So why am I choked up about his death? Because I love the man for what he accomplished, and how he’s changed the world.

Way back in elementary school, I used an Apple //e. I moved Logo’s turtle around on the screen. I discovered something odd: being able to understand that computers were predictable machines, rather than mysteries had separated me. There are an infinite number of things others can do better than I. Other kids could run, they could play team sports and not let down their team. But this, I could do. But what use was it? Computers were only good at being computers. FORWARD 10. RIGHT 45. Repeat 8 times, it was a stop sign.

I learned BASIC and Pascal, but on some level I was still drawing stop signs. I was solving problems no one had.

Around age nine or ten, I was at a school looking at various displays. Most were uninteresting. But there was an original beige Macintosh, running MacPaint.

The Macintosh was something else entirely. That was something useful. I had only a few minutes with it. I moved the mouse about, watching the cursor. I clicked a few things; I think I doodled a bit with the pencil, typed some text, and used the eraser. It made sense to me. More than that, it dawned on me that computers could be things other than a computer. The complexity behind it was boggling, but someone had solved it. Therefore, it was solvable. It wasn’t actually magic, it just felt like it. I didn’t know it at the time, but Steve Jobs had made that experience happen. He didn’t write the code, and exactly how much of the design was his I’ll never know. Many talented individuals had brought that experience into being. But he drove the team, and he pushed the vision.

It would be several more years before my next encounter with the Macintosh, but something had changed for me. I knew a bit about programming already, but now I wanted to solve real problems for real people.

I practiced for years, and I impressed some people, and ended up with a job programming computers. And I enjoyed that job, and I enjoyed what we were building, but it wasn’t what I yearned to build. It wasn’t accessible to enough people. It was still hard-to-hit buttons, activated by sliding a cursor around the screen using a plastic box.

It turns out that computers, even the Macintosh, were too complex. It was tough to master the indirectness of the interface. For a time, I smugly assumed I was smarter than the people who couldn’t get this, but that wasn’t the case at all. If anything, just the opposite: these machines were far more hostile than I was willing to admit. I couldn’t see the problems in front of me.

There was Palm. They made a hesitant half-step in the right direction, but it didn’t last. I knew we were going backwards again, but I didn’t know how or why.

Years passed. And finally, the iPhone. In the iPhone, you could see at last the future, what Apple intended for the next generation. Even if it was just a small, 3.5″ cut of it. Again, that was Steve Jobs. Not solely responsible. I don’t even know that it was his idea. But either way, he owned that idea. He nurtured it, he cultured it, and he grew it. He turned complex computers and crappy phones into something entirely new.

But I think you could also see echoes of the past: What Apple had wanted to produce with the Macintosh, but been unable to.

A few years later, we got a bigger slice of the future with the iPad. The iPad does not represent finished by any means, but I believe it is the realization of what Apple truly had in mind with the original Macintosh, and an extension of what they tried to achieve with the iPhone. It’s more than a computer — so much immeasurably more — by being less than a computer. And, again, Steve Jobs was responsible. Not solely, of course. But in the same sense that had it gone wrong, one person would be to blame, if one person must be given credit that person is Steve Jobs.

And along they way, he reinvented the music industry. And he’d have reinvented both television and movies for the better, too, had the existing powers in those industries been more eager to follow.

Through demonstration, Steve Jobs had taught me a few things:

• Great products are worth using, so they’re worth building.
• Great things can achieved, even under pressure from others who don’t see the same future.
• Greatness is revolutionary, but does not ignore what’s gone before.
• It’s okay to not achieve perfection. Producing something amazing is good enough.
• Having achieved something amazing, there’s something more amazing just ahead.
• True greatness means the result is not just easy to use, but unbelievable easy. Magical, even.

There are thousands of developers in the world who’ve learned these same lessons. Many of them learned before me. Some of them learned from different sources. But the entire industry has been influenced by the revolutionary evolution of computing from Apple and Steve Jobs. We make up a small part of his legacy. Part of our job is to use these lessons to build magic. The greater part is to inspire others to build magic.

Thank you, Mr. Jobs. Tomorrow, the temptation will be to say the sun rises on a world with less magic. But that’s only true if we don’t create more of our own.

Today, iTunes 8.2.1 broke that. But despite the ridiculous accusations of lock in, Palm doesn’t need the Pre to sync music to the iTunes.

iTunes saves its entire music index as an XML file in iTunes Music Library.xml. It’s XML. Palm can open it, read it, and get whatever they want.

New music is unencumbered by DRM. There’s an exception, music bought before DRM was removed, but Palm wasn’t able to play that before.

And, of course, the USB bus is available to any Mac or Windows application programmer.

So, then, nothing stops Palm from shipping a Pre Music Sync program. All it would have to do:

• Read the XML file.
• Grab the music using standard file I/O.
• Send the music to the Pre over USB.

If Palm is less dumb than a sack of hammers, they expected Apple might fix how they validate the iPhone to exclude the Pre’s tricks.

If Palm is less dumb than a sack of hammers, they would already have a Pre Music Sync program almost ready for deployment. ((But Palm being Palm, you should probably expect a Pre Music Sync program some time in October or November.))

In fact, this should have been their solution all along. Why wasn’t it? Well, assuming Palm isn’t a bunch of idiots ((And, again, this is Palm.)), Palm probably didn’t have their music sync program ready. Ship the hack or slip the date? And somewhere along the line, some marketing type probably decided that impersonating an iPod was a good idea. They wanted a bullet point that it worked without installing software. Well, now Palm is going to have to write software and get users to install it.

They just did an entire OS. I think they can handle Pre Music Sync. And if they can’t, I’m sure Markspace can handle it with The Missing Sync.

To me, sidebars with lots of internal links are a sign of pretentiousness and inflated ego. And that’s pretty much it.

I’m going to use my own blog as an example. Let’s pretend it was written by a guy named Steve (this isn’t imagination) who is not me (and this part is):

If I was visiting Steve’s blog for the first time, I’m probably there because someone linked me to a specific article on it. Or maybe I found something with a Google search. If I like what I see, maybe I’ll read a couple extra articles. Maybe I’ll click the subscribe link. Maybe I’ll post some venom-filled, ignorant accusations in the comments. ((Okay, I won’t do that.))

But being able to view all the posts Steve made in February 2005? Utterly without value. I just don’t care. I’m never going to click that link and say to myself “Gosh, I wonder what this Steve guy posted on February 26, 2005?” Not gonna happen. I may search for a specific topic such as Palm, if I think Steve may have written on the topic and I’m interested in what Steve had to say. That’s what the search tool is for, after all.

See all that crap beside your blog? Just cut it out. We don’t care.

I’ll admit my current appearance doesn’t do this. View this post as an apology for the cluttered sidebar of the current theme. I’ll work on it. I wasn’t interested in putting effort into the theme I had, and the Kubrick theme is just too “whoops, I didn’t set up my blog yet” in appearance. This was just my pick for “what looks the least like ass?” on short notice.

I estimated at the time they were at least four years ahead of the competition in terms of an operating system.

But since then?

Buying and selling themselves to… themselves.

Absolutely nothing on the OS front.

Since then? Windows CE and successors have caught up in many areas, exceeded Palm in others. Blackberry, and iPhone exist, both of which make Palm look pathetic.

Loss of professional-level development tools.

Hardware quality control problems.

It’s hard to believe that Palm has thrown away this much of a lead. But they have.

I wanted to make a few comments on the state of Palm OS tools and such, and I didn’t want to post them publicly because they’re not exactly positive. If there’s a better place to send them, please let me know. Don’t worry, there’s no questions here… and I don’t mean any of this to be insulting, either, if I’ve phrased some of it that way I apologize… PalmSource seems to be focusing mostly on “Cobalt.” This is important for the future, I definitely agree with that. But in the near term, there are no Cobalt devices actually shipping and will not be for months yet. How long until the majority of shipping handhelds are Cobalt? I’ll be a bit optimistic — I figure it’s at least two years. Developers in the business of making a profit over the next few years need to focus on Garnet. I have not even looked at the Cobalt tools yet, and have no intention of doing so for many months yet. The current state of affairs for Palm OS Garnet development is rather poor. PalmSource seems to be putting the majority of their efforts into the Palm OS Developer Suite. I am starting a new Palm OS product, and am no longer actively involved in maintaining the first one (which is on the market and being maintained by someone else; if you’re curious, see www.principalm.com). So it was the perfect time to switch to the new tools. I downloaded PODS and gave it a try, but I ran into a few problems. The first is that the IDE is pretty unfamiliar. And this is from someone who has used a dozen or more IDEs over the years. I couldn’t even find a way to “quick open” SDK header files within the IDE. Making a makefile was easy (and, to be honest, I prefer this approach to an IDE) but getting the files recognized by the workspace was a pain. I’m not exactly sure how anyone uses a SCM with it; just the limitation of storing everything in Program Files is huge, and I never found a way around that one. But finally I had everything in the workspace and compiling. Here’s where the real problems began — I had to segment. Segmentation is a fact of life under Garnet, and the documentation for segmentation is very weak — did I say weak? Between myself and a co-worker (working on yet a third product, with no code in common with either of the first one or mine), we couldn’t find anything on it as part of the install. I had some ideas how to do it for C, but none at all for C++. He figured out how to segment eventually and emailed me on it… Now, which segments were too big? The error messages were next to useless for figuring it out. Still, through trial and error I reduced the size of my segments. That’s when I started running into data segment size issues. What was wrong? Well, I still have no clue at all. So one night after about a week of fighting it, I threw threw in the towel and moved back to Codewarrior Palm (the latest Mac version). I sent an email to my coworker: “I gave up on PODS. It struck me last night that even if I got everything compiling in PODS, there was no real advantage over Codewarrior that was likely to matter to me for a while. [With Codewarrior, I] had my project compiling within ten minutes. No segmentation issues at all. Hopefully by the time I start to run up against the limitations in Codewarrior Palm’s tools will be ready, because they’re not right now…” I expected him to tell me to keep fighting PODS, but apparently he’d done the same thing the vary same day, only he moved to the latest Windows version: “I came to same conclusion late last night and am now doing my demo work in CodeWarrior.” So I just put in an order for the latest version of Metrowerks’ Windows-hosted tools. Will they save me? I don’t know. I’m worried — the new version of Codewarrior is based on the PRC tools,. So am I probably going to be fighting it for data segment size. (I know the standard RTTI/exceptions off trick. I need exceptions. I’m trying to write 21st century C++ here, not 1988-era ANSI C….)

As an aside, this is wrong — Codewarrior Palm 8′s linker is not based on PRC-Tools. This is why I ended up settling on Codewarrior as my development tool.

My conclusions: 1. There has to be a greater focus on Garnet development. Cobalt is the future (maybe.. if it’s late enough, the future is probably going to be the dreaded PocketPC), but it isn’t going to keep me or anyone else in business now. 2. There has to be a lot more work done on both documentation and tools for Garnet. The current (PRC-based?) toolchain — in particular, the linker — needs a lot of work and is under-documented. 3. All of these segmentation issues I’m dealing with are “artificial,” in that segments don’t actually hold any meaning other than legacy to the current Palm OS. If there was a way to write an application for Palm OS 5 that wasn’t PACE/68k, this whole series of problems wouldn’t exist. But still, there’s a couple years to wait until I can stop worrying about this mess. Anyway, I hope none of this insulted you. Not my intent at all. And I could very well be wrong, I just call it like I see it.

We’re almost in 2006. What’s changed since then? NOTHING. Cobalt still doesn’t exist in any tangible way, and there’s still been no significant efforts put into the Garnet toolchain.

(Also, I want to add: For the one guy out there who recognizes this email, I do not blame the lack of progress on you. I dug up this particular email only because I felt it was the best one I’d written on the subject.)

Open jobs listings on Palm’s website indicate the company is preparing for Linux development for a new generation of Palm devices. This is a positive sign that the company is already preparing for developing new mobile devices using Palm OS for Linux.

(Via PalmInfocenter.)

It is a little too soon to assume Palm will move to Linux instead of just cautiously poke at it, but it does look hopeful that Palm’s Palm OS will move past Garnet. I can’t say I’ll miss Garnet, and I can’t say I’m disappointed that Palm passed on Cobalt. Three strategies was three too many. Although maybe they still have two…

“This is just a rumor at this point, but there’s scuttlebutt that smartphone and PDA manufacturer Palm (formerly PalmOne) may acquire PalmSource, the creator of the Palm OS.”

(Via PC World’s Techlog.)

I am very skeptical as to the odds of this occurring. In fact, I think “rumour” might be too strong a word: “speculation” would better. but I would certainly be pleased if it happened.

Shortcut.9 reveals Mon 09/27/2004 1:47a, so I do indeed need the update. The T5 is about as fresh as it can be — hard reset clean and HotSynced against a new profile. So I start the updater.

Only a few seconds later I’m staring at a “There is not enough memory to complete this operation.” Well, the instructions say it needs 17.9MB. I have 53.5.

I looked through Palm’s site devoted to the update. The alternate instructions are actually what I was trying to do, so they’re of no help. There are no troubleshooting steps that I can see, and no indication that this has ever gone wrong before.

A few google searches have left me wondering: Am I the only person this update has ever failed with? What exactly is wrong with my T5?

Anyway, an hour and several hard resets later the T5 remains un-updated… and as far as I’m concerned, remains a blemish on Palm’s otherwise fine release history.

One thing I missed in my initial review of the T5: Not only is resetting much more difficult than on previous models, it also takes much longer to reset and is much more awkward to hard-reset. The sooner this device is replaced, the better. In the meantime, with so few devices available it is hard to recommend Palm to anyone.

Update, 6:50pm: I eventually worked around the updater’s bug by trying the Mac version instead. Update complete.