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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Ratteler Wrote:
"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."
In some cases storing data in files does make sense but not always, and therefore people use databases. Photos, as an example, are probably best managed individually as files and on newer Palms you can do this. My T3 will take JPG files just fine and display them in the Photos application. I can easily copy JPGs to an SD card on my PC and display them on my Palm.
Other file types like MP3 and Doc files can be easily moved to the Palm on an SD card. Likewise you can send files like Word documents or Excel spreadsheets from the Palm to a Desktop PC.
On the other hand I don't think I would want to manage Calendar Appointments as individual files. Can you imagine trying to search hundreds of individual files to find a specific appointment?
Ratteler Also Wrote:
"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."
To my knowledge there are no standards for Calendar or Contact data and most of these types of applications cannot use each others data without some sort of conversion. The benefits to using databases to store this type of information is that you can easily cross-reference multiple pieces of data and you can quickly search and sort that data into something meaningful.
File systems have their uses but, IMHO, they are not the best solution for all data types.
Cheers
TC - aka Cowboy Shootist