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Alpha Testing of Pocket HAL for PalmOS
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I'm helping Thierry Tremblay test his port of PocketHAL for the PalmOS. It's been pretty interesting trading ideas back and forth because Theirry keeps his source code pretty close to himself, but he drops hints here and there as to how he has optimized a lot of his ARM blitting routines. Thierry's Pocket Frog has been around for a while, and as such, his ARM assembly has been refined to the point that it's blazingly fast. However, the architecture of his original code base and the limitations imposed by the PalmOS have made for some interesting discussions about implementation. I'm excited to see how it all turns out. As of this posting, it still has a long way to go.
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Submitted by bosshogg on Tuesday the 30th of November 2004, at 09:59 am
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Treo 650
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 | Well, I've had the new Treo 650 from Sprint for a couple of weeks, but I didn't want to violate any NDAs so I have been pretty quiet about it. However, now that it's out, I'm free to share my thoughts. I realize that the 650 has been covered already by a lot of different sites, but here are my two cents anyway. In a nutshell, the 650 fixes everything that was wrong with the 600 and breaks one really big thing.
The best enhancements (IMHO) are:
1. When the battery dies, you don't lose your data. This is because of a new feature called NVFS (more on this one in a bit).
2. The keyboard buttons are bigger and easier to press.
3. The home ane menu buttons are now up by the nav dial. which makes life easier on your thumb
4. 320 by 320 screen makes it easier to read little text.
5. Bluetooth support.
Here are the negative 'enhancements':
1. The NVFS Volatile/non-volatile memory shadowing reduces the usable memory footprint.
2. The soft reset hole is behind the battery cover
3. The camera still is pretty wimpy (Not a big deal really, but I had to have 3 items in my list!)
Now, a lot of people might think that the removable battery is great, but until I get a spare battery or even an external charger for the battery, the feature does little for me. Overall, there really is a lot to like about the 650. Probably my only *BIG* complaint is the NVFS implementation. (If you want a full technical explanation go here). At work, I have run head long into its limitations because of our client-server architecture. In the simplest case, one of our applications downloads a payload from the server, but the first four bytes that we download indicate the payload size. In our current implementation, we check the available free space against that number and abort if there wasn't enough memory free on the device. However, with the memory changes, it is difficult (nay, impossible) to translate how much that data will turn into once it gets down on the device. I'm still trying to figure out an elegant work around for this without having to do a major re-write. I'll post more about that as I figure out the details. |
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Submitted by bosshogg on Tuesday the 30th of November 2004, at 02:43 am
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