TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Forbes.com is partially owned by Elevation Partners, who furthermore own Palm. This explains a lot about why they cover some companies more than others…but doesn’t make the quote below any less interesting:

…Extra employees will be on hand to manage crowds … Sprint is also borrowing manpower from partner Palm … the additional help will stick around for two months, Owens says.

Both companies are also establishing “situation rooms” to quickly address problems that might arise during launch, particularly tech support issues…

I have no idea why handset designers keep playing around with their handset’s keyboards…the latest victim is a device designed by Samsung for Verizon (who will peddle it as Alias2):

The image above hits us via PhoneArena, with Engadget Mobile claiming that the keys are “identified” via an underlying E-Ink display.

As of now, no tests have been performed to determine the usability of this new input method. While I personally fear that the usability will be bad due to sub-par materials (this is said to be a cheap handset), I dare to say that this is the first keyboard idea which has impressed me.

Future devices using this technology could allow customers to dynamically adapt the keyboard layout of their devices, for example by replacing unpopular special characters with others he needs more often (I’d love to ditch some weird chars on my XPERIA’s keyboard for < and >, for example).

What do you think?

The boys at the FH Hagenberg’s have started their NFC Congress, which is more than well-visited…in fact, it is so well-visited that the event site’s capacities are pushed to the very limit:

Nevertheless, all works lovely so far – the program of the IEEE workshop which lies ahead of us is below:

With that, I sign off for now – all further coverage is at our sister site TamsS60…

Palm  has recently released some fresh information of the Mojo SDK and development of webOS applications:

The first chapter of the official resource for programming the new webOS platform, “Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript Using the Palm Mojo Framework” is now available. The book is written by Palm Vice President and Software Chief Technology Officer Mitch Allen along with members of the webOS development team and is being edited and distributed by O’Reilly Media.
O’Reilly is also hosting a webinar with Mitch Allen on February 25 at 10 a.m. PT to offer developers a preview of the webOS operating system and development environment, followed by a Q&A session. A link to register for the webinar will be available here on Monday February 16th.

[Link added by editor]

The book is currently nine pages long, and provide new insights and screenshots of webOS and what development on this platform will be like! Among the information given is information about the notification area, how Cards — the webOS method of displaying what applications are active and what they are up to — are handled and displayed. even some small snippets of UI code are given:

Typically, you would declare the widget within a scene’s view file, then direct Mojo to instantiate the widget during the corresponding scene assistant setup method using the scene controller’s setupWidget method:

// Setup toggle widget and an observer for when it is changed.
// this.toggle attributes for the toggle widget, specifying the 'value'
// property to be set to the toggle's boolean value
// this.togglemodel model for toggle; includes 'value' property, and sets
// 'disabled' to false meaning the toggle is selectable
//
// togglePressed Event handler for any changes to 'value' property

this.controller.setupWidget(’my-toggle’,
this.toggle = { property : ‘value’ },
this.toggleModel = { value : true, disabled : false });

this.controller.listen(’my-toggle’, Mojo.Event.propertyChange,
this.togglePressed.bindAsEventListener(this));

Development Tools

The Palm Developer Tools (PDT) are installed from the SDK and include targets for Linux, Windows (XP/Vista) and Mac OS X. The tools enable you to create a new Palm project using sample code and framework defaults, search reference documentation, debug your app in the weOS emulator or an attached Palm device, and publish an application. Chapter 2 includes more details about the tools in Palm’s SDK and third-party tools, but you’ll find a brief summary in Table 1-1

The introductory chapter of the webOS programming guide can be found here.

What do you think about these new revelations on the webOS front?

The boys who put together iPhoneDevCamp in July 2007 to prepare applications developers to develop using the iPhone SDK are putting together an event specifically for Pre developers.

The event, dubbed preDevCamp is hsoted by @whurley @giovanni and @dancrumb (all they provide are their twitter handles) and events are being set up all across the world, including yours truly’s home town Phoenix, Arizona.

The dates of these events, since they are not officially affiliated with Palm, Inc, are being held a week AFTER the Pre is released. These events will give developers much needed time on these devices, even if they are not able to get their own from Sprint/Palm for development purposes.

See here and here for information of preDevCamp, and here for registration information — you’ll need to select your particular city.

People who are into looking at EXIF files will likely have figured out that yours truly is an Olympus (and Sony) fan – I have thus naturally been dying to hear more about the E30.

And here it comes – digitalcamerareview.com did its job and posted a very detailed review of the recently-released shooter. Their verdict is extremely positive BTW:

There were a few minor bumps in the road for the E-30, but as a rule, we’ve come away generally impressed from our time with this camera. Olympus has certainly packed in all the right features to make this model appealing to the enthusiast market.

With this in mind, I’ll admit that where I’m conflicted on the E-30 has nothing to do its performance or features, and everything to do with its price. For about $1300 at the moment, you get Olympus’s very good, very fresh advanced amateur body. Not only does this price the body-only E-30 above most of its rivals’ kit prices, but Olympus’s full-on professional model is only ringing up a few hundred dollars higher at some retailers right now.

Admittedly, the E-3 is starting to look a little long in the tooth, and certainly doesn’t have some of the cool features and brand new technologies that the E-30 offers, but in exchange you get a highly rugged pro spec camera body.

Other than the possible temptation to jump straight into the pro system, there’s very little to keep Olympus fans from coming to the E-30 in droves. Amid some stiff competition – on both features and price – from some of the best cameras we’ve reviewed in awhile in the 50D and, especially, the D90, it’s hard to tell how successful the E-30 will be in convincing users to jump ship from other manufacturers.

But on its own merits, the E-30 is a good buy for advanced shooters that, with a few operational tweaks and/or a price cut, might just be a great one. In either case, there’s enough that’s different here to make the E-30 worth checking out: after all and especially in photography, different perspectives can be a good thing.

The ISO 3200 shots are extremely impressive to say the least (for Olympus users, that is) – if you are a Four Thirds head, definitely hit the link above!

Please tell us more about yourself and your company
My name is Miro Pomsar and I’m working for Resco Palm Division. We produced a number of popular applications such as Resco Explorer or Resco Backup. (To name the most popular ones.)

I’ve been working with Jan Slodicka since Resco started producing PalmOS software, so I was more or less involved with every application on this platform.

What were your initial impressions after the webOS announcement?
webOS seems nice, but I hoped for a native SDK (think C, C++).

For some applications javascript might prove good enough but for anything advanced native processor power is needed. I must say I like the idea of cards and multitasking. Also the notification area is well thought out.

I’m not sure about the value of the facebook and gmail and eventual other web services integrated into the base installation. For example the Facebook community may be large, but it is stil a small minority.

Well, a difficult question – Palm bet on the web services, hence some
examples must be preinstalled…

What did you expect Palm to do? Were your expectations met?
I expected a powerful and nice device with all the common features (3G, BT, Wifi, GPS).

But this is the baseline, I expected a SDK and a clear development strategy, f.e.: how to move/port existing (PalmOS) software to this new platform, IDE, emulators, examples, etc.

To this day nothing was released, but we shall see. So right now I’m, happy with the hardware, but slightly unhappy with the software.

The operating system is said to be web-only. Do you think that its possible to create solid applications in such an environment?
As I said, for some apps this might be good enough (especially when the data crunching is offloaded to a web server).

For others such as audio, video, docs, (encryption, compression) etc. it won’t. As far I understood Palm wants to provide needed services (such as imaging) case by case based on demand.

I see this strategy as some sort of “lego” development, where Palm provides the blocks (gui controls, audio/video decoding) and programmers put these blocks together.

It will depend on the number and versatility of these blocks whether or not this strategy will be successful. In any case the creativity of the developers will be seriously undermined.

WebOS is not able to run old Palm OS code. Can you understand this decision?
On the one hand there are thousands of apps for PalmOS.
However:
- There is no way old apps would look up-to-date on this device.
- Many of the thousands of apps are no longer maintained, so even a slight modification is not possible.
- Many of those apps, are rather simple and can be replaced by web apps
right now.
So I understand that decision. (Still I at hoped for Palm to have a clear porting guide.)

Many have compared webOS to the iPhone, thinking that most applications will be crapware. Do you think that a solid economy will be built around the pre?
I don’t know for sure, but have the feeling that the developer situation will be more difficult with WebOS than it used to be in the old Palm OS era. Also part of the iPhone crapware problem is AppStore.

So we must first see what the Palm “AppStore” answer will be.

Do you plan to develop applications for the pre? Could you give us a preview?
Not right now, we will evaluate the SDK once ready. Also we would start with porting some of our apps, before creating brand new ones.

If you could change one thing about webOS, what would it be?
It is too soon to say.

If you could ask Palm one question, what would it be?
Why didn’t you contact more developers about your new platform?

Palm is preparing to release their new operating system, codenamed Nova, and devices designed to run on it at CES 2009, as recently confirmed by Business Week. According to Jon Rubenstein and others, ” the goal is to create products that bridge the gap between Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple’s iPhone, oriented to fun.”

Investors as always have high hopes, but will the crazy boys at Palm be able to pull out something big enough to help the ailing company?

The first batch of MSI Wind handhelds shipped with Synaptics touchpads offering a “touch scroll” feature which allowed you to scroll across pages by dragging your finger across the sides of the pad. Unfortunately, many people (including a few friends of mine) had huge problems with this feature – which is why MSI switched to cheaper Scentelic touchpads lacking the touch-scroll capability.

MsiWind.net users unhappy with the lack of this feature decided to take matters into their own hands: they purchased a similar touchpad and managed to get it working on their MSI Wind. While the upgrade will likely void your warranty and requires a complete disassembly of the unit, I can fully understand them as the touch scroll feature really is insanely useful.

The full scoop can be had here:
http://forums.msiwind.net/hacks-and-mods/the-touchpad-experiment-t5959.html

After a year long stint trying to configure Debian Sid to work stably on my laptop — and for the most part failing miserably; maybe that’s why sid is ‘unstable’ — I decided it was time to stop pretending I could configure Debian, so I installed Ubuntu, which happens to exist specifically for people who can’t handle configuring debian.

Jokes aside (please don’t comment on my horrid sense of humor, I’m probably legally insane right now.) I installed fedora 10 on my Gateway MT3423 laptop. Here’s what I have to say about the newly released distro: Very sound, very stable, very reliable, even running KDE4.1.3, I have had little to no issues with it; only positives.

Let me start by saying this: RedHat did a superb job on the Anaconda installer. It is by far one of the easiest installer system that I have ever used. It’s fast, it’s clean, it’s concise. It let me deploy an entire system based on the packages I wanted, which, based on my prior experiences is not the norm… at least with debian, you are hardwired to set up either a desktop (GNOME, no other option) webserver, sql server (only postgresql) etc… With Anaconda, you can choose individual packages, or just choose a desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, etc)

So, after a nice install, I got to see the shiny new KDE4.1 desktop. Fedora 10 ships with a very nice blue and black theme called Solar, which is primarily an image of the sun, or some other star, filtered through a blue filter, imo. It looks really snazzy; everything matches, from bootscreen (which I could, for the life of me, not get working on Debian) to the desktop background. The only thing I had to do out of the box was change KWin to use a different color scheme, to match the desktop — I used Zion (reversed), a nice high contrast black theme.

KDE4 introduced the concept of plasmoids, little widgets that can be stuck anywhere on the desktop, little widgets for, say, taskmanagement, calculating, even twitter. The choices were a little paltry, but then again most users have yet to upgrade their desktop, leaving the core of developers still at kde3.

Fedora 10 also ships with integration with SELinux, a kernel level tool used to verify that security is at it should be and to prevent root use as much as possible. While this is kind of a pain the behind for me, a regular laptop user running virtuall no services, and not minding an occaisional typing of his root password, I can definitely see the cool-factor and reasons behind it. It was just a bit of a pain to get NetworkManager to work when SELinux blocks it from doing a dhcp reservation. I fixed that though with a minor bit of hacking in the policy files, which, by the way, is managed by the Fedora system configuration tools, another stellar part of Fedora 10.

Fedora — and I assume RHEL — use system-config-* tools to bind up all of their configuration tools into one quick little interface, which keeps one from dredging around in /etc and keeps the system nice and easy to administrate; I haven’t had to vim a single /etc file except once to change the desktop manager to KDM.

While KDE4 is still a little rough around the edges (no way to hide unused tray icons? what?) it shows great promise and great, erm, entertainment for little technophiles like me. And that hiding unused tray icons will be in KDE4.2

Palm has been at work advertising on their hardly little PalmOS device, the Centro. Their newest ads, centerred around the holidays focus on “Claüse,” the reinvented Santa, whose life was turned around after he received a Centro.

While the man is definitely creepy looking, this seems to be a very interesting advertisement campaign, and has the hopes of capturing some sort of press coverage

This is just the next step in a long line of palm’s dealing with Facebook; perhaps Palm is looking to attract a wider range of users, branching from their usual corporate appeal. Perhaps some new, exciting devices are in the tubes?

Anyways, the ad campaign is here (palm.com) and here (facebook.com)

What do you think Palm is up to?

PS: Cheers to Nicoya over at #palm on irc.freenode.net for the tip!

Austria was recently graced with a small photography exhibition going by the rather funny name of PhotoAdventure. While I usually don’t care too much about these small events, Olympus’s new E30 looked promising. As I had some free time on hand, I ventured out with Doris in tow…oh boy, adventures we had indeed.

Usually, journalists passing by are admitted if they are members of a journalist’s club which is of good standing. The process goes along the lines of show ID, shake hands, go in. Afterwards, reports go on-line or to the press. This process has all over the world for the last years…

Unfortunately, the organizers of PhotoAdventure (Bolch & Wiltner OEG) think different. As they had a few journalists who didn’t report (enough) about them, their chauvinist egos were hurt…which led to them refusing admission to people who didn’t register weeks in advance.

So: yours truly had issues and didn’t get in at first. Nobody was at range who was willing to help out…we eventually stumbled across the B&W boys sitting at the local coffeehouse trying to fatten up.

None of them felt like doing their job in a proper fashion: for them, journalists apparently are annoying critters who hinder their fattening process. OK – yours truly might be skinny…but definitely wasn’t there to steal their food.

Anyways: as we were not willing to put up with a bunch of lazy and haughty madmen who need to be prodded to do anything, we decided to call it for a day. No reports for you, and no reports for Olympus and the other exhibitors.

I came here with the honest intention to gather info on the E30 for you…but it was not possible. I hope for your understanding…

Cutting a long story short: it’s the exhibitors who get to foot the bill. Imbecilic press accreditation leads to less/no free column space – unfortunately, this system is not understood by many.

Our overlords have been updating their mail client, GMail. For those of you who don’t know, gmail provides (currently) 7265 MB of storage space for any mail you can possibly chug into it. I highly recommend google mail to anyone who is looking for a new account.

At any rate, they have recently updated gmail adding themes and making labs available to all users.

The themes are basically just css hacks that give gmail an entirely different feel:

There are about twenty themes to choose from, ranging from plain color changes to images, and full theme conversions. However the ability to use user created themes is not involved (probably a good idea, imo!)

Along with themes, those of use who are into bleeding edge features can play with ranging from a quick links tab next to your list of labels, which allows you to throw any sort of link you would like and have it available at any gmail session . Also available is mouse gestures, keystrokes, signature tweaks, and mail goggles (not googles, as I thought when I first read it):

Both of these new features can be available from the settings menu in GMail.

Dataviz has recently updated their Word Document editor to version 11.000.

This new version is available for 30$ (standard version) or $50 (premium version)

New features include:

* View tracked changes in word processing files
* Apply and view Styles in word processing files
* View border and wrapped text in spreadsheets
* 10 starter Templates included for creating Word and Excel files

This update brings Documents to Go as the only way to view and edit Word 2007 files, so if you need to use these files on a daily basis, it is a highly recommended piece of software!

Full details, including purchase information