OSNews

>> Did you read the comments from Dianne (Hackborne) or Palm
>> (and former Be employee)? Did you read the interview with
>> George?

Yes, and they talk about screens, multimedia and... POSIX compliance. They do not talk about what's going on with the internal memory or the way the apps see files on it.

>> There will be a VFS layer. This is how most OS of a
>> UNIX/POSIX nature work. The FS is abstracted, and the
>> driver for the FS implements specific calls and ioctl
>> calls. Therefore, *yes*, reading between the lines,
>> external FS will be supported in the future.

VFS have been around since Sony introduced the PEG-S300 to provide support for its memory sticks.

The problem is that it is an add-on, which behaves like an add-on even in version 5.x! That is; applications do not use it unless you specifically do so.

For example you need to use third party software to do a backup to the memory stick, you can not open the notepad and tell it to save the .pdc file which contain the notes on the memory stick, same with the contact database or anything else.

Basically PalmOS behaves like an electronic agenda regarding the FS, which is annoying considering the aims of Cobalt and that we are in the year 2004

>> As for why you need a FS in the memory PalmOS uses to
>> store data, why? Please tell us more. I've been a Palm
>> user since the late 90's (PalmPilot Pro/PalmOS2) and the
>> lack of a FS has never stopped the device from
>> functioning... A database is like a folder, it can
>> contain one of more files (a lot of apps do it this way
>> under PalmOS), so why the big problem?

The problem is fairly simple, for example you cannot just copy a jpg file to the internal memory, you need always third party software to create a .pdb, which will contain it.

The real issue here is the need for a palm-desktop type of application, you always have dependency of such software which by definition runs only on full size computers, (and remember that MACOS now is excluded). And this is only if you are using non third-party software like documents to go or similar.

That problem render the PalmOS a platform that cannot run standalone, it always have dependence of another OS.

If there was a regular filesystem (or at least if the applications could use FS functionality) on the internal memory (and external devices) you could edit text files, rtf files, or any sort of file like any other computer platform does, making the PalmOS a true mini portable computer.

My Palm device never failed to me either, I'm quite happy with it, its battery last weeks, and it does what it is supposed to do, but I need to have the F***** palm desktop software everywhere to use the device, along with all third party transform-to-pdb-conduit software to transform regular files into palm .pdb. A good example is the PDF reader? you can?t copy a PDF to a palm device because there are no means to convert it to a .pdb, so you depend on having a memory card device to copy the file to the memory stick, and read it from there. Depending on which version of the operating system, vendor and so on you have to place the files on a particular directory or another on the memory stick in order for the reader software to recognize it (disadvantages of add-ons, no one agrees on a standard way to use it because the underlying os doesn?t provide a standard way)?

The solution is as always to find a third party app to transform the pdf to a palm doc, to do that you need to have the converting tool and acrobat? and all just to have a stupid pdf on your device!