Developer who has used the Palm pré Mojo SDK speaks out on Ars Technica | Hacker News Reader

Developer who has used the Palm pré Mojo SDK speaks out on Ars Technica

arstechnica.com

26 pointsclint9 comments

The article is a string of rants about how "developer hostile" Apple is, and how open Palm is, but...

Unfortunately Palm is currently not opening this developer program to the public and has only released the Mojo framework and SDK to a private group of developers.

Aside from that, it says nothing that wasn't already made clear in Palm's announcement. "It has an API, and you can do stuff with it."

-local storage capabilities of HTML5

-a JSON-based message bus to tap into a wide range of device services, including contacts, calendars, and location

- the platform will allow [...] access [to] most of the phone's capabilities, including calendaring, contacts, music and video playback

-running notification and periodic tasks in the background, providing direct access to the phone's text messaging (SMS) system, and more

This is getting more exciting by the minute.

I am an Apple diehard, so the odds of me getting involved with this are poor. Still, it's nice to see Palm showing signs of life, and giving Apple a little competition. The fact that the iPhone still doesn't have cut-and-paste, two years after launch, says to me that they need a little nudge.

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, from 2006, on the iPhone: "We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in." And yet, they did. Heh!

cite: http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20081218/palm-new-ness-a-...

Palm may actually pull this off.

Seriously..

In a previous life I had a product on PalmOS. Not only were the APIs pretty good, but they'd give you the source to PalmOS APIs. You didn't get the kernel (AFAIK it wasn't theirs to give), but you knew how the APIs you called interpreted their arguments.

It was a good community, and in between that, Palm, and Metrowerks, you had lots of support. Oh, and CodeWarrior... those were the days...

And finally, you never worried about Palm screwing you as an app vendor, which is a concern from Apple (I'm a mac fan, and have written on MacOS, but I'm also realistic cough Watson cough). They're not playing the walled garden game, they just did their side of the system well and encouraged app developers to do the same with good tools, docs, & support.

I'm kinda curious to see how this all works with only html and js.

Probably quite well, once you realise how "misunderstood" js is: http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html

Also, they probably use drawing on a <canvas /> element for the main UI, so it won't be limited to html/dom.

This got my curiosity, the mobile space is going to buzz in next coming months!

Cocoa + OS X = developer playground in your pocket.

Mojo + WebOS = web browser in your pocket.

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