem incredibly obvious. For example, list items grow to multiple lines when the text reaches the end of the line. Virtually all other lists truncate text or prevent it from being displayed. The Mac has always been known for its excellent user interface.
