Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 24th Feb 2004 18:34 UTC
The voice, the man, the... machine. That's George Hoffman for you. According to people who have worked with him (including my husband) he is one of the brightest Be, Inc. engineers ever. These days, George works at PalmSource, Inc. as the Director of Applications and Services. In his free time he sings with an (a cappella) vocal band of 4, Hookslide (check out their .wmv promo video clip)! In this interview we talk about PalmOS 6, aka Cobalt. We discuss the architecture of the OS, its capabilities, its market targets and more. Screenshots of Cobalt are included.
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Jace wrote:
"Can someone enlighten me about Palm and File Systems? Why would we want traditional file systems features or architectures in a Palm?"
Because files are a sensible way to deal with data. My BIGGEST complaint about PalmOS is that it has no idea what a .Jpg is. If I move a picture onto my device, I want every single program that can comprehend what a picture is to be able to use that picture. As it stands, I have paint programs that can't see my photos. Text files that can't be seen by other all my text editors, and no way to get any of this stuff to any desktop computer even though I can copy the information to a SD-Card, becuase my Desktop can only see the things as Palm Databases.
"One of the things that makes a Palm OS device so easy for people to use is that there is no hierarchy of storage. Each app "stores" its own documents."
Which makes the Palm a "Pocket of Bable".
"The user needs never consider applications and file types."
Sure they do. It's the internat age. Even the simplest web page is an .HTM file. I should be able to Save that to my device and load into Quickword so I can make changes, then save it back and upload it back to my web space. My Tungsten C has built in WiFi. I should be able to grab pictures off the net and edit them, post them back via FTP too.
"I like it this way."
That's fine for you. So let Palm OS scan a directory and make you a database of the files types your apps can see.
I so NO benefit to having data in a propriotery format that only one application can see when there are simple standards that would let that data work in any application.
"Hey, while on this topic... what file system would be used if Palm OS started to have that? Would it be exposed to users or only developers and hackers?"
A VFS card is already a Fat formated device, and practically every OS on Earth understand it. I guess the best solution would be to let people choose how they see their information.
As for me, If OS6 doesn't make some sence out file navigation, I'm looking into porting the Xscale version of Linux to this device.