About
List started as a project back when the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 were first available. For more information on the history of the Palm I suggest you start with the wikipedia entry. At the time there was no easy development environment, I relied on resouces hosted by Darrin Massena. The original code was intended to be a CD List application limited to storing information about my music collection – I had done quite a bit of work in assembly using Pila as a GCC port had not been done yet.
Before long GCC was made available, and moving to C was an obvious step. While doing this re-write I made the code more generic to allow for any type of simple list. The first official release of List was on April 19th, 1998. Very little has changed from the original design since then, the goals were to make it a very Palm-like application – simple and intuiative to use. It only supports 3 fields, two which can be customized and a note field.
The number of users, and uses of the List program have continued to amaze me. Now there are other database programs for PalmOS that are freely available and provide much more functionality – but List seems to have a particular niche.
Up until 2003 I was able to maintain a single version of List that supported all of the PalmOS devices. This included all of the legacy devices back to the Pilot 1000. However, with the introduction of newer devices it become more difficult to have a single code base that supported the new features that users were looking for, and maintained backwards compatibility. The download page will always have links to older versions for anyone who’s got an very old device, but more recent versions will target the devices that are current.