Please tell us a bit more about your company

Red Mercury has been making Palm OS products since 1999. Our most well known products are the AcidSolitaire Collection (also available for Windows), a collection of great Solitaire games that many consider to be the best for the Palm (including Sony and Tapwave, when they were around), as well as AcidImage, a popular image attachment viewer that no Treo should be without.

The AcidSolitaire Collection can be tried for free here:
http://www.red-mercury.com

And AcidImage can be downloaded and tried from here:
http://www.acid-image.com

Do you think that a development shack supporting only the Palm OS API has chances to survive?

Sure - everywhere you look, there’s a Treo. Now that more devices have internet capability, there are more and more opportunities for cool stuff to be done. Any must-have app can generate a lot of interest. On the other hand, there is a lot of competition out there, so it’s harder to sell something like “Dog Claw Clipping Scheduler Plus” these days, though I might still buy that one.

Do you feel that the Palm software market has changed?

It’s evolved. There seem to be fewer vast unexplored areas of development, though anybody claiming that everything has been done is sure to be proven wrong. We still see people who are really passionate about their devices, people who are really nice to us and thank us for what we’ve done, and that’s why we keep doing it. People who like their Palms also like palmish software, it still has a cult-like feeling. The guy who makes the sandwiches at my local sandwich shop here goes on and on about his 650 every time he sees me with mine. He drank the kool-aid. Next time I eat there, I’ll ask him what software he’s bought lately.

What do you think about the Treo 700w? Will the ‘traditional’ Palm cut it against HTC, etc?

Personally I think the Treo 700w is pretty cool, obviously they have a competitive device. It seems to be one of those things where people decide ahead of time whether they’ll like it or not, then they look for the good or the bad and ignore the rest. There is no reason why Palm can’t compete against HTC devices, I mean, you know, they can just have HTC build them a device…

As always, the success is with the usability. The Treos still have those little noticable nicities about them that you don’t notice till you’ve used the device for a while, and it’s those things that the competition is most likely to miss out on. I mean, you’d have to be nuts to walk around with a block of wood in your pocket, right? But apparently it still works.

Do you think that Garnet will still be around next year?

Clearly, existing devices will still be in use and for sale next year. As for new devices, I have absolutely no clue what version of OS any of them will have. But due to backward compatibility, a chunk of Garnet will live on forever. I’m curious what the real next gen of Palm OS will look like under the hood, but from the point of view of the guy who works at the sandwich shop, it will be the same.

Why did Cobalt fail in your oppinion?

I have no idea. But I imagine re-writing an entire OS and making it backward compatible with an OS that had totally different design goals is kinda hard.
I also think the new design goals of Cobalt were probably completely changing all the time. It was being developed during a really uncertain time. iPods weren’t really the big thing, so it wasn’t yet clear that you were allowed to do one thing and do it well, mobile video seemed to be some kind of wierd thing that everyone wanted or nobody wanted, everyone knew wireless was important but nobody knew what that meant - I mean, WiFi wasn’t all over the place then, Bluetooth still seemed like a good idea, cell phones weren’t really that powerful… how the hell do you design and deliver an embedded OS targeted just right when everything is changing all the time? I’m still not so sure what I want my Treo to be able to do…
wifi? wimax? woofoo? All of those things. Plus everything else. Though I really only use it to play AcidSpider, make phone calls, and keep my contacts and calendar.

What do you see as Garnet’s sucessor on the market?

For the rest of the questions, and all previous questions, assume they all start with “I have no idea.” Now, as for Garnet’s successor, I really don’t know. The thing that seems to work is to tinker around deep under the hood to add new capabilities and remove any limitations from app developers. On the face of it, the UI is what people see, and they like it. And there has been a lot of thought put into it. And more thought will be put into it. So I don’t think we’re going to see a radical change in the UI, just more improvements in usability and friendliness and all that good Palm OS stuff on the surface. Under the hood, we’ll just see some of the old limitations going away, with possibly some new kernel that can last the next 10 years, like a linux-based thingie.

New capabilities get added incrementally, and developers take advantage of them as needed. Sounds fine to me. What really matters now is that the core device ships as a totally usable unit that everybody wants. It seems like the Treo line has been doing that pretty well so far, so what’s under the hood just needs to keep up with Palm’s ability to deliver devices that people want, and that’s it.

Do you think that palm’s developer support is good enough?

I think that the best developer support Palm can provide is selling gazillions of devices. Developer support is nice when it’s there, but if they need to focus on getting units out the door, then that’s what they should do. Supporting developers is really hard, I think it’s probably expensive, and it gets harder all the time. If Palm ships lots of devices and they work like they’re supposed to, then developers can figure the rest out for themselves I suppose. Nice documentation goes a long way, and we’ve had our share of that I think.

What do you think about ESD’s, can you reccomend a specific one?

I am pretty neutral on this whole topic, I think ESDs provide a needed service to the market, and they seem to do a pretty good job. All of us developers got started on ESDs, I doubt anyone just opened up their own store on day 1, so it’s always been nice as a really easy way to enter the market with a product. We have our own store, but we also sell through ESDs, they both work for us. And, I’ll get killed for saying this, but if you think Palm ESDs charge developers too much, take a look around at some Windows software portals and see what you find. You might run crying back to the Palm ESDs. (Don’t worry about me giving the ESDs any ideas, I’m sure they already have all of the numbers on a big chart somewhere.)

As for a specific ESD, I suppose try ‘em all, why not.

What kinds of marketing can you reccomend?

Well of the “four P’s” of marketing, I’m really big on the crazy idea that “Product” is where it’s at. If your product totally rocks, people tend to find you. That’s the only way we’ve ever had success. We can drive traffic in short bursts with a lot of marketing effort, but sustained sales come from a good product, that’s it.

Do you wish to say anything else?

What else… well, we’ve always had this thing that if we see devices out in the wild, we know they’re really out there. It’s hard to interpret sales numbers but it’s easy to see what’s out there. I see a lot of Treos. That’s a good thing.