[capitain]

It's the whole idea of 'apps' before smartphones became a thing. It's also the simplicity of how these worked, forget multitasking, just focus on one thing at a time.

No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing.

And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole build system worked.

[anthk]

Are the Z-Machine games (Infocom text adventures and the ones from the 90's made with Inform6 and 7 in the 00's) really playable with a stylus input?

[simmons]

When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.

[3036e4]

I posted this 24 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45395479

"I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction."

From looking at my old hoarded palm files I think that the interpreter was PalmPilotFrotz, still available on the if-archive: https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/infocom/interpreter...

[anthk]

Uhm, the context menu on words was a thing on the ZMachine (v3) port for the Game Boy too. I launched Tristam Island under a Chinese Game Boy Colour clone and some rewritable USB cartridge. The games where playable enough with patience.

On smartphones, FDroid for Android had the Anysoft keyboard with a swipe option, it works great, much better than typing. There's also some grafitti 'keyboard' input at FDroid, but I prefer the swiping one as it's far superior.

On the old T9 phones, OFC a Frotz port exists for J2ME, but I didn't try it.

[lxgr]

There were many keyboard accessories for Palm OS devices!

I had a foldable one with (almost?) full-sized keys that I really enjoyed using. It connected via infrared, which was a bit strange but made it compatible with different generations of device connectors.