> Perhaps your memory is different to mine, but I remember all > sorts of frustrating, nasty, undocumented problems with apps > that just grabbed an "interrupt ... and did what they wanted".
Of course - but my point was that it *was* possible (and relatively easy) to do what you wanted in a well-behaved way. I've done a TSR virus scanner in MS-DOS - no problems and it wasn't causing trouble to anyone. Of course there were programs that were sloppily written - aren't there such programs in the PalmOS universe too? Yes, some TSR programs tried to be way too smart for their own good - I remember SideKick trying to be always the first on the chain of TSR programs; if you had another TSR program that tried to do the same, the two *really* disliked each other... :-) But it was easy to do things and it was easy to them properly - without any silly limitations, except the fact that you essentially had to write the whole user interface yourself. > Yeah. With the emphasis on 'cooperative'. Anything that > broke the rules even slightly brought the whole house of > cards down on it's arse. Well PalmOS is no different - any badly written application can grab the device and crash it in various creative ways. Except that the word "multitasking", cooperative or not, is somewhat missing... :-) (Unless we count version 6.x which currently doesn't run on anything but the simulator.) But forget multitasking. Even MS-DOS had the concept of "shell to another program and when that one exits, return to the caller". You don't need multitasking for that. It's one program that's running at any given time. Yet PalmOS doesn't have even that... > I'm not going to pretend that Palm OS was brilliantly designed It's just not designed at all with systems programming in mind. Anti-virus programs, device drivers, other deep stuff - hell, even writing libraries isn't exactly trivial there... It seems that all the design efforts have been concentrated on the user interface. It's quite good there - the API is very rich and one can do almost anything easily enough - although I wish it had Windows-style radio buttons instead of the "pushbuttons" it currently has and that implementing a tabbed form and scroll bars on lists and tables was a bit easier (I mean - supported by the API so that you didn't have to do everything manually yourself). Oh, and to answer one of my own questions - one reason for the difference between a Windows machine and a PalmOS machine is that the PalmOS machine doesn't have a hard disk. True, the CPU and 2 Mb RAM ought to be sufficient to implement a cooperative multitasking Windows 3.x-style OS - but there there won't be much space left for the user to put their applications. I have no experience whatsoever with Windows CE-based devices. Does that OS support multitasking? (And does it actually work?) Do these devices have a hard disk? (I know that Apple's iPod has one, so it's possible to put one in a PDA-like device.) Regards, Vesselin -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
