You Can Now Browse Twitter on Your PalmPilot… for Some Reason

Before smartphones and tablets came along and turned us all into social media zombies, we had PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) to conduct real work. The most well-known PDA was the PalmPilot, which had apps for managing your calendar and your contact list, sending emails, and performing calculations. The original PalmPilot 1000 was released way back in 1996 — long before today’s social media behemoths. That meant that it didn’t have apps for browsing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat. But apparently Jorge is a masochist, because he decided to go and develop a Twitter app for his Palm OS PDA.

Obviously this was a bad idea, because nobody actually likes using Twitter. It’s a social media service that is only good for getting yelled at for either being too liberal/conservative or not liberal/conservative enough. That said, it is cool to see a Twitter app running on a device that was released before Twitter was even a twinkle in Jack Dorsey’s eye. The device in question is a Handspring Visor Deluxe. Handspring was formed by the founders of Palm after a dispute with 3Com, and Handspring devices ran Palm OS. That means that Jorge’s app should work on other Palm OS devices, including the PalmPilot. The Handspring Visor Deluxe was released in 2001 and chugged along on a mere 20MHz processor and 8MB of RAM. It had a 4-bit grayscale resistive touchscreen display with a resolution of 160x160 pixels. Those specs are laughable, even when compared to the first generation of smartphones. But it is enough for this Twitter app.

As Jorge is quick to point out, his Palm OS Twitter app is still buggy and lacking in features. You can’t, for instance, “heart” tweets using the app. But you can scroll through your Twitter feed using that silly stylus and post your thoughts in 280 characters or less. Jorge was able to create this app thanks to the Twitter API, which lets anyone interact with the service using REST (Representational State Transfer) and webhooks. The Handspring Visor series of PDAs did not have any built-in wireless connectivity, which means that it can only access the internet (and therefore the Twitter API) through a special dock or modem attachment. Put all of that together and you have a completely impractical app. But that is fitting when the app is for accessing a completely impractical service. Still, please be sure to follow us on Twitter! We promise that we aren’t toxic and won’t yell at you.