[rbanffy]

When I first got my very first Palm Pilot I recognised one thing: what the minimum computer needed would be and how much that little gadget could do that, otherwise, would tie me to my desk (or force me to carry my laptop.

In the end, most of the time, our day to day needs can be covered by very simple software - text editors, spreadsheets, messaging (including email), threaded discussions, and not that much else.

[bluGill]

The designers of the Palm Pilot carried a chunk of wood with a stack of post-it notes and a pen for months. At the end of each day they looked at all those post-its and tried to figure out how they could make the gadget do that job. It became very focused on the things that people want to do without using a larger computer.

[fallat]

Happy to see a comment like this. One thing I'd add to the list is spaced repetition software for memory strengthening. When you have a moment, you can go over things and strengthen your own memory.

Is a spreadsheet even necessary on the go? Might be better to just have a calculator and store values in a text file?

Also, music? Or is this really a luxury? Truthfully I think yes. But maybe there are some "sound programs" which are "necessary" (like white noise generation)?

I'm sure a lot of us have had this line of thinking many times, but it'd be nice to have a discussion around it :)

[mbork_pl]

> Is a spreadsheet even necessary on the go? Might be better to just have a calculator and store values in a text file?

You might be right technically, but one of the features of a spreadsheet is that it stores formulae. (Like a programmable calculator.) Even better, it does it spatially (which fits the way many people remember things), so after a while you can train yourself to put "kilometers driven here, amount of liters of gas there, and your gas usage per 100km is over there" etc. You can do this in a text file, too, of course (see e.g. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Emb...), but a text file is essentially 1-dimensional, which may be a drawback here.

[fallat]

I know, but the problem with that is now each cell is essentially a calculator, and it only makes sense to store numbers, and even on small devices, dealing with spreadsheets isn't the greatest because of screen size. Building discipline also to record data like this just to review once in awhile sounds like a lot of work, vs just opening "L/100km.txt" and calculating. Heck, you could make the calculator program be able to open files where each line is a number and operate on that.

[dspillett]

> Is a spreadsheet even necessary on the go?

Necessary, no, not by any means. But it is certainly a very-nice-to-have. Something far simpler than Excel would do but as it runs on my phone and I have a licence, why not?¹

> just have a calculator and store values in a text file?

That would be something new to learn and/or a manual process.

I use spreadsheets for little repetitive calcs, or even non-repetitive ones that I want to remember after I've lost the bit of paper from my pocket that they'd otherwise be on. This doesn't happen on-the-go often, but when it does it is handy to have something that lets me go back and edit the calcs easily, and automatically keeps the results rather than me copying them from calculator to notepad. The middle ground that is a logging calculator app could deal with some of these use cases, of course, as long as it has the range of functions a reasonable spreadsheet has (usually I'm just totting up money, but sometimes time-base calculations are useful, or unit conversions (though 1.609 sticks in my mind better than I remember what Excel's CONVERT() function calls miles so usually those are done from memory not with a built-in function), and so on).

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[1] other than the fact it seems to have sync problems, so I never trust it to edit workbooks created elsewhere

[rbanffy]

> Also, music?

I'd say music is fair. The notion of using a desktop computer to listen to music was always a bit strange to me.

Also, a phone, because it's very useful to remain connected (I instruct everyone who works with me that, if they want synchronous responses, they should phone me. All other are asynchronous with low QoS.