PalmSource recently sent out an email to its developer partners covering GTK, the new Palm OS application framework. The tutorial that they sent out is available here:
http://www.palmsource.com/developers/newsletter/20060425_GTK.html
However, I still didnt start porting BinaryClock and AutoSync to ALP, and dont plan to do so in the next few months for a simple reason: it isn’t clear yet what ALP will really be. Will it be a smartphone OS? Will it be a PDA OS? Will it even make it to the US? Questions over questions, and if you add in the constant rumors about how Palm is planning to create its own new “Palm OS”, nobody can really say anything about ALP yet.
Many developers ported their apps to Palm OS Cobalt and paid a dear price for it-the 10 Palm OS 6 powered phones sold at a Palm DevCon for sure don’t create enough revenues to finance the huge costs for the port.
OK, but won’t I loose cash by not porting? The answer is simple, nope. Both ALP and Palms rumoured OS are said to be fully compatible with “wellbehaved” Palm OS Garnet apps. So, users of phones/PDA’s with the new operating systems can continue to use their existing Palm OS 5 applications while developers slowly but surely create their ports.
Are you preparing for a port?
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GTK? Isn’t that what Gnome is built-up with? In that case, it’s pure Linux–not even a drop of Palm OS. What they want us to do is to port our Palm OS apps to work in Linus environment. Or did I get this wrong? In any case, I agree: Let’s see what will come first.
The guidelines PalmSource gave were not about how to start porting your Palm OS apps to ALP. How could they be when the SDK and tools won’t be released until the end of this year at the earliest? Instead, the “tutorial” (if you can call it that) was just some hints about how to get oriented toward Linux and GTK by trying it out on x86 Linux.
While PalmSource claims it will be easy to port GTK+ apps to run on ALP, Linux developers should keep a few things in mind: first, the newsletter states that ALP will support only a subset of GTK+ 2; second, they still haven’t stated whether ALP will include an X server, which will make a big difference when it comes to doing a port of some software from x86 Linux or GPE; thirdly, the preferred API for developing ALP applications is not going to be raw GTK, but the MAX application framework API, which sounds like it will could be somewhat more familiar to Palm developers than Linux developers; lastly, MAX will also be the only API that exposes the full range of ALP OS features.
Gtk is a cross-platform toolkit. It doesn’t have to run on linux. That said, ALP includes what you might call a PalmOS runtime, to allow palm apps to run, and allow developers to compile them natively for devices, or build them the same way as always, and let them run emulated.