Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

Online color scheme generator. Never enough of them.

Treo - I’m watching you. That’s why I noticed report from NYC Treo 600 launch.It’s good that you’ll be available via so many carriers. It’s not good that you’re so expensive.

Learn to juggle 4 balls. Just found an animated tutorial on juggling 4 balls. I can juggle 3 but not 4. Maybe this tutorial will help me get to the next level.

Northwest C++ users group meeting. Of interest to Seattle (and near-Seattle) dwellers interested in C++: on October 8th there’ll be a Northwest C++ users group meeting with Bartosz Milewski of ReliSoft.

Leaked info about Tungsten E and Tungsten T3. You can read all about it here. The news is that this is really not news. Just an incremental upgrade of Tungsten: a little bit more memory, a little bit faster. Nothing very interesting about those models.

More Palm OS 6 info. BrightHand has more information on Palm OS 6. The big news is ability to write fully ARM-native apps and multi-tasking improvements.

Palm OS propaganda. This CNET article has only one useful piece of information: next version of Palm OS 6 will be “launched” on Dec. 29.

The only other significant thing in this article is how low PalmSource will go to “promote” Palm OS over the competition. Lacking any real advantages PalmSource claims that “standardized API” in Palm OS is its advantage over Symbian and Pocket PC. In reality Palm OS is the most fragmented platform of them all making it a nightmare for developers to support all the available models of the hardware. For a long time there was no standard API for accessing external memory cards which resulted in at least 3 different APIs (now standard VFS, Handera’s and MemPlug’s APIs). Many Sony CLIE models have their own, non-standard APIs for dealing with non-standard screen resolutions and managing the virtual silk-screen area. I believe Treo has its own networking library. Tapwave’s latest device has its own graphics library.

To be fair: those things finally got standardized but it doesn’t help developers much as long as the devices with non-standard APIs are still on the market.

Palm OS currently is a messy platform because it wasn’t designed with extensibility in mind (e.g. a big assumption was a screen of fixed 160×160 resolution, there was no multitasking at all). As a result Palm OS had to be hacked in ugly ways to support better devices (e.g. supporting all the possible screen resolutions on Palm devices is a nightmare, the power of ARM processor is mostly wasted because most of the software is still emulated 68k code and even if one would want to write purely ARM code, one can’t because there is no good compiler support). I used to hope that Palm OS 6 will put an end to it and provide sane APIs for things like graphics but now I doubt it - nothing that has been said so far about it suggests that it’s going to be the case. Most likely we’ll see continuation of ugly hacks in the OS. But I do hope I’m wrong.

Treo 600 in US in mid-October. According to this article Treo 600 will available in US from Sprint in mid-October.

Alan Cooper on software business. Alan Cooper argues in this article that a way to win in the software business is not by cutting costs of production (i.e. number of programmers and their salaries) but by investing more in creating good software (i.e. hiring more programmers).

Borland to use wxWindows. According to this page Borland is going to use wxWindows in their new C++ product and also help in developing wxWindows. That’s another great win for wxWindows (after being adopted by Chandler).