No this is not a mistake. It is not supposed to be 2022, and this is not a futuristic post about how mobile development will look a few years from now. It is about how we developed applications back then, in 2002. I found this magazine in a pile of old papers I was about to throw to the recycling bin, and suddenly it hit me – I wrote this piece on how to develop mobile apps more than 13 years ago! So it is a visit down nostalgia lane, bringing long forgotten memories from what seems to be now a tons of technological generations ago.

AT the time, there were no iPhones or Android phones, and Windows Mobile was just making it’s first steps. In fact, the term “Smartphone” was not yet established. What was considered a “mobile” platform was actually more of a PIM (or PDA) device, running a forgotten operating system – the PalmOS.

Yes I’m talking about the good old Palm Pilot. I was managing the mobile development in MobiMate (later to be evolved into WorldMate), and my article “Developing Applications For Palm” was published in the “Mobile World Magazine”, Volume 4, June 2002. It was published in the Hebrew language and was targeted to the local mobile developers community in Israel, which was just forming and was small enough to be considered a family.

It is amazing that more then a decade have passed, and I’m still managing mobile development for this greatest technological instrument of our era. Having seen empires rise and fall (did someone say Nokia?), operating systems evolve and die (PalmOS, Symbian…) and users and developers adoption soar.