PDPal in Talk To Me

 

Well, I have a fondness for this old project — PDPal. PDPal is now enshrined on the Talk To Me exhibit’s little online catalog of thing-ies. Without getting assy about it, I think it deserved to be in the physical exhibit with all the installation mechanics we had built for its display in the real world..we could’ve even bought a bunch of Palm m505’s off of EBay and given them out with PDPal on them, those things are so cheap nowadays.

*shrug.

There’s no figuring the mind of the institutional curator. Plus, they over at MoMA have their perennial favorites that they shove into every show.

It’s on the list of @2011 Goals that I keep here to re-do in something like iOS — anything modern. I remember squirreling away in the depths of Metrowerks Code Warrior writing Palm PDA code to get this thing working. Seeking support from some dodgy Russian software company that made a little library I needed to use. Being up until the crack of dawn in an artist’s panic thinking — “This is it..This’ll be the end of me.”

At the end of it all — it was fine. It’s a lovely little bit of futuristic serendipity-y mobile app-y application. I don’t mean to get all, like..”back in my day”-y on you but, like — all the iPhone app kiddies? You have little idea what it was to program a PDA — that awful industry term that some knot head in the business unit came up with to describe these things. It was ugly. Thoroughly barely fun. There were no APIs for anything. You wrote to the metal and built things up from there. Really nasty. I reckon, even with my squeaky iOS skills that I could have an iOS edition of PDPal written in a week..couple of weeks if I work just at night.

Anyway — enough reminiscing. I’m just glad this one still has a little life left in ‘er.

Check out the main PDPal page here for more data points and to download the emulator, if you want. It’ll be wonderfully baffling.

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