Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]

https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdocs/uiguidelines.pdf

by spiffytech • 5 months ago

203 107 5 months ago

cs.uml.edu

I still miss my palm treo, the stylus, and physical keyboard. 20 plus years later and I still cannot use an apple pencil on my iphone... >:(

weezing• 5 months ago

It puzzles me why there is no proper stylus for an iPhone considering how big some versions are.

RGamma2• 5 months ago

In fact my keyboard is still broken from that "misdetected keyboard button press" bug they introduced some time in iOS26. Gotta see whether that's fixed in 26.3. Embarrassing!

cosmic_cheese5• 5 months ago

Typical smartphone aspect ratios are too awkward to be great for use with a stylus in my opinion, and is exacerbated by bezels having been all but eliminated.

If I were to design a smartphone for stylus use, I think it'd look something like an iPad mini, with its squarish ratio and thicker bezels, shrunken down by ~20%.

ianburrell• 5 months ago

You can buy styluses for iPhone (or any smartphone) but they have round squishy tips for the capacitive touch screen. They aren't any better than a finger, probably cause the display is tuned for a finger. I only use mine when phone or tablet is on stand.

Apple could put the technology for Apple Pencil in iPhone, but probably not worth the cost for number of people who would use it.

guide42• 5 months ago

The Graffiti.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

I remember the Giraffe game to learn it.

https://palmdb.net/app/giraffe

cbdevidal• 5 months ago

I carried a Palm Treo 700p until about five years ago. Only as a PDA, no phone or internet access. I used to swear I’d be buried with a Palm in my pocket.

But now I am feeling the same way about my iPhone. You can have my iPhone when you take it from my cold, dead…

kmoser• 5 months ago

I still use Palm Desktop (4.1.4, not even 6.2.2!) to manage my contacts.

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

I'm adding this to my repertoire of HIGs to study for a new desktop environment project I'm working on. I'm trying to synthesize the best parts of every computer interaction method, primarily focusing on desktops but looking at mobile designs as well.

There are 2 principle reasons for this project: 1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE) 2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)

jim180• 5 months ago

would you mind sharing your library of HIGs?

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

I can give a list of ones I'm studying CUA (87 and 91 versions) Awaita Breeze Material (primarily 3, but also 2 and 1) Apples HIG Microsofts HIG and Motifs HIG Some of these aren't technically HIGs and are rather "design-systems" but they all contain the commonality of trying to set up a consistent model for user-interaction in their environment

cosmic_cheese5• 5 months ago

I'll be keeping an eye out for your DE. For a long time now, the Linux desktop space as a whole has been rather uninspired in my opinion. A few interesting ideas have surfaced within it but failed to become popular for one reason or another, making for a rather stale environment.

That's not to say that it needs to be in constant flux or to be full of radical ideas. If anything, it'd be nice to see more DEs settle into a design and feature set and chase stability, efficiency, and performance over shinies. Rather, I think it would be better if more Linux DEs were built around coherent, opinionated design philosophies that cleanly set them all apart from each other. Even if that design philosphy is just "N platform's desktop, refined to its ultimate form", it's better than the "aimless bag of features" direction that's most common.

RGamma2• 5 months ago

IMHO if you can afford some setup time just skipping the DE entirely is still the best option. My i3wm setup plus some scripts and services was super lean and efficient. Still buried it for reasons I can't remember, switched distro too, but when I find the time I'm eager to create a tiling WM, wayland native UI on NixOS again.

inigyou• 5 months ago

Please can we just have Windows 98 again. Not the kernel, kernels are better now, but UIs have only gone downhill from there. Win9x was peak "it just works" (as long as it doesn't crash so please, no win9x kernels)

bombcar• 5 months ago

The real problem is you can’t have a DE separate from the programs that run therein, so everything just apes windows ;or sometimes macOS; badly.

To really break free you have build all the programs too, with the new UI paradigm.

resters• 5 months ago

great idea! would love to star a repo or otherwise follow the project.

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

Still in the planning phases. I've had many ideas and am excited to share them

klaussilveira• 5 months ago

I wouldn't use modern Windows as a good reference in user interface and user experience. If anything, is an experiment in user hostility.

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

Certainly not a reference, rather I'm looking at what each platform does good and trying to combine them in a way that empowers the user rather than fearing them

jimmaswell• 5 months ago

How is KDE like that? If you don't go out of your way to change options, you aren't "bombarded" with anything, it just works.

cosmic_cheese5• 5 months ago

Can only speak for myself but the problem is that with KDE there's always stuff I need to go in and change because I don't like the defaults, and then I fall into a rabbit hole of endless tweaking from which it's difficult to escape because no matter how much time I spend I can never get it to be just right.

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

The wealth of things in the KDE settings are things people will likely never change or are things that can be tweaked but don't necessarily need to be. For example, let's look at GNOMEs settings app. It has menus and options for all the things that the average user needs (network settings, mouse and display options, etc.) but leaves out, for example, things that people need to change for specific workflows (like the option to have focus follow the mouse). A settings app should let the user set things needed for the functions of a computer to work properly while separating deeper level customization for those who want it.

I think emacs does a very good job at this. You can configure most of the settings people need to be productive in a text editor from the menu bar while leaving the extremely rich customization of emacs to the options menu and elisp config files

lunar_rover• 5 months ago

It's quality issue from my experience. Nobody ever bothered with polishing the defaults and the "option bombardment" is really bad incoherent design instead of having too many things.

I remember spending hours customising the KDE 5 task bar clock, trying to correct the padding. Eventually I gave up customising it and switched to GNOME.

KDE app customisation is also a mess compared to something like foobar2000.

wao0uuno• 5 months ago

I love KDE, especially since Plasma 6 release but oh man is the Settings program poorly designed and littered with settings 99% of users will never need.

So many options placed seemingly at random. Similar options like lockscreen, login screen and desktop background settings spread out over 3 different main categories.

Customization options so extensive and granular one can only wonder about their purpose. Even in their latest release blog post they chose to brag about the new ability to change intensity/thickness of frames. I don't think most people care about stuff like this.

Until recently defaults were straight up insane like single click to open folders/launch programs, touchpad scroll being inverted etc.

If you navigate to Settings -> Sound you'll be presented with some options but also buttons in the top right that will open a mostly empty screen with a few additional options. Why not split the whole page into parts and present everything on a single screen? Why not tabs?

Sometimes those buttons in the top right have different behavior. Some will open a whole new page ansd sometimes it's just a popup and other times it's a dropdown.

And oh man just navigating Settings sucks. Main list consists of single and two level options with two level options opening another, mostly empty vertical pane so the actual size of the right pane changes with top text jumping around depending on what you press. So why some settings have two levels and some have tabs and some have those junky top right buttons that need their own back button to show up in the interface whenever they're pressed? I'm not for or against any of those design choices but why all of them at random? I just want some goddamn consistency.

Cherry on top is the bloat most distros choose to install alongside Plasma desktop. Dragon Player? kMail? Does anyone even use these? I dislike Gnome a lot but at least their preinstalled software is minimal, elegant and actively supported/developed. Most KDE programs look like they stopped receiving updates in 2008.

I still think it's a great DE but there's much room for improvement.

relium• 5 months ago

The best book I've ever read on the topic was the classic Mac OS Human Interface Guidelines. I still recommend them even though some of the specifics are out-of-date.

https://dev.os9.ca/techpubs/mac/pdf/HIGuidelines.pdf

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

It's on my list as well. I really appreciate the MacOS handles progressive disclosure, something most environments either get wrong or misunderstand (caugh caugh GNOME caugh caugh)

ETA: One thing I forgot to mention is how playful MacOS was (and to an extent still is). They recognised that the easiest way to learn something is by messing with it and seeing what happens. It also caused it to be very approachable through what I like to call 'professional unprofessionalism'. It wasn't afraid to use silly metaphors or graphics to get a point across without crossing the line into seeming out of place in a work environment or feeling infantilising

krickelkrackel• 5 months ago

I'd want to add "Designing Interactions" by Bill Moggridge (IDEO, designer of the first 'laptop' computer):

https://www.amazon.com/-/en/Designing-Interactions-Press-Bil...

DaanDL• 5 months ago

I wonder how much of their own guidelines they violated with MacOS Tahoe.

vostrocity• 5 months ago

I adore Tog on Interface by Bruce Tognazzini, who led the earliest editions of Apple's HIG. He explores ideas that have been lost to time, like tailoring an interface to a user's personality.

cpeterso• 5 months ago

If you haven't already, check out Microsoft's "The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering" report summarizing some of the Windows 95 designers' user research:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

I read it and it partially inspired the entire project. It made me realise how inaccessible modern design is despite being held up as best in class and easy to use

hypercube332• 5 months ago

If you're looking at Windows peak was like Win2000

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

I agree to an extent. I have some problems with it but I appreciate the way it approached new users. Instead of instantly trying to accommodate them it instead presented itself to the user in ways that let the user learn, sometimes the hard way.

NetMageSCW2• 5 months ago

Nah - peak was Windows 7.

WillAdams3• 5 months ago

If you want a photocopy of the Go Corp. PenPoint UI guidelines let me know and I'll see if I can dig out a copy from a binder which I got w/ an SDK I purchased years ago --- I really miss PenPoint, and always thought it was one of the better UI environments.

contact info is my user name here at aol.com

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

1) I'll be sure to reach out

2) You still use AOL? Is it just you've had it long enough to not want to switch or do you actively choose to use it for some reason I might've missed?

NetMageSCW2• 5 months ago

Consider picking up Alan Cooper’s (perhaps somewhat dated) UI books for some useful perspective in thinking about UIs outside the experienced computer user mindset.

ErroneousBosh7• 5 months ago

or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE)

What do you find "dumbed down" and unusable about it?

Press ctrl-alt-T, and a terminal appears. Begin typing.

Press the flag key and a kind of menu thing you can type the name of apps into appears. Type "firefox" or "vscode" as appropriate, begin typing.

It could hardly be made any more straightforward.

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

Its not that (thats actually really good) its the application design being unsuitable for complex tasks

tapoxi• 5 months ago

they still, to this day, pretend the concept of a system tray doesn't exist. unfortunately applications expect one, so they put it behind a menu in a dropdown with a picture of a ghost so you know an app is hiding somewhere

it's insane

a1o• 5 months ago

If you want some cool unusual UI, check out the HP Logic Analyzers (like the 16500A but there were others). It had a touch interface even though it had a CRT, and it had a knob for scrolling and for some alternative uses too - I think it used an encoder instead of a potentiometer but I may be misremembering. It was a really cool interface, I used it in early 2000s but it was old already by then, but it was really cool. There is a small website that documents its UI but I forgot the url.

internet101010• 5 months ago

Not sure if you have experimented with it yet but COSMIC is a DE made by System76 (creators of Pop!_OS) and manages to get pretty close to what I have been seeking, which is essentially MacOS with tiling. They basically gave up on GNOME and built it in Rust from scratch. Still a few major things like HDR missing but overall it's solid.

You get the tiling without the config that comes with Hyprland, with the added option of toggling between tiled or floating. Settings are minimal but they are slowly adding more when there is enough demand. IDE-style theming is done at system-level so that applications match.

mghackerlady18• 5 months ago

Yeah, but it has the same issue I have with elementary: it uses a toolkit nobody uses or would use for anything else

cyrc• 5 months ago

For user interface designers. A sincere request to consider these old interfaces like Palm OS, IBM CUA, Mac System 6 for a modern Linux GUI.

The simple black and white interface reduces cognitive load and decision fatigue. Modern UI like skeumorphic, material, drop shadows, 3d interface, aero, glass etc are high cognitive load for some individuals.

A text heavy interface and GUIs that are explicit, not implicit and learnt through discovery is easier for me.

A link to the an article. The picture shows that the IBM CUA works for both terminal and Windows 2.0 type GUI in simple black and white.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-cua-today-enduring-legac...

analog31• 5 months ago

To me the best thing about Palm OS was the rule that you’re never more than two taps or a button press away from where you want to be. (I think that’s how I remember it). The beloved early GUIs were all on machines that didn’t do much, comparatively speaking. The problem with modern GUIs is that there’s just too much to learn and remember if it’s presented as symbols rather than text.

lxgr• 5 months ago

Symbols are already a best-case scenario. Too often, modern UIs require hovering over this button or making that swipe gesture to perform a certain action. The antithesis of affordance.

Apocryphon• 5 months ago

Perhaps it's natural then that when Palm went on to make WebOS they included the cards system for quick accessibility.

Someone• 5 months ago

FTA:

“Minimize Taps

Most information about that data should be accessible in a minimal number of taps of the stylus — one or two.

Desktop user interfaces are typically designed to display commands as if they were used equally. In reality, some commands are used very frequently while most are used only rarely. Similarly, some settings are more likely to be used than others. On Palm Powered handhelds, more frequently used commands and settings should be easier to find and faster to execute.

• Frequently executed software commands should be accessible by one tap.

• Infrequently used or dangerous commands may require more user action.”

don-code2• 5 months ago

This is one of the reasons I hung onto my Treo for so long. It was so much faster to do... well, basically anything that the device was capable of. With the physical keyboard, you actually didn't need to take the stylus out very often, either.

Calling Mark: (power on) (phone key) M-A (send) - hitting the phone key automatically brought up the dialer, which did double duty as contact search.

Adding a new event to the calendar: (power on) (calendar key) (enter) - and just start typing; you could navigate the fields with the up and down arrows.

Opening the calculator: (power on) (home key) C-A (enter) - the launcher was filterable with the keyboard.

jen20• 5 months ago

Even better, IIRC on the Treo the phone key would turn it on?

I had a Treo 600 and and then 650 from around 2003 until 2007 when the iPhone came out. The 600 was among the best devices I've ever had. Rock solid, did exactly what it said it did. The 650 would crash randomly just sitting there. Not quite as bad as a Windows phone of the era, but a substantial regression.

silveira• 5 months ago

I still remember using Palm OS for the first time and having my little mind blown away because there was no save buttons (at least in the version and apps I was using). You edited a document and that's it, it was saved. Like writing on paper.

Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.

ignoramous• 5 months ago

Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.

PalmOS designers & engs (along with MS WebTV / Danger Sidekick folks) ended up working on early Android (Astro Boy / Bender / Petit Four etc), and there's a lot of parallels between the two.

crims0n• 5 months ago

I really miss this era. Everything was straight and to the point by design, no processor cycles or memory were (or even could be) wasted. Less layers of abstraction, the entire stack from physics to application could be understood by a single person.

snozolli• 5 months ago

My favorite detail of the Palm story is that the founder carried around a block of wood and pretended it was a PDA in order to work out details of the interface.

https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424...

jcalvinowens• 5 months ago

I didn't know the impetus for the graffiti writing was actually hardware limitations, that's fascinating:

Gaffiti power writing software was another design decision affected by the battery selection. During the design of the first Palm handhelds, users were clamoring for natural handwriting recognition. However, natural handwriting recognition would require a more powerful processor and more memory, which together required bigger batteries. Adding all these things to a handheld would have weighed it down and made it cost too much for the market. Instead, the Palm designers bet that users would settle for good-enough handwriting recognition if the result was long battery life.

Ylpertnodi• 5 months ago

I still do my 'v's backwards.

Brian_K_White2• 5 months ago

I miss the whole Palm ecosystem.

I have noted many times that I had a slab phone with full screen color icon grid general purpose os with internet and countless 3rd party apps for every conceivable purpose,... 7 full years before the iphone. 8 years before the iphone had 3rd party apps.

And it wasn't Android it was a Samsung SPH-i300 running PalmOS.

It was great that there was not really much of an app store, you got apps individually more or less like desktop os apps. There might have been app stores that collected apps but I don't remember ever using any.

I had apps for everything the same as today. Even though the screen was only like 160x240 and the internet was 14.4k, I had browser & email of course, but also ssh, irc, I even had a vnc client! Audible.com player, countless random things like a netmask calculator, resistor color code app, a few different generic db apps where you design your own fields and input/display screens etc. 3rd party phone dialer that integrated the contacts db. I must be forgetting a hundred other things.

The OS wasn't open source but at least the apps could be, so pretty much like windows & mac.

All in all I'd prefer Android where the entire system is open, except Google has somehow managed to make the real world life with Android less open than PalmOS was, even though PalmOS wasn't open source and I think even the development system wasn't free either.

I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.

andrewf• 5 months ago

I worked for a company that published a PalmOS app. Palmgear.com was a very important distribution channel, but so was our own website, I forget the exact ratios.

jomar• 5 months ago

I think even the development system wasn't free either.

Metrowerks CodeWarrior was the original development system for PalmOS and was indeed not free (in either sense).

However a bunch of enthusiasts cobbled together some free development tools: the main parts were adapting the GCC and binutils m68k targets to PalmOS's constrained PIC runtime environment (it was constrained even by m68k standards); a tool to convert the resulting COFF or ELF executable to PalmOS's .prc database format; and a text-based resource compiler for generating UI elements using its own home-grown description language to express what CodeWarrior users were using a graphical UI editor to make.

That mostly still exists as it was back in the PalmOS days at <https://prc-tools.sourceforge.net>. And if you hunt around on GitHub you'll find a few people who've kept the code compiling with stricter more modern compilers.

(And see also <https://pilrc.sourceforge.net> for the resource compiler.)

Wowfunhappy• 5 months ago

I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.

I don't think this in itself is the cause. Basically every Linux distribution has an "official repository" which is really just an app store by another name, but the system is still open. Having an integrated distribution channel is really useful!

Brian_K_White2• 5 months ago

True. And of course there is no problem with other stores like fdroid.

But somehow google play is different, which is why I added the highly integrated part.

I think fdroid actually helps google play by going so far the other direction that it excludes most apps, so you cannot have fdroid as your only app store. (to be clear I highly approve of fdroids policy and would not change it)

But there are even other app stores that cover both bases, allowing all the non free apos from play store and yet not being google. But then the problem is trust. I trust the apps in say the ubuntu repos and in fdroid, but say Aurora store? ehh, maybe? I would normally not even slightly consider installing apks from a 3rd party like that, but I got an eink tablet that can't install google play, so was more or less forced to try it just on that device. But that's not my phone. I don't have or do anything important or sensitive on it.

So while I am still sure that Google is doing multiple things that keep play store practically unavoidable necessity, it's probably also a combination of other, kind of coincidental factors too like fdroids strict principles and no obvious basis to trust any other store. Maybe some of those other factors are not immutable.

Maybe it's just an impression thing or a failure of marketing and Aurora is exactly the answer and exactly as trustworthy as any official major linux distro repo, and I just don't have that impression for some reason.

gelstudios• 5 months ago

sigh palm, we all miss you.

Your product needs enough features for the optimal user experience and no more

https://cs.uml.edu/~fredm/courses/91.308-spr05/files/palmdoc...

agumonkey• 5 months ago

Very interesting to see guidelines for UI on such constrained devices. Also terrible realizing that functionally, my so-very-2026 css3-reactjs-tailwind app is also tabs with rows and toolbars.

felixding• 5 months ago

I can’t recommend another excellent free ebook enough: Zen of Palm.

It accurately describes the key differences between designing for desktop and mobile, which explains why PalmOS was so much easier to use than the various Windows-based mobile formats from Microsoft at the time. I even wrote a whole blog series about this book two decades ago (https://dingyu.me/blog/zen-of-palm-1).

I switched from a Dell Pocket PC to a Treo 650, and it was such a revelation. IMHO, this little phone is still one of the best in terms of simplicity, even today.

aidenn0• 5 months ago

My wife still misses her Centro. She held onto it until Google Maps removed the API that the maps app on it used.

rkagerer• 5 months ago

I've been seriously contemplating reviving my old Palm device. No notifications / nagging, no ads, in many cases better apps, hardware buttons and a security posture exotic enough to basically not be worth targeting.

lateforwork• 5 months ago

Palm OS does not get enough credit as the progenitor of modern handheld experience, including especially iOS.

iOS shares many similarities with Palm OS, such as the home screen layout of app icons, the use of full-screen apps without windowing, the absence of an explicit "quit" action, no exposed file system (obvious today, but bold back in those days), a single hardware button to return "home", and so on.

What iOS added is true preemptive multitasking, memory protection, multitouch gestures, physics-based scrolling and so on.

nofriend• 5 months ago

The first three are presumably just hardware advancements? Apple certainly deserves credit for refining the concept and making it into a neat package.

Daub• 5 months ago

I wrote some teaching material on the rise and fall off Palm for which I produced a graphic showing how the palm split and merged over the years. Quite honestly it's one of the most complex and insane graphics i have ever made.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/7hh5uzoaj2x7zq60yv9vz/palm_ti...

aquova• 5 months ago

Ars did a retrospective on the Palm line-up that I occasionally go back and re-read. I never got into the ecosystem, although my dad had a Palm III(?) when I was younger. Had I been a decade older I think I would've been infatuated with them.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/palm-os-and-the-devi...

zombot• 5 months ago

That was when we still had user interfaces. All we have now are ad billboards.

rrix2• 5 months ago

My first personal computer was a Palm and my earliest programming experiences came with reading these docs, how fun. For a young person whose parents' custody arrangement led to almost every night of sleep under a different roof, a wifi enabled OS with a great applicaton library that was always with me was really powerful and ended up being quite impactful on the arc of my life.

By high school I was writing apps that followed this hig with a fold up keyboard, designing the ui and compiling code on board the device. PalmOS 4 and 5 could be tricked out to be a whole computer, capable of working offline for a week and also could get you up all night on IRC and ebooks. it's hard to imagine using my smartphone offline for a week now....

and most of the apps implemented this hig and were straightforward to use because it was the defeult builtin toolkit largely the same its entire life, progressively enhanced GUIs from 1bit 160x160 to full color 320x480 responsive design... nowadays I'm building a Material3 app in my evenings and i know some day google is gonna make a material4 so that my app looks scuffed up

Western0• 5 months ago

I like computers that can run for several days or weeks on a single charge. Today, better processors and better screens could make this possible. Add solar panels and we would have weak computers that work like calculators. No power from the wall!

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]

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