Comments on: Partners in Precrime, Part 2

Third-party software: the secret sauce of smartphones that keeps us gadget-addicts coming back for more geeky goodness. Last week, we took a stab at guessing how Sprint, Facebook, Google and Pandora were going to integrate with the shiny new Palm webOS. This time around, in part 2 of our ongoing series analyzing Palm's publicly-announced software partners, we'll put Yahoo!, Amazon, MobiTV, Pivotal Labs and DataViz under the microscope.

So grow your hair long, let your beard go wild and help yourself to some Lysergic acid from that dodgy-looking man in the trench coat as we once again take a trip into the Realm of Tech Fantasy…

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Glossing over nicely ;)

skeezix @ 2/17/2009 1:29:13 PM #

Consider DataViz and docs2go. (And as a dev, we all have the same questions..)

If there is no native application access (more to point, a C compiler.. could just 'compile' to JS, or to native code. Whatever.) then it means a lot of existing code (for Palm OS and otherwise) needs total rewrite before being useful. For games, you're not going to get a Quake port 'just like that', but lets talk productivity apps like Docs2Go..

Devs won't be inheriting any of their old code; a lot of good code is easily portable, even if it was old Palm OS code - lose the UI, adopt the good parts to reusable library code, and add a new UI. Thats not going to happen if we're stuck with JS. (Not to say JS is bad, but its not going to buy you any old code, and it is a performance bottleneck for some applications. Anyway, not my target here.)

So you say 'we can expect ...' - well, only if DataViz has a special relationship with Palm (obviously they do ;) and a lot of lead time to recode eveyrthing in JS, or else a back door so they can re-use old code. If they're left using JS, its going to take a long long time to get all that functionality reimplemented from scratch. (And for non developers out there .. this isnt't being lazy. Old code has a history and likely has been debugged.) Certainly, I've got tens of thousands of lines of business logic for some of my apps that would be nice to just bring over and write the new UI for.. but it means so far that all apps are ground up new. (Which in a way is nice, since you are forced to reconsider everything.. but it sure makes for a lot more work, which translates into 'time to market' and 'cost to market'...)

These are very large questions we devs are all waiting on.

Will there purely be JS access to the device, forever, or will this be a staged release a la Apple - first JS, then down the road, a heavy duty API for those needing to write device drivers or high performance computations or the like.

jeff

The Shadow knows!

RE: Glossing over nicely ;)

SeldomVisitor @ 2/17/2009 1:33:02 PM #

The Palm guy in one of the more recently-released videos mentions the copy-n-paste needs work.

I'd still like to see someone have a screen full of text and, say, copy from the next to last word on a line to the next to last word on the second following line...

Fingertips are BIG w.r..t words on that dinky screen.

RE: Glossing over nicely ;)

freakout @ 2/18/2009 5:29:19 AM #

skeezix - One thing I've been wondering about is how closely webOS is related to the Foleo OS under the hood. Palm apparently had a decent C-based SDK for the Foleo, so if they're even distant cousins it could be they've already got one ready for webOS too. Maybe it's only available to select devs though?

mega-messaging, massive messaging, mighty messaging

crmealey @ 2/17/2009 7:26:27 PM #

Somebody's going to be the one to coin the next buzzword, might as well be you.

Nice wordsmithing - really, I've enjoyed both the articles in this series. Nice the look forward. You could keep yourself busy just digging into each of those companies' activities for the next while.

I actually posted a link to each of the articles in my own little website's link page. Check it out at http://palmprefix.com. You're writing was the first thing that kept me reading here. I've tried to do the same over there. I'd love to know what you think.

Thanks again. I'll be back for round three.

RE: mega-messaging, massive messaging, mighty messaging

freakout @ 2/18/2009 1:01:16 AM #

Thanks much, that's one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me. Well, except for the time Daniela told me I was a "bad kisser" in high school, right before she dumped me, a remark that I've treasured/been massively damaged by ever since... ;)

that's a nicely put-together site, it's now bookmarked, rss'd and Facebooked - the latter of which entitles you to see my wonderfully, horribly graphic profile pic of me in Speedos. That's what you get! :P

RE: mega-messaging, massive messaging, mighty messaging

twrock @ 2/18/2009 4:26:38 AM #

which entitles you to see my wonderfully, horribly graphic profile pic of me in Speedos.

That's just wrong. Seriously wrong.

"twrock is infamous around these parts" (from my profile over at Brighthand due to my negative 62 rep points rating)

RE: mega-messaging, massive messaging, mighty messaging

freakout @ 2/18/2009 5:19:13 AM #

^^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hrsZ2hm8K4

RE: mega-messaging, massive messaging, mighty messaging

twrock @ 2/18/2009 8:37:40 PM #

What, do you think I'm stupid enough to click on a Youtube link right after you talked about graphic pictures of you in a Speedo?

"twrock is infamous around these parts" (from my profile over at Brighthand due to my negative 62 rep points rating)

RE: mega-messaging, massive messaging, mighty messaging

freakout @ 2/19/2009 3:11:49 AM #

lol. No, I'm not that mean-spirited. It links to an amusing clip from America's most under-rated sitcom ever. Man, Phil Hartman had a way of making anything funny...