Developers Continue to Bestow Praise on WebOS

InformationWeek has posted a new piece focusing on the ease with which developers can code for Palm's new WebOs. Quite bluntly entitled "Developers: Palm's WebOs is The Bomb", the article is written by InformationWeek's Mobile Blog contributor Eric Zeman. Zeman's piece quotes heavily from a recent, lengthier article from John Cox at IDG's Network World entitled "Palm's WebOS lives up to the hype, early developers say". Both pieces are worth reading for fans and critics of alike Palm's new WebOS + Synergy cloud-based initiative.

In what is becoming a regularly cited example, Pandora's radio app is used by both authors as the paradigm for a company quickly and easily porting their product to the new Palm Pre utilizing familiar web-tools such as HTML, CSS and Javascript. The oft-quoted Pandora CTO Tom Conrad appears in both articles gushing over the ease with which his firm was able to effortlessly transition to the world of WebOS in December '08, shortly after porting Pandora's Internet radio app to the BlackBerry platform.

The Informationweek piece goes on to applaud the WebOS UI as both intuitive and being extremely speedy and responsive, something I noted as well from my initial Pre impressions during CES in January. According to Pandora's Conrad, the WebOS UI feels "future-oriented, not an iPhone-inspired knockoff" despite many of the blatant similarities between some elements of the Pre's hardware and industrial design along with some UI elements (such as Palm's camera app) appearing rather iPhone-esque.

In particular, the 2nd page of the Network World piece goes into some solid detail of breaking down the Webkit-derived UI System Manager acting as WebOS' runtime environment. The article also goes into a bit of detail in debunking some of the initial criticism by both users and developers of WebOS lacking "true" native applications.

Palm no doubt faces quite a daunting task in recruiting fresh blood to their platform as well as winning back old Palm OS developers who fled for the greener Windows Mobile, iPhone, and BlackBerry pastures in recent years. Nevertheless, it's encouraging to hear positive feedback from those developers who will be onboard simultaneous to the Pre's launch sometime in the next two months, even if recently-quoted partners such as Pandora seem to be mostly repeats of the names shown by Palm at CES and CTIA and covered in depth by Tim's "Partners in Precrime" series.

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Will it be enough...

ldrolez @ 4/30/2009 2:21:36 PM # Q
...to revivify the PalmOS community ? iPhone programming is awful (Objective-c), closed (99$, NDA, MacOS only SDK, etc), but they managed to have 15000 apps written in a few months.
www.palmopensource.com - Open Source Software for PalmOS devices
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