Tonight was a really impressive event organised by O2 Litmus. The two guys from Palm did a very good job presenting WebOS and Palm’s plans for the future. The food and drink was excellent. And they even gave us a Palm Pre each to take home! Certainly makes me want to at least try out making an app.
As usual, here’s my notes for the evening in a vaguely coherent manner…
- webkit appearing all over the place on mobile
- as well as opera (there were a couple of people from Opera at the event)
- HTML 5 is providing standardisation for web applications in the same way that HTML provided standardisation for web documents
- web applications are escaping the browser:
- fluid, prism — single app browsers
- adobe air, appcelerator titanium — provide additional features
- why not flash, javafx or silverlight?
- because:
- canvas
- fonts in the browser
- javascript engines — with JIT compilation
- access to native graphics
- “When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better — you've made something new” — Stephen Levy
- Palm Pre uses V8 javascript engine, just like Chrome
- WebWorkers provide background threads
- came from Gears worker pool
- invented to stop database access causing hangs
- Chrome uses WebWorkers for extensions
- Firefox hasn’t implemented SQLite, but may go for a JSON-based database, like CouchDB
- CSS Transforms
- “it’s not javascript people don’t like, it’s dealing with cross-browser issues”
- anyone mention IE…?
- “it’s not just going to be developing apps for Palm — it’s making things for the web”
some detail
- Mojo Framework is open-source
- Mojo uses prototype.js at the moment, but will be made nicer to use other alternatives later
- dashboard items and popups are just DOM items
- want to integrate apps into system — background apps
security
- web browser provides normal web sandbox
- applications get access to native services
- certain APIs still need permissions granted
- e.g. location
- can get app to ask when API is used
- would like to push local APIs to browser windows
- apps are packaged and signed
- working with developers to encrypt apps in different ways
- would anticipate that developers would be able to opt-in to encrypt their app
- protect against people uploading a copy of an app as their own
- balanced against the benefit of view source on the web
app store
- Palm would like a “web app store” to emerge
- Palm doesn’t feel that it’s the right company to make this move
- creating a Palm catalogue & developer program for mid-December
- charging $50 for each app to be in the catalogue — as a spam filter
- money goes to funding developing programme & catalogue service
- interested in finding other “friction points”
- can get an immediate acceptance into the web distribution of the Palm app catalogue
- submit and get a URL straight away
- can email/tweet other people
- no review process
- opening up the backend too — feeds of all the apps and charts
- would like digg-style rating
- a developer can choose to make an app available for specific markets
- also aiming to provide metrics for developers, so they can see how users are choosing or not choosing their apps
- payment:
- right now they have PayPal
- would like to support several options
- want to decrease the friction
BONDI & others
- palm works with them
- including W3C widgets & geo
- Palm way will be there originally, but will be switched out when
- order depending on developer requests
- native-accelerated CSS transforms are higher at the moment
- “Palm pays us, but they didn’t pay us enough to sell out”
supporting open source
- waiving cost for anyone working open source
- $99 for developer
testing
- O2 Litmus will be recruiting Palm Pre users for testing availability
- DeviceAnywhere will feature Palm Pre in O2 VDL
feedback
- devrel@palm.com
- they already use Jira and want to open it something to the public soon
- homebrew community will patch things before Palm do it themselves
- there are differing viewpoints internally…
personal usage
- like multi-tasking
- don’t like UI latency
- hardware is roughly equivalent to the iPhone 3GS
- don’t have access to hardware GPU — so CSS Transforms is really important
- will happen with a over-the-air software upgrade
multiple devices
- Palm Pixi seems a lot nicer
- different screen size (80 pixels shorter)
- should design liquid layouts…
- the future is devices in all kinds of form factors
tooling
- there are tools for Flash — what about tools for WebGL, etc?
- mozilla is making tools
- e.g. Atlas from 280North
- this week there may be something new released…
- should flash be a native platform for apps on Palm Pre?
- nearly supported for web pages — Adobe has shown something working already
2 comments:
have you read this? Sounds very much like it won't leap-frog the iPhone to me
http://jwz.livejournal.com/1108212.html
I still hate the fact that Palm cocked it up so badly; they are the PDA equivalent of Silicon Graphics: proprietary but good hardware (the docks), their own mildly odd but good OS, then a disastrous switch to Microsoft underpinnings...
Palm screwed up most of all by changing the dock design too often; way to reward your most loyal customers, guys - make all the old accessories obsolete so people don't care about changing *platforms*.
Still, all this can only help to raise other manufacturers' aspirations. About time they pulled their sodding fingers out.
@Anonymous: I'm not sure it will leapfrog the iPhone either, but I'm reasonably impressed with the direction they're taking.
The speed is the main killer at the moment -- and apparently Palm are waiting to incorporate GPU native CSS Transforms into their WebKit build. Hopefully this should address a lot of issues across the board, but I'm not sure if it will address camera lag...
Let's see how it goes.
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