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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

Palm is still my favorite mobile OS ever invented. It was a joy to use, whereas my iOS and Android devices annoy me on a regular basis.

A few of the apps live on in emulation on my Android via StyleTap. One is the best astronomy map app I've ever used, another a favorite game (from back before platforms like Google turned us into product and incentivized developers to fill their stores with so much low-quality ad-infested in-app-purchase garbage).

I held onto a few models over the years which I kept as backup devices (eg. Palm V, Treo, an Enfora Wifi sled) and local copies of all the software to make 'em work. Quite confident I could bring them back to life for posterity (though secretly wish I could bring them back to life as a daily driver).

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One thing I loved about Palm was the reliability of the handwriting input. It forced you to get used to the shorthand alphabet, but once you did it was so easy to take notes without even looking down. For awhile I had an Android mod that let you scratch notes using Palm script, but I don't have it now (or a phone with a stylus). For me, writing in Palm script is still almost as fast as jotting notes on paper. Come to think of it, I think it actually altered my real handwriting.

It also altered my handwriting with a ballpoint. Fountain pen or pencil seemed to not trigger "palm mode".

Well... e.g. I now write capital "F" from the bottom-left to top-right. And I still write a capital "T" as an L from top-left to bottom-right. A lot of times I also write "E" as a reverse "3". I lost my initial down-stroke on "m" and ending downstroke on "u"....

Like you say, if I'm writing longhand with a good pen, I wouldn't write this way; but it definitely shaped my writing. Also, I learned cursive in 1st grade. I got my first Palm Pilot in 6th grade. It peeled back a lot of my writing style...

Really the amount of time I spend trying to just stop Android from using the wrong autocomplete words is less than what it took to jot letters out on the Palm...

Another one is how responsive/fast they usually felt.

The loss of Graffiti to lawyers and patent emporiums strikes me as one of the biggest setbacks to the use of modern phones and tablets. It was an order of magnitude faster for me to use it than anything currently available for handwriting recognition...

There are some Graffiti input systems for Android somewhere.

I couldn't find any, but you can emulate Palm on Android with the website CloudPilot.

Once I also built a proto-Grafitti symbol recognizer with a neural network in Python. (It doesn't support the Graffiti "X" because it requires two strokes).

First result when I type "Graffiti" in the Android store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.access_com...

Shouldn't any relevant patents be expired by now, though? This is late-1990s tech at most.

I started using Graffiti on my Newtons; under NewtOS 1.x, having it was the difference between usable pen input and not. Under 2.x, the native HWR was so much better than I really only ended up using Graffiti when I was editing an existing block of text -- but it was still very useful. And then, like almost everyone, I shifted to Palm.

I had forgotten about the lawsuit.

The issue for me was that, by the time that was muddying the water, I had moved on to a keyboard-based Treo 650 that I used off and on with sidelines in BlackBerry (about which UGH) and WinMo (UGH UGH UGH) -- until I got my first iPhone.

The Treo keyboard was good enough I didn't miss stylus input, but on the WinMo device I absolutely did. BB was its own thing, but didn't really work for me on any level.

I'm probably faster on my iPhone than I was with Graffiti, but both input mechanisms enabled fast-enough input that I was rarely frustrated at the input rate.

Are you sure thats not just 'looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses'? I loved PalmOS/Graffiti as well back then, but I am way faster nowadays just writing naturally with my S Pen and Samsungs handwriting recognition.

I know this is a bit off-topic... but I'm still, to this day, completely convinced that Palm could of had a solid stake in the smartphone market if the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi were not launched with outdated specs at the time. WebOS was an innovative OS, and they implemented so many things that you now find in iOS and Android, like card/app management and swipe-to-close.

The fact that it's been shoehorned down to an OS for TVs is a bit of sting. I'm glad to see that it's still around, but I can't help but wonder what the landscape would be like if they executed better.

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