And because yesterday I had to answer the soul-crushing question by a loved one “Now, what is it good for?” Shortly after that, I managed (it was trivial) to compile and run Decker on it. In its own words: “Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior.”
With my bluetooth mouse connected, I can now draw and code little apps on the PicoCalc screen, using the included tools or the Lilt scripting language.
The only hurdle I had to overcome was that I needed to prepare an initial .deck file for the small screen size of 320x320. As the file format ist simply text, I could edit any of the included examples and save it as my initial Deck.
With Decker installed, the PicoCalc comes very close to the vision of a Dynabook, a dedicated small machine for digital creativity.
