Submission + - From Palm OS to Foldable Phones (linkedin.com)
ardiri writes: Long-time Slashdot reader Aaron Ardiri, whose Palm OS work has appeared here a few times over the years, has revisited a mobile architecture he developed more than 20 years ago after this week's renewed attention on fold-able phones.
MedHand International began developing medical reference software for Palm OS in 2000, eventually supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Windows and Mac OS X. Because medical publishers supplied content in wildly different formats, MedHand developed its own canonical XML representation—“MedHand XML”—and separated structured content from its presentation.
That work resulted in a patent filed in 2005 describing components, containers, a layout manager, hierarchical information and display-dependent presentation. Its diagrams explicitly show the same information hierarchy being presented differently on a mobile phone, PDA and desktop display.
The interesting comparison isn't that MedHand somehow “invented the foldable phone”—it didn't—but that modern foldables create essentially the architectural problem the software was designed to handle: the underlying information remains unchanged while the available display environment changes substantially, requiring the presentation and visible information hierarchy to adapt.
Ardiri has written a retrospective comparing the 2005 architecture with modern adaptive mobile interfaces. There's also an amusing historical circle: MedHand International built its own XML publishing pipeline before EPUB became an industry standard, while Ardiri has just released his autobiography and Inside the Machine as EPUBs—including on Apple Books.
So how many supposedly “new” computing problems are really old architectural problems waiting for the hardware to catch up?
MedHand International began developing medical reference software for Palm OS in 2000, eventually supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Windows and Mac OS X. Because medical publishers supplied content in wildly different formats, MedHand developed its own canonical XML representation—“MedHand XML”—and separated structured content from its presentation.
That work resulted in a patent filed in 2005 describing components, containers, a layout manager, hierarchical information and display-dependent presentation. Its diagrams explicitly show the same information hierarchy being presented differently on a mobile phone, PDA and desktop display.
The interesting comparison isn't that MedHand somehow “invented the foldable phone”—it didn't—but that modern foldables create essentially the architectural problem the software was designed to handle: the underlying information remains unchanged while the available display environment changes substantially, requiring the presentation and visible information hierarchy to adapt.
Ardiri has written a retrospective comparing the 2005 architecture with modern adaptive mobile interfaces. There's also an amusing historical circle: MedHand International built its own XML publishing pipeline before EPUB became an industry standard, while Ardiri has just released his autobiography and Inside the Machine as EPUBs—including on Apple Books.
So how many supposedly “new” computing problems are really old architectural problems waiting for the hardware to catch up?
