Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]
cs.uml.edu122 points by spiffytech 6 hours ago
122 points by spiffytech 6 hours 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.
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)
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.
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...
I wonder how much of their own guidelines they violated with MacOS Tahoe.
As they should. There are fundamental differences in hardware and capability between 1992 and 2026.
The most immediate are pull-down menus at the top of the screen. They work good on a 9 inch screen, they are awful with 27 inch displays.
Another related change are modal dialog boxes. When you have a 9 inch screen you're fundamentally looking at one document in one app at a time. When you got 2 27's that's not true anymore.
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
Needs moar Copland (R.I.P.) https://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/mac/developer/Copland/D11E4_...
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:
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
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.
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.
Kinda what I'm trying to do. It will have a sort of "native feel" but will try to accommodate other UI paradigms and incorporate some of their ideas
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.
I definitely agree, but those are hard to approach for newcomers. GNU shouldn't just be usable by those willing to put in extensive time, it should be easy to grok for newcomers as well (how else would we spread free software?). There is of course an amount of learning that might be required, as with any system, but we should balance that with the power of the software. systems like GNOME balance it by making the software near useless in exchange for the ability to be used without needing to learn or challenge anything, adopting user interface patterns designed to restrict the user as it's easier for people to instantly know how to do something. That's like trying to make a house easier to live in by locking the doors and putting up barred windows to accommodate those previously living in prison
It's a decent option for those who lean technical and like minimal WMs, but none are really my cup of tea. I've played with several and probably the one I enjoyed most was OpenBox which is the least like a minimal WM and most like a traditional floating DE, but it still wasn't what I was looking for.
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)
Well, this will be on a unix and it will be libre so its already better than windows, but I am heavily inspired by the 9x design language in multiple ways. Of course, things have changed and current tastes must be accommodated but there are important ideas that can be pulled from it
I wouldn't use modern Windows as a good reference in user interface and user experience. If anything, is an experiment in user hostility.
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
> 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.
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
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?
1. I'll start looking
2. Yes, I was a charter member (who unfortunately, was broke when they offered the chance to buy stock), and it's easy to remember, and everything online account-wise is tied to it, and if I could still be paying for it and having my member FTP/webspace, I would.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Funny I feel the same about gnome. I haven't played with others enough to comment I suppose but all are missing some basic creature comfort stuff like a full tcp/up config dialog or a real fluid working app store out of the box. Distros add these but what is going on here.
The thing with GNOME is having to stack a bunch of extensions (most of which will only somewhat meet your needs) to get desired features, half of which will break periodically because there’s no stable extension API.
GNOME and KDE sit on extreme opposite ends of the minimalist/maximalist spectrum.
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.
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
would you mind sharing your library of HIGs?
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
If you're looking at Windows peak was like Win2000
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.
great idea! would love to star a repo or otherwise follow the project.
Still in the planning phases. I've had many ideas and am excited to share them
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I had the Treo until 2012; the Android headwinds were blowing full speed at that point.
Before the Treo, I had a VisorPhone. Wonderful device, and fit a specific need (no phones allowed in school - great, I can slide the phone out of the back, and continue to use it as a PDA). The thing that killed the VisorPhone for me was PalmOS 3.5's lack of memory protection, combined with a bug in the SMS app. Anybody sending me an MMS message instantly crashed it, requiring me to pull the batteries. Sometimes I hadn't realized it happened for hours, and missed phone calls. MMS messages (group texts, etc) only became more and more common, and when this became a multiple-times-weekly occurrence, I made a move.
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.”
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.
Perhaps it's natural then that when Palm went on to make WebOS they included the cards system for quick accessibility.
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.
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.
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.
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... >:(
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…
The Graffiti.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
I remember the Giraffe game to learn it.
It puzzles me why there is no proper stylus for an iPhone considering how big some versions are.
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.
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!
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%.
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...
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...