I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Tag: PDA

The Personal Digital Assistant. A device type that has had a big impact on my life.

Why did credit card computers not take off?

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I noticed a Rex device on eBay the other day and was sorely tempted. In the end I resisted though. Which is probably good. But it got me thinking about these kinds of devices. I’ve posted about these before, a number of times and there is a page dedicated to all things PDA as well. I wonder why credit card sized devices never took off.

I know that smartphones have taken over almost every use case of mobile computing, but I do think that the result of that is that everything is a little dull. Sure we have smartwatches and phones, but the lack of a variety of form factors makes everything a little too uniform in many ways.

Something to think about maybe.

Arduboy (and a little retro comparison)

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I got this last week, which was much sooner than I’d expected to see it. It is tiny. About the size of maybe 3 or 4 credit cards stacked on top of each other. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to see it with a Rex 6000. Of course the Rex has a lot more memory than an Arduino and is of course designed to be a PDA where the Arduino nor the Arduboy is. Even so, it’s an interesting comparison.

When I get some time I’m going to try and see what I can make with the Arduboy as you can code to it via Codebender. So that’s really the next step.

Actually the old PalmSounds mobile music app directory is quite handy for old Palm OS apps

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That and the Palmorama library which has a lot of good stuff in it too. Of course a lot of those apps have gone and a lot of links lead to non-existent web sites, but then it was made in 2007, so what can you expect?

Old bits of ‘art’ made with NinerPaint on the Palm OS

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Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (1)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (2)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (3)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (4)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (5)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (6)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (7)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (8)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (9)
Art Made with NinerPaint for Palm OS (10)

I hadn’t seen these in a long time and when I did I thought I’d put them here so you could see the kinds of things I used to do with NinerPaint which was a great art app for Palm OS. So far I haven’t found anything similar in the iOS world. Or perhaps I just haven’t looked hard enough?

That could be it of course, and I should perhaps have another look at some point.