Twitter has been plugged into a Handspring Visor for some reason
Twitter has been plugged into a Handspring Visor for some reason
Your scientists never stopped to consider whether or not they should.
In a curiosity that appeals to all seven people who still have a working Handspring Visor PDA, Gizmodo points out that developer Jorge Cohen has worked out a solution bringing Twitter to the PalmOS device via its HotSync cradle. Sure it’s “kinda buggy,” but like watching Tenet on a Game Boy Advance, some issues can slide considering it’s running on a device released back in 1999. How old is the Visor? Within a year of Engadget’s launch, we were already writing articles about the “old” device back in 2005.
Still kinda buggy, and tweeting/liking/etc still WIP, but I’m pretty happy with it.
— Jorge (@JorgeWritesCode) March 10, 2021
The like/retweet counters are janky I think the desktop part is messing up the database, but should be easy to fix. Anything with an emoji looks bad, I’ll probably create a custom font with the most used emojis and do the text drawing manually.
— Jorge (@JorgeWritesCode) March 10, 2021
The Visor appeared as a spinoff of the Palm family way before social media sites connected the world and even before WiFi or cellular connections were a standard feature. While modems were available as a hardware option that plugged into the device’s expansion slot as a backpack, it was built for an offline world — I’d download the day’s news stories on mine before I left for class in the morning and not get any more updates until I returned in the evening. In the year 2000, that still worked as a way to stay well ahead on the day’s news without being tied to a radio or TV.
Now the blessing/curse of real-time information flow has invaded even this monochrome device, proving that nothing can stay pure forever and giving me a reason to figure out where I put the handheld’s dock. Unfortunately, this madman won’t stop there — the MessagePad 120 and Apple Newton are next.
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