It all started one grey winter day in the mid 90s, during a lonely Friday afternoon flight from Charlotte, NC to Chicago. It had been a long week at the client, and I was ready to get back home to my lovely wife and a Dos Equis or two at the local Mexican joint. So there I was, folded uncomfortably into seat 18F, trying to update my To Do list on my PalmPilot. But there was a problem: the setting sun was streaming through the window, reflecting my face in the screen of the Palm and making it nearly impossible to use.

And then it dawned on me - the PalmPilot might just make a handy little mirror.  I turned the contrast all the way down, and wouldn’t you know it, I could see myself pretty well.  That weekend I hacked out some code to turn the screen black, and posted it to the web as the “Palm Mirror”. Little did I realize that that little app would eventually be downloaded over 800,000 times, and get written up in newspapers as far away as Madrid.  I even came ‘this close’ to getting an endorsed version from Claudia Schiffer or somebody, exchanging e-mails with her agent and everything.

People who downloaded the application from PalmGear.com left all sorts of feedback, ranging from “The best Palm app ever” to “I can’t believe I downloaded this stupid thing.”  

As life would have it, Mirror spawned a dozen imitations, and after five or six years finally mostly disappeared from the public mind.  That said, it still gets downloaded 700-800 times a month from here.

More Palm applications

A few more little Palm apps that I wrote back in the day.  These are quite old and may not work on your newer Palm, but give it a shot.

Dotnote, a large on-screen keyboard

Dotnote Hack, a fast method for entering frequently-used letters

JackJill, a cartoon of the traditional story for the kids

Tronic, a game similar to snake with a Tron theme

TronicZ, Tronic for the Zires

the original palm mirror