Cut and Paste—webOS vs Classic PalmOS

One of the big albatrosses around the neck of the iPhone was it's lack of support, until recently, of copy and paste functions. So naturally Palm has trumpeted loudly that the new Palm Pre supports copy and paste from day one. And it does but there's a problem—actually two problems. Palm's copy and paste doesn't work everywhere and it doesn't work as well as it did under the older PalmOS operating system.

In order to copy and paste text in the Palm Pre's webOS, you tap to place the cursor at the beginning of the block of text you want to copy, hold down the shift key, and drag your finger horizontally to choose the text you intend to copy. Then you choose "Edit" from the drop down menu and select ." Palm has even created a little shortcut where you can tap and hold your finger in the gesture area and it acts like an unlabeled Menu key—the Pre will cut, copy, or paste whenever you press the "x," "c," or "v" keys on the keyboard. Pretty slick right? Actually, in the old PalmOS it was even easier to copy and paste. You could simply drag your finger across the text you wanted to copy and select "Cut," "Copy," or "Paste" from the edit menu which is even easier and more intuitive than with the Pre's webOS. In fact, I was so used to this way of doing things from my PalmOS devices that at first the webOS felt more awkward because I was trying to drag my finger across the text I wanted to copy when I was supposed to first place the cursor and drag my finger horizontally in the direction that I wanted the selction to move. This feels confusing and unintuitive, the older PalmOS way of doing things feels simpler to me.

Of course the older PalmOS was designed for PDAs and smartphones with different types of touchscreens than webOS. PalmOS was optimized for use with a stylus while webOS is designed for use with a finger. Could this be the reason for the Pre's Cut and Paste method? If only there were a way to compare these two methods side by side. There is—MotionApps' Classic emulator allows us to run PalmOS apps side by side with webOS apps. So I loaded the webOS Memos application and PsMemo within Classic. And it turns out that it's just as easy and intuitive to use the PalmOS Copy and Paste method in an emulated PalmOS app on my Palm Pre as it is on a Treo or a Palm TX.

I suppose that it doesn't make much difference one way or the other—the Palm Pre cuts, copies, and pastes just fine. It's just interesting how in the march of progress we sometimes take a tiny step back even as we move ahead.

One thing that does make a significant difference to me is the fact that webOS' copy and paste only works in text fields. As a result, you can't copy a block of text from your browser and paste it into a memo or anywhere else. The PalmOS web browser, primitive as it was, has always been able to do this and it should be simple to implement. Of course it this is so simple why did it take Apple, many times larger and richer than Palm, so long to implement it in the iPhone? Even Android, which is made by Google and had copy and paste on day one, took over a year to implement it in its browser. So perhaps I should cut Palm some slack.

Nevetheless, this does have a practical downside. I have secured my home wifi hotspot with a long 63-character wifi password. It's easy for me to put this key in a text file on a flash drive copy and paste it into any laptop that connects to my home network. It's also easy to put it into a memo and copy and paste it onto my Palm TX. With my T-Mobile G1 it was a little harder. First I had to find an Android application that could read text files and copy and paste. Once I had done that, it was easy to copy a text file to the G1 and copy and paste the wifi key.

With the Palm Pre it was even more of a challenge. While I had imported my old PIM data into Classic, including a memo with my wifi key; Classic sadly does not appear to support copying and pasting data between PalmOS and webOS applications. And neither does the Pre's built-in document viewer, the text file option was out. After trying several solutions, I concluded that the easiest solution was to email the wifi key to myself and open the email in my Palm Pre. But since the email application only displays the email I wasn't out of the woods yet. I had to tap reply in order to place the text of the email into a text field so I could copy and paste the key. Once I did that, I finally had access to my wifi hotspot on the Pre. That's not exactly what I'd call elegant.

Treo Versus T-Mobile G1—Software

Walking out of church last night, I was stunned at the sight of Venus in the night sky. Nights when you can really see the stars are rare in a big city like Chicago with its many lights. Being the nerd that I am, I whipped out my T-Mobile G1 and tried to see what I could see. Sky Map is powerful application available for the G1 on the Android Market. It uses the G1's GPS and accelerometer to create a tiny planetarium in your phone. The view changes as you move the phone around providing what is at times a mind-blowing effect. I also used Sky Map a bit during my trip to Texas to watch the night skies in a more rural setting and it was a pretty cool experience.

But Sky Map is slow...so slow that Android sometimes thinks that it has stopped responding an offers to force the application to close. I usually just tell Android to wait and Sky Map responds just fine once it has updated all the information that it needs to calculate to show its interactive star map. That's just the price of working with a complicated application right?

Actually I have a similar application installed on my Treo 680, Astro Info. It's a much simpler application which shows a globe with the positions of the stars plotted on it. It takes a lot of work to set up, you have to install the application along with several other databases which contain the stellar data that it needs. Then you have to figure out your geographic coordinates and enter them into the application. While Astro Info does allow you to define several different locations, if you find yourself out on a country road at night and the mood to do some stargazing strikes you better have a map or a compass or you won't be able to get much information out of Astro Info. Sky Map on the other hand, is still good to go.

Still Astro Info is a simple and powerful application once it is properly set up. You still have to know if you are facing north, south, east, or west but if you know that, it's pretty easy to use Astro Info for stargazing. In some ways it's easier than Sky Map because you don't have to wait for it get a GPS fix (actually Sky Map does have a manual mode but I rarely use it). I can usually find any star Astro Info by using the moon as a reference point.

These two applications are a good example of the differences between the Android and Palm OSes. One is extremely modern and can leverage just about every technology you can name to form powerful platform. The other is old and tired but simple and flexible enough that it has allowed many powerful applications to be created despite its limitations. One allows for extremely simple, easy to use applications but all this simplicity is build upon a complex foundation. The other is inherently simple and easy to use but its age has made it increasingly difficult to create easy to use applications since developers must work hard to get around its flaws.

Another good example of the difference between Android and PalmOS can be found in their contact applications. This one area where Palm after all these years is still ahead of most of its competitors. Creating a new contact in Android opens a busy window full of boxes, buttons, and icons which wastes tons of space. The G1's 480x320 screen allows you to enter six pieces of information in your new contact: a picture, full name, cell phone number, e-mail address, ringtone, and a checkbox to tell Android whether or not to send this contact's calls directly to voicemail. Scroll down and you also see a More info button which allows you to enter a wide variety of phone numbers, e-mail addresses, IM addresses, and other information like an organization for the contact or a note.

The Treo 680 by contrast produces a much starker, more elegant, and efficient window. Despite its smaller 320x320 screen, the 680 actually shows more information in the new contact window than the G1 does. It shows eight pieces of information: separate first and last names, a picture, ringtone, company (note that Android buries this option in the More info menu as Organization), title, and work and home phone numbers. Scroll down and you see fields for a cell phone number, e-mail, another phone number, IM address, website, a physical address with separate fields for number, city, state, zip code, and country. Scroll down a little more and you see fields for a birthday, anniversary, and four custom fields which you can define yourself. And Palm also makes good use of its limited screen real estate by putting a category menu (in a tremendous contrast with an Android phone which as far as I know cannot assign a contact to a different group even though Google Contacts does support organizing your contacts into various groups), and icons for creating a note (an option which Android buries at the end of its More info menu), and an icon for adding still more phone numbers, e-mail and IM addresses, physical addresses, and even more custom fields. The Treo's Contacts and other PIM applications really do typify the "Zen of the Palm" the simplicity which once made Palm's PDAs and smartphones so popular.

I could go on comparing the software available for the Android to software available for the Palm. But I think that comparing these two applications make my point. I have two problems with the software on my T-Mobile G1, one which I am confident will be solved with time and another which I fear will never be solved. Android lacks a full suite of applications before it can be a legitimate mobile computing platform, the big one is an office suite. But Dataviz has announced plans to port its excellent Documents to Go application to Android so that problem will be solved soon. Similarly, Android e-book and PDF applications are already in their infancy and will only improve over time. The other problem is less serious but is also less likely to be remedied. Android does not seem to have a design philosophy beyond "make it colorful and pretty." This emphasis on style over substance makes Android applications clunkier and dumber than they should be.