It's the whole idea of 'apps' before smartphones became a thing.
It's also the simplicity of how these worked, forget multitasking, just focus on one thing at a time.
No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing.
And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole build system worked.
When you become good at using Palm graffiti, it's not too bad. I remember playing through all of the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ game on a Palm IIIx while commuting on the bus between Boulder and Denver back in 1999 or so, and being amazed that I could play an actual computer game on a handheld device.
"I have fond memories of some z-machine interpreter on the Palm that I found easier to play with than anything on my desktop computer. There were lots of shortcut buttons and thanks to the stylus it was still easy to use those (vs a touchscreen using ony fingers where you need huge buttons to hit). You could also tap any word in the output to bring up a context menu of actions (e.g. to examine or pick up objects mentioned in room descriptions) and that list of actions was a combination of a configurable global list and a game-specific list you could add actions to. Could play through entire games and barely ever have to type anything. Had a folding keyboard, but no memory of using that for interactive fiction."
Uhm, the context menu on words was a thing on the ZMachine (v3) port for the Game Boy too.
I launched Tristam Island under a Chinese Game Boy Colour clone and some rewritable USB cartridge. The games where playable enough with patience.
On smartphones, FDroid for Android had the Anysoft keyboard with a swipe option, it works great, much better than typing. There's also some grafitti 'keyboard' input at FDroid, but I prefer the swiping one as it's far superior.
On the old T9 phones, OFC a Frotz port exists for J2ME, but I didn't try it.
There were many keyboard accessories for Palm OS devices!
I had a foldable one with (almost?) full-sized keys that I really enjoyed using. It connected via infrared, which was a bit strange but made it compatible with different generations of device connectors.
No subscriptions! Either the applications were free or it's a one-off fee/shareware kind of thing.
And it's ofcourse nostalgia, I made my first game for Palm OS over 20 years ago, it was nice to revisit it and get familiarized again with how the whole build system worked.