HB++ – Handheld Basic ++ – When PalmOS still mattered…

Back in the days – when PalmOS was about to die there was some French guy creating a blatant copy of Visual Basic 6 – but for PalmOS. I guess Microsoft never really cared for anything – may it be piracy of their own products or a copycat re-inventing Visual Basic. This prolly breached a million of patents, but then again PalmOS was already on the edge of death, so they just never cared. Actually this was prolly the reason why so many PalmOS appz still came out in like 2004/2005…

Handheld Basic++
Handheld Basic++

If you were a trained Visual Basic 6.0 programmer (Like all the cool kids making trojans and such) you’d obviously easily get into this. Actually it’s amazing how this was not made by Microsoft since this was pretty much exactly Visual Basic for PalmOS… I think the only feature it did not have was “Sort” -which was kinda not a big drawback.

So you’d draw your buttons and crap like in paint to create a nice GUI and throw in some dodgy functions or subs behind these, just like in good old VB6. Programming is so much fun if you don’t need to learn it…

The original manufacturer – “Peter Holmes Consulting” (Pretty typical French name i guess) – kinda went bankrupt years ago. Well since this was a one man show i guess the guy (Jean-Philippe AmarĂ©) just noticed that PalmOS kinda died out and noone was left who’d slam a few hundred bucks (Originally 500 USD – Last reported price was like 150 USD) on the counter for this. So he closed down the website (www.handheld-basic.com) for good, concentrating on drinking red wine and eating snails or whatever French people do when they retire…

So if you wanna create enterprise PalmOS appz to sell for big $$$ here’s your link:

HB++ 1.04 Patched

The last official version was 2.53 which you can get here.

It will be ask you to register to get rid of the nagging screens on your compiled version – which you obviously can’t do since the website is down since like a decade. I can’t be arsed to patch it but if you have the patience then message me and I’ll upload it.

 

RIP PalmOS… But then again some gravedigging is fun…