The Palmtop Guide

Palmtop is a phone that makes its own software. You describe what you need in a sentence, and a small app appears on your grid — a list, a form, a tracker, a board. It is yours: you keep it, change it by asking, and hand it to other people if you want to.

This guide is in four parts. The basics is everything one person needs. With other people is sharing, groups and forms that answer back. At work is what teams and businesses use it for, by situation. How it fits together is the shape of the system, so you can judge whether it belongs in your business.

You do not need to read it in order. If you have five minutes, read the basics and make something.

1 · The basics

Getting it

Three ways, same Palmtop:

Whichever you pick, your apps live on that phone. There is no account to make and nothing to sign in to.

Making your first app

Tap Build, and say what you want in plain words:

A list of what to buy for the shop, with prices and a running total.

A minute later it is on your grid. Open it and use it. If it is not quite right, say so — "put the total at the top", "add a column for the supplier" — and it changes. You are not editing anything; you are describing it.

Two things help more than anything else:

• Say what it is for, not how to build it. "A rota for six staff over a fortnight, so nobody works two closes in a row" produces something better than a list of fields.
• Ask for one change at a time. Small corrections land accurately; a paragraph of them does not.

Starting from something that exists

+ New → Gallery has ready-made apps: an order form, a sign-up sheet, a poll, a checklist, an expense splitter, and a set of work ones (a shift board, an incident board, a trade blotter, alerts). Install one and then make it yours by asking. Starting from a working app and changing it is usually faster than starting from a sentence.

Where your things live

Everything — the apps and what you put into them — is on your phone. Not on our servers, not in an account. That has one consequence worth knowing:

Back it up. Settings → Back up everything writes a single file. It contains your apps, your data, and the private half of anything other people are relying on: the board your servers send alerts to, the inbox your shared forms send orders to. Restoring it on a new phone picks all of that up exactly where it left off. Keep the file somewhere only you can read.

Keeping the old one

Duplicate (in an app's menu) makes this week's from last week's and leaves the old one alone, with its data, as a record. It is the right move whenever something is periodic — a weekly order form, a monthly count, a per-event sign-up sheet.

On a computer

The web app opens on a laptop or a desktop too, at the same address. It uses the whole window, with your apps down the left, and an app built for a wide screen gets the room. It is the same Palmtop, the same apps.

2 · With other people

Palmtop is built around handing things to people, not around inviting them to a platform. Nobody you share with has to make an account.

Sending an app to someone

An app's menu has Share. You get a link (or a file, for the places links cannot go). They open it, see what it is and what it contains, and confirm. Then it is on their grid, theirs to change.

You choose whether your data goes with it. A blank checklist and a filled-in one are different gifts — sometimes the filled-in list is the whole point. Anything you would rather keep — your notes about a customer, your own running total — can be marked as yours and never travels, even when the data does.

Two kinds of app

Worth knowing before you build something for work, because it decides what you can hand to a colleague.

Most apps are yours to hand around. Everything they need is inside them, so the copy you send works exactly as yours does — the order form, the checklist, the rota, the poll.

Some apps reach your computer: they read a file, query a database, render a report, print something. Those are pinned to the machine that built them, on purpose.

• What you share is the phone half. Send one to a colleague and the part that touches your computer is left behind. They get an ordinary app.
• An app that arrived from someone else can never reach a computer — not “unless you allow it”. It is refused, whatever the app says about itself. Sharing strips the reach out of the copy and the receiving phone declines it: two separate locks, because this is the one that matters.
• Your computer answers by name, never by command. You decide once what it offers — “today's fills”, “render the report” — and an app can ask for those and for nothing else. It cannot send an instruction of its own.

So: hand the order form to anyone. Keep the app that reads your trading files on the machine that has them. If a colleague needs the same thing, they set up their own computer side in a minute, and their data stays theirs — which is usually what you wanted anyway.

Circles

A circle is a family, a class, a team or a group of friends who share apps with one tap. Post an app to a circle and everyone gets Install; post a change and everyone gets Update. A circle has no owner and no server-side membership list: it is a shared key that the people in it hold.

Forms that answer back

This is the one that surprises people. Share a form — an order, a sign-up, a poll, an RSVP — and the answers come back to you, into the app you shared. Not to us; we cannot read them.

• The person filling it in needs nothing but the link.
• You see the replies in the app, or in Palmtop's Inbox, and can export them to a spreadsheet.
• Replies are signed, so two orders from the same person are recognisably the same person, and a stranger cannot claim to be them. You can put a name to someone once, and it sticks.
• A second tap on Send does not become a second order. A later change amends the first rather than duplicating it.

That is a whole small business's worth of machinery — take orders, see who ordered what, chase the ones who have not — with no accounts, no subscriptions and no customer list anywhere but your phone.

3 · At work

Palmtop is not a replacement for the systems a business runs on. It is for the gap those systems leave: the thing your team currently does in a spreadsheet, a group chat or somebody's head.

Each of these is a real starting point. Install the template, then describe your version of it.

Taking orders from customers

Start from: Order form · Good for: a farm, a bakery, a supplier, anyone with a weekly list and regular customers.

Share the form with customers by link. Orders arrive on your phone as they come in, grouped and totalled the way you asked for. Next week, Duplicate it and the old one stays as the record of what went out. Prices, minimums, cut-off times and "we are away until the 14th" are all just things you ask for.

It will not take card payments, or tell you what to do when you are out of stock. It will tell you who ordered what, immediately, for nothing.

A team's rota, checklists and sign-offs

Start from: Shift board, Checklist · Good for: shops, kitchens, clinics, sites, anywhere with shifts and a handover.

A board everyone has on their phone, that says who is on, what has been done and what is left. Circles keep it in step across the team. Sign-offs — opening checks, cleaning, safety — become a tap with a name and a time against them, which is usually the whole audit trail anyone needs.

It will not be your HR system, and it does not do approvals or payroll.

Knowing when something breaks

Start from: Alerts, Incidents · Good for: anyone running systems that matter — a trading desk, a service, a pipeline, a line.

Your systems already know when something is wrong. Palmtop is how a person finds out. You put a small program on the machines that stay awake — a server, a build runner, whatever raises the alarm today — and it puts alerts on your phone: a severity, what broke, and where to look. Serious ones ring the phone and stay on the screen until dealt with; the rest wait quietly on a board.

What makes it usable rather than noisy:

• The same thing going wrong forty times is one line with a count.
• Each machine is added once, with a code from your phone that works once, and can be taken away from your phone later without touching the others.
• Nothing a machine holds can read your board, reach your computer, or see your other machines.
• Your phone tells the sending machines when it has stopped collecting, so a dead setup cannot pretend to be a healthy one.

Be honest with your team about the limit: this tells people, it does not guarantee them. A phone that is off finds out when it comes back. For a genuine 3am page, have it place a phone call as well — it can, through your own telephony account.

There is a separate guide for wiring this into your systems; see the end.

The desk's numbers

Start from: Blotter · Good for: trading desks, ops teams, anyone who starts the day with the same handful of figures.

Fills, positions, breaks, the checks you run every morning — on your phone, from the files or systems that already hold them, arranged the way you actually read them. The work happens on your computer, where the data already is; the phone is the screen.

It will not connect to your database on its own. Someone decides, once, which specific things the phone may ask your computer for, and the phone can only ask for those by name. This is an app of the second kind — see Two kinds of app — so it stays on the machine that has the data.

Field work

Start from: Checklist, Sign-up sheet · Good for: inspections, deliveries, events, surveys.

Phones are good at this and the software usually is not. A form built for one job, used offline, photographs where you need them, and the results collected back to whoever sent it out.

4 · How it fits together

There are two kinds of part, and it is worth keeping them apart: the app you use, and the things that power it. Most people only ever meet the first.

What you use

What powers it — both optional, both yours

Neither is needed to use Palmtop. You add the hub when you want more building power or your own files; you add Link when something in production has to be able to reach you.

And one thing in the middle

The one rule that shapes everything else: anything that leaves your phone is sealed on your phone first, with keys that stay on it. We carry it; we cannot read it. That is why there are no accounts to make — there is nothing for an account to protect.

What each can and cannot do

• An app someone sent you cannot reach your computer, read your other apps' data, or see your alert board. It is a guest.
• Your computer does only what you have named. A mini-app can ask for "today's fills" if you set that up; it cannot ask for anything else, and it cannot send a command.
• A machine with Palmtop Link can add an alert to one phone's board. It cannot read that board, reach your computer, or enrol anything else.
• We can see that traffic passed and roughly how much. Not what it said, not what your apps do, not who your customers are.

When you want it on your own infrastructure

For businesses that cannot use a shared service — compliance, policy, or simple preference — everything here can run entirely on infrastructure you control, with no dependency on ours. That is a conversation rather than a download; ask us.

5 · Privacy, in plain terms

• No accounts. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to delete.
• No tracking. No analytics in the apps you build, no profile of you.
• Your data stays on your phone unless you share it, and you choose each time whether it travels.
• We cannot read anything that passes through us. Not your apps, not your orders, not your alerts.
• Deleting is deleting. Remove an app and it is gone from the phone. Turn off a shared form and its replies stop, for everyone.
• One exception worth naming: if you let us ring your phone for alerts, we hold an anonymous address your phone's browser issued, used for nothing but waking it. Turning ringing off deletes it.

6 · What Palmtop will not do

Worth knowing before you build a business process on it.

• It is not a database. Apps hold what a phone can hold comfortably — hundreds or thousands of rows, not millions.
• It is not multi-user software. There is no shared login, no permissions matrix, no admin console. People hold copies and send things to each other.
• It does not take payments.
• It cannot be woken from anywhere except alerts, and even then not with a guarantee — a phone that is off learns when it comes back.
• It does not run in the background. An app does its work while you are looking at it.
• Quality follows the description. A vague sentence produces a vague app. Ten minutes of saying what you actually want is the whole skill.

7 · Where to go next

• Quick start — get it on your phone and build the first one.
• The Gallery, in the app — the fastest way to see what it is good at.
• Integrating Palmtop — for engineers wiring their own systems in, so alerts from what you already run reach the right phone.
• Talk to us — for running it on your own infrastructure, or anything your business needs that this guide does not cover.