Tuesday, 22 March 2005 12:56 AM
If you've not read David Pogue's book "Piloting Palm", you really should get a copy and find out about the history of the Palm OS platform and the PDA market. It's pretty fascinating. Also quite good is the talk that David gave at last year's Mac OS X conference, a free download from IT Conversations. It starts out with some hilarious tech support calls, then gets into an exploration of good and bad user interface, highlighting problems in the Windows UI, as well as what both Palm OS and Mac OS X do well. If you've got to design the interface for a Palm OS application, David relates some "Zen of Palm" principles that are worth observing, such as counting the actions needed to do something and optimizing for the common case.