The Future of Dynapad (survey!)

Norton, Chris chrisn at Kronos.com
Thu Oct 24 16:02:13 UTC 2002


On Thu, 10/24/2002 11:41 AM, Aaron J Reichow wrote about the cost of a
PDA...

Aaron, I understand that you can get cheaper machines (under $500), and
hopefully the price will drop even lower, but for me, the key PDA-disconnect
is the screen size and the inherent difficulty of a pen-based interface.
It's just not good enough for me.  I like my keyboard (yes, I know there are
keyboards for PDAs and also simulated (holographic laser) keyboards) and my
big monitor.  I think PDAs will become truly useful when they support full
voice recognition and have expandable (or perhaps projection?) screens --
but that's another topic entirely.

What I was getting at with my proposal of a PDAEmulatorMorph was aimed more
towards machine emulation than towards change sets.  If we had an iPAQ (and
Zaurus, etc) machine emulator in Squeak, then we could all use your work 'as
is' in our own images (you could also run other native iPAQ software on your
PC).  We could even 'shrink-wrap' the Squeak PDAEmulatorMorph and make a PDA
simulation application that could be run from a desktop, outside of Squeak,
on any platform that supports Squeak!  So your iPAQ apps could run on
Mac/Unix/Windows/Acorn/etc.

Maybe I'm not thinking clearly, but I think it would be nice to simulate
these PDA machines from within Squeak.  The emulation code could probably
even be turned into a VM plug-in, so it could have snappy performance.  :-)

I'm not volunteering for this (big) job.  But perhaps another interested
party might volunteer.

Cheers,

---==> Chris



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