Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

I was a Palm holdout into close to 2013. They weren't capable of the same range of things that a modern Android smartphone is, but it genuinely felt that someone had put time and effort into making the absolute best experience out of what they _could_ do.

On the Treo 650, for instance, making a call meant hitting Send (a hard key) from anywhere in the UI, typing a name to start a live search - you did not need to focus into a text box first - and hitting Send again to start the call. Likewise, if I wanted to send a text message, I'd hit the SMS button, start typing a name, hit Select to open that conversation, and then start typing the message. The device had a touchscreen, but for the most common activities, you didn't need it.

The 650 did not have built-in Wi-Fi, but with the Enfora Wi-Fi Sled and Opera Mobile, Web browsing was actually a decent experience. Likewise, I had some basic networked apps like AIM on there.

Before the 650, I had a Handspring Visor and the VisorPhone attachment. The VisorPhone was way ahead of its time, but what finally killed that for me was a side effect of Palm devices not having memory protection. If someone sent me an MMS message, the entire thing would immediately freeze (it had no MMS support, and didn't handle receiving one gracefully). I'd have to take the batteries out to reset it. As more and more people did this, it became a more frequent occurrence.

PalmOS still does a few things much better than any smartphone does.

The integrated calendar and todo list that was Datebk6 is simply unmatched on any platform, and I looked for a long time.

One of the key benefits of it was using a hard key to instantly open the calendar, with the cursor in the to-do list. The hard key was so good that you could almost entirely capture tasks on a phone in realtime while walking around.

If it sounds strange to talk about to-do's and calendars in the same app, a todo is just a task that happens to occur at a point in time on a calendar. Some don't have that time pre-scheduled. Having a list of to-dos that followed you every day if not completed wasn't a common task.

DateBk6… Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Homepage is still up :)

http://www.pimlicosoftware.com/datebk6details.htm

While I remember DateBk6.. I totally forgot about Pimlical their replacement for DateBk6!

https://pimlicosoftware.com/

I'm curious if you could speak to this a bit more, I've had an itch to build something like this on the backburner for many moons.

My initial guiding instinct is roughly the same, hard to word without inviting caveats, but: todos/calendar are the same thing as I'm going about my day. Either I'm doing something, or I want to know what I should be doing.

> Having a list of to-dos that followed you every day if not completed wasn't a common task.

This bit went over my head: is the idea that it was rare to have a todo _without_ a date, so it wasn't a common thing to have ex. 20 todos without dates rolling over day to day cluttering up the UI?

Just try the app for yourself.

Datebk6 on Palm OS? Is "just" the right word? :)

Let's say I find a PalmOS emulator, pirate a system image, pirate Datebk6, put in some dummy data.

Could that explain what the post meant re: commonality of having todos rollover?

I don't think so. That's not a function of the software, that's a function of a particular use of the software.

Would using it be the same as getting the wisdom from a passionate user?

I don't think so. Living with PIM software is such a different beast from demoing it.

Really you'd want to both try it for yourself and get wisdom from somebody else. Otherwise, how would you know if they were right/wrong, correct/incorrect?

Emulator to run Palm apps on your smart phone https://cloudpilot-emu.github.io/

Just asking somebody is a very minimum effort approach. Reach higher!

Watching swimming and listening to experiences on swimming might not be the best way to learn how to swim, literally and figuratively in a problem space.

It’s hard to know where the currents in the water might be and how to navigate them.

Experiencing todos that roll over would show up pretty quick in using DateBk6 in an emulator. Install it and try to use it every day. There might be a video on YouTube.

After PalmOS, for a while I actually bought any mobile device I could get a PalmOS emulator on to for DateBk6 while I looked for a replacement. It was only so good on an emulator though for day to day use.

I’ma product person. Getting “wisdom” from a “passionate user” likely rarely is the same as also experiencing it yourself and ensuring you have more than than a passing interest in the space.

I had the problem of a really busy period in my life in my 20’s that this helped with. It almost was an unfair advantage.

From time to time, I meet other folks who like this topic deeply, only because it helped them learn to not accomplish so much, but maybe have been really effective with their time at a period when it really mattered.

Haha, me too. I avoided it even though building a todo list is a right of passage.

The main thing most task or calendar apps have failed on for me is when tasks and calendars are completely unaware of the other.

It’s fair that all software has an origin story and resulting product arc, and solves a problem in a certain way. Still, a calendar that integrated tasks and calendar well is elusive.

Honestly, trying the app is the best way as another post has said. The author may still be pretty accessible, I still remember my interactions with him I becoming a customer.

My belief is everything is a todo. Including calendar bookings. It becomes a task when it’s scheduled and completed. From a calendar view when you check a task becomes the date and time it would have been listed on a. Calendar.

Happy to chat offline, maybe there’s something here now.

I don’t know if it’s an instinct thing. Entering thousands of tasks and completing them in lots of different apps helps though. I get the feeling I may not be the only one who’s tried to find something.

DateBk6’s todo feature was a little sublime, and configurable.

If you had a task today you didn’t complete it would push over until tomorrow. This was entirely uncommon. It could be placed at the top of the list the next day, etc.

Practicing GTD to DateBk6 remains the most productive combo I’ve ever used. Android, iPhone, Windows mobile has never come close. Too many taps ands magical pageantry filled gestures just to open an app and add a task. With palm it was just a button. I had set mine to press was fn+Calendar.

Maybe someone can built a phone case with a few shortcut buttons on it. For a while I used an Android app that detected fingerprints on the back. Different finger to launch different apps was handy.

Todos without a date could be just batched/contextualized work you have to do, gtd style during a time block. For example longer emails.

There is an app called Motion you may have seen ads for that is starting to do some interesting things in this area.

Another app that is really decent is 2Do.

Wow, never thought I'd see Enfora mentioned in a thread in 2024. I worked there for a year or so, supporting those early GPRS cards.

I remember sending ICQ messages to friends while sitting in traffic on I-635. It was kinda unbelievable to be online in a car

I never had the WiFi sled, but I remember feeling this way when I used my 650 in the car, plugged into the aux audio input, to stream 128kbps music from Shoutcast servers via some media player I've since forgotten (it aped the Winamp interface, but wasn't a port if I remember correctly).

This was at a time when folks I knew were getting XM radio, but for the cost of the data plan I was already paying for (only a $10/mo addon for unlimited!) I could listen to hundreds of stations. I even ran a Shoutcast server from home so I could listen to my music collection on shuffle as a sort of bespoke radio station.

Enfora was great.

GPRS not so much! It did give a taste of the future and a good headstart to think about things to learn to recognize the iPhone/App Store moment.

I had the Enfora too (well, still do). I really miss Palm, in my opinion the UX was far superior to what we have on smartphones today.

So I had one of these and loved it so much, but then I switched to an, early-ish, iPhone, perhaps the 3G one, after playing with a couple early-ish androids. The iPhone was just so much better, generally, even if I lost the parts of the Treo that appealed to the more "nerdy" or tinkerer parts of me.

I think this was a lesson for me on how important UI is to mass-market devices. The Treo had so much going on for it, but most of the things you describe, most people would describe as awkward to use. Worse, the hardware keyboard meant the screen would always be smaller than an iPhone. I think the earliest Androids were marketed as "still has a keyboard" and that didn't really last. No one cared other than die-hards.

Downloading apps from random websites wasn't fun either. The app stores make a lot of sense in general, but moreso in mobile.

I also learned most times I'm forced to be a "tinkerer" by the industry, when most times I just want stuff to "just work" so I can choose what to tinker with. Oh, my win10 wont update to win11 because I need to redo the boot type and install a TPM chip on my old motherboard? That's not fun tinkering, that's annoying. The same way all the little things about the Treo or other less polished tech were like that. The game or novel I'm writing? That's fun tinkering.

It was also a lesson for me on how if you want to sell a mass-market product, the geeky, super-efficient, nerd-culture wisdom, etc stuff is a liability, not an asset. A lot of Apple wins is because someone said "this is too nerdy, get rid of it, abstract it away, make it easy, pretend you're a stressed out executive in a hurry." That model just gets sales and then that becomes our new default.

Apple is trying this in VR too, but Meta seems to already Apple-ized its current gen of headsets. Its a very Apple-like experience. I think that's hurting it. Ignoring the price issues, I can get "apple" from Meta already. They're several years too late. Apple, reportedly or rumored, cancelled its electric car program probably because groups like Tesla and others have already "Apple-ized" the car.

I'm not sure what areas Apple can attack now. We've all learned Apple's lesson.

I don't think Apple agrees with you that Meta has made headsets Apple-ized. Apple's idea with headsets is that you're basically never in a black VR void. Nobody has done that except Apple.

You're probably right about cars to a point, but I believe there the main problem is that Apple no longer believes self-driving cars under all situations that are safer than humans are achievable with current tech.

I think there are creature comfort areas Apple can work on, definitely, but I was very surprised at how Apple-like the experience of the Quest was, from unboxing to the UI. Especially coming from a Vive/Steam combo which is a bit of a technical Rube Goldberg machine and expects a certain amount of technical skills on top of owning a gaming PC, which is its own barrier to entry, both financially and technical skill-wise.

The bigger issue is that the Meta is just a gaming device while the Vision Pro is being marketed as a productivity device. I think this is where Apple can have success. They could, predictably, be the Apple // to Meta's Colecovision.

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