Back in the day, the Palm Pilot was a massive hit. The reasons?

1) It did what it said on the tin: Contacts, Memos, Todo list and Calendar

2) It did it very conveniently: Each application was accessed by a single button, which also powered on the device. Imagine that in a PC! There’s your PC, switched off, and you just press the “WORD” button on the keyboard and 0.5 seconds later you can begin typing where you left off.

3) It was easy to develop for: In the ’90s I decided I would like to be able to schedule tasks for “Monday”, and “Saturday” as well as “Today”,”Tomorrow” and “Choose Date…”. It took me about two evenings to set up the development environment, install the emulator, modify the ToDo application, build it, debug it on the emulator, and install it on the actual Palm. Bermilliant! This involved going to the site www.palm.com, clicking Developer, entering some registration details, and downloading everything they offered me: palm compiler, example application (which included the source code to some of the applications that shipped with the device!), and the Palm emulator (to run your programs on without knackering your Palm.

When you use an old Palm, for example the Vx, you are constantly delighted by how convenient and integrated it is. Almost every button and swipe of the pen does just what you expected it to, and it really helps you get on with the things you wanted to do, which in those days could include things that weren’t directly to do with computers. It was clear that the developers of the palm applications all had palms, and were running their lives using the prototypes.

Then the Palm caught a case of the Suits. Palms started coming in different shapes and colours. Extra buttons appeared, which worked properly in some applications and not in others. Applications showed up that didn’t sit well alongside PalmOS’s funny GUI model of having only one application on the screen at a time. Its grip on point (1) was wavering. Then came WiFi, Internet in everybody’s home, and ‘convergence’. (Convergence is the bastard offspring of the James Bond digital watch and the “MORE FEATURES!” fetish of American technology: It thinks that you won’t buy a radio unless it’s also a cassette player, picnic hamper and roller skate) The Palm, rather than a compact, re-writable alternative to carrying a file-o-fax and an alarm clock around with you, now had to become a phone, a web-browser, an email terminal, a GPS. All those features would be nice, but they outgrew the PalmOS and that, combined with apparently hasty design, resulted in kludgy implementations that usually worked but never felt right. To this day, the WiFi settings on my Palm and I maintain a respectful distance. I don’t change the settings (or try to use the memory card slot), and it continues to recognize my home network. To cut a very long paragraph slightly less long, (1) went out the window, as the Palm was no longer sure what it was supposed to do, and (2) went with it, as it wasn’t sure how to do it.

Still, at least we can hack about our own code and customize our own personal palm.

Tonight I went to www.palmos.com, where I squinted at the page until I found Developer way down at the bottom in minuscule letters, clicked and got asked to log in or register. After failing to log in using the details I have on file, I registered. I had to tell it what sort of company I was, repeat my email address, tell them my country and my market sector and my role in the company. Then I was given a glitzy page which included the following:

To develop for Palm products on the Palm OS platform, complete the following steps:
1) Join the ACCESS Developer Program
…

So… wait, I joined the PalmOS Developer Network — twice — and I’m not able to download the palm emulator unless I sign up? When I get there, they’ve renamed PalmOS (Palm Operating System) to Garnet.
There goes (3).