Re: Re: New Respect for Shadow

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011, Doug wrote:

# I feel for you - I mostly did multiple bitmaps to support multiple 
# densities and color depths.  My apps mostly didn't need to support 
# rotation or screen size changes.
# 
# The modern OSs make that much easier.  I had to make one tiny tweak to 
# adapt Outline Tracker to the Pixi/Veer screen size, and even adapting to 
# the TouchPad (with no hardware keyboard or gesture area!) only took 
# three or four days.  Gonna have to do multiple bitmaps for the Pre 3, 
# unfortunately -- it has the 1.5x density that Palm threatened to 
# introduce to Palm OS, but thankfully never did.  (Or was there some 
# Chinese PDA that did?)

	There was some 1.5 IIRC, but I don't recall which; was it one of 
the Handera models? or Dana? *forgets*

	But there are other considerations; Palm OS had a clever/strange 
approach to having no RAM (or stack .. imagine coding on a paltform where 
you coudl generally not do recursion for running out of stack! So on all 
my apps I allocated my own stack to use, on devices with sufficient 
memory..) -- remember the "in place" running they used? Rather than 
malloc/new a linked list node, you'd ask the memory manager to lock up a 
piece of storage memory, then erquest a write to it, then unlock it, so 
that your live RAM was effectively also your storage-RAM (ie: not so much 
a separation of RAM and disk as on normal machines.) Handy in the old old 
Palm days (Palm Pro original etc), but increasingly odd as you got to 
later era machines like the T|C etc. A dinosaur on todays machiens where 
you have dual core and multuiple GB of storage and even 512MB-1GB of RAM 
to throw around.

	(And all that processing power just to make the JVM able to slide 
the icon grid around faster .. its pretty sad that an Android machien 
running on 600mhz is really poor performing. For shame...)

		jeff

--
If everyone would put barbecue sauce on their food, there would be no war.