Comments on: Interview with Pandora About Developing for WebOS

Datebk6 is a hugely popular Palm OS application and one that shows just how robust and full featured a Palm app can be. If Steuart has seen the new webOS and thinks that he could replicate Datebk6 with it, then I would really be a believer!

nice job freakout. you actually sound relatively articulate.

you're famous

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/pandoras-cto-talks-about-pre-webos-sdk-gaming-and-small-chil/

Nor did I know Tom had worked on You Don't Know Jack, which is probably a good thing because I may have just wound up gushing about that instead of asking real questions.

all in all though, turned out even better than I thought it would.

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 -> Treo 650 -> Treo 680 -> Centro

I'm gonna roll it back off Windows eventually I think, see if the initial problems have been fixed - there's got to be new versions of the apps by now...

-------------
Hey Admin: Why do we have to keep two profiles?

http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_Story.asp?ID=2607

Prior to that, Palm was pretty good about releasing OS updates though that was a different era, totall different economic climate and different product lines.

Aside from that, there have been a few fairly hefty ROM updates for the T5, LifeDrive and T|C but nothing that ever actually changed the OS version # in ROM.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

i disagree. that might have been the case yesterday, but given the popularity of digital media (music, movies, photos) even people who aren't really techies (or were never considered "power users") can really QUICKLY accumulate a lot of media which will take up a lot of GB. me, i'm a minimalist - but i'm a power user in other ways. yet some 17 year old kid who doesn't care about PIM who maybe yesterday wasn't considered a "power user" probably have many GB of media they want to carry.

don't forget about parkinson's law.

also - how much does each GB cost these days? i'd imagine it's pretty cheap - maybe they should have offered an 8GB and a 32GB and cover both bases???

I told him that for about $60 shipped, I could buy 2x16GB SDHC cards now and 32GB cards would be probably at that price probably by year's end. He just ignored me and said that the added complexity of spring/eject mechanisms (not required by most microSDHC devices-in fact, I have a digital photo frame here with a fullsize SD card in it that doesn't have an ejecting mechanism.

My point is this:

Flash prices are constantly dropping and in flux. It takes Palm so long to conceptualize, design, approve, place orders for, manufacture, sell to the carriers and receive FCC certification that yesterday's 8GB is today's 2GB. And remember, Palm doesn't have Apple's NAND purchasing power/influence and Palm's product refresh cycles are traditionally glacially slow. So why try to anticipate market trends by crippling your device with a tiny amount of onboard storage? Either fill it with 16gb/32gb from the onset or just put a damn slot in it and leave it up to the customer to keep it empty or max it out.

Do you know how many people would be crying the blues if digicam companies went back to having a small amount of fixed memory in their cameras? My first digital camera had something like 2mb onboard and it was a huge PITA, even when limited to shooting 800x600 images.

No, my guess is that Palm's just trying to be like Apple and being greedy. They want us to buy a new Pre everytime they refresh the design to get the latest version of their browser & email apps and to gain a few more GB of storage.

P.S. As far as seamless expansion card integration goes, I have a cheap-o Sandisk Sansa for working out. It's got 2gb onboard and I think I have a 2gb microSD card installed in it. Either volume is seen as a removable USB drive when I plug it into my PC. So if I drag & drop folders A-J in the internal space and put K-Z on the SD card, the whole selection of songs is "seen" by the Sansa as one contiguous volume of music (after it does its kinda slow routine at startup of assembling the library but that's only a one-time thing when you add new music).

So if that $40 MP3 player can do it so elegantly, then I am sure the combined might of WebOS + the TI chipset COULD handle seamless integration of an external expansion if Palm wanted it. It's just that Palm doesn't want it for $$$$$ reasons.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

If they are not going to have removable flash storage included, then they need to include more storage on the device - 8GB standard is too small in today's world (though I suspect they will bump this up to 16GB standard with a 32GB option before launch) - I currently have 16GB of music on my Treo. 8GB isn't going to allow for many movies, especially after a user adds their music...

I agree with this wholeheartedly. 8 GB isn't a whole lot. I would greatly prefer 16 or 32.

@Winterbay

I hope they won't do any kind of iTunes automatic synching of media. It is one of the many reasons I will never buy an iPhone or iPod.

iTunes is highly configurable. I have never had something on my iPod that I didn'dt want to be there. I have my iPhone (hacked so I can use it with no service: might as well be an iPod Touch...) set so that it automatically updates my podcasts, but the music it includes is only a small set of playlist that I created.

-alan

There are pros and cons to each approach. I think the best compromise would be "large fixed storage." YMMV.... 8 GB is too small if it's going to be heavily used for media though. I have found I, personally can get by with that if need be.

-alan

Another potential drawback to gaming is going to be the lack of hard buttons. Sure, you can do motion sensing or onscreen "buttons" ala iPhone but those just don't work as wel for most titles as a nice old-fashioned analog stick or digital pad.

Oh well, that's what the DSi and PSP are for, right?

On a rather OT note, I think whoever (Sony or Nintendo) can hit the market with a nice touchscreen + d-pad + analog stick enabled device with oodles of onboard storage and a rock-solid content delivery system via wi-fi will win the next portable gaming console battle.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7v8QAw_8Rs

Your bias is inconsistent - to say the least.

Even with a web environment, you'll need some more power under the hood (C, assembly) to really create some kickass apps.

Once Palm releases a proper SDK then the apps. developed for the Pre will really take off.

As we saw with the iphone, even the best web apps. are no substitute for an SDK.

^^ (sigh>)
Pre's "web apps" aren't actually web apps. They are installed locally on the phone, can make use of the hardware and can run offline just fine. They are merely applications written using web languages.

iPhone's "web apps" all ran inside the browser, were useless without a data connection and were actually just web pages coded to use mobile Safari.

Big difference. (Maybe you should try reading the article you're actually commenting on?)

All of the Pre's apps run within a browser.

So, IMHO, the thing you emphasized the least: Pre web-apps accessing the "hardware" is the real difference vs. web-apps on the iPhone. But once again, that's a losing argument. None of the iPhone apps I use need access to the hardware either, except to get your GPS location (which if Apple really wanted to, they could make available in Safari).

The fact of the matter is that web-apps were a flop on the iPhone, and I see no reason for them to do any better on the Pre. They apparently weren't so "fantastic to build". This article does nothing to answer those questions.

No, they don't. Try reading the interview again:

TC: Well, I think one of the important little nuances here to understand is that you might think from the name "webOS" and from the technologies used – HTML and CSS and Javascript – you might think that this is the whole thing, just kind of a fancy web browser, and that you're – y'know, any interaction you take is interacting with web content. That's really not how it works at all. What you really have, is that you have an environment where a developer can write a traditional application – so, an application that gets installed onto the phone with all its code and all of its user interface elements and that is actually local to the phone. There's also a database and file storage that allows you to take data from the internet connection and store it locally – so when you're browsing your contacts, for example, you're interacting with an application that's local to the phone, with interface elements that are local to the phone and with contacts that are actually sitting on the phone.

What makes it this "webOS" is that the programming models for your developer rather than being C or Java is really just HTML and CSS and Javascript.

David Beers has a good explanation on his blog also:
http://www.pikesoft.com/blog/index.php?itemid=204

If you watched any of the announcement you know that webOS is also intended for delivering a cutting edge web app experience, but that has to do with the browser they developed. It should also be clear that applications originally written for the web using JS/HTML/CSS (like GMail, BaseCamp, Facebook, etc.) should be easy to port to webOS and be enhanced to run in offline mode, due to webOS's HTML 5 support for offline databases.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around that.

Sounded really interesting, I thought, especially the bit about them being able to port the features over to their WinMob devices if they wanted to. Although it still wouldn't be enough to make me want a WinMob devices.

...LIST VIEW is superior?

I was wondering about that too - but for the app launcher. I much prefer list view.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

Let me reiterate:

At BARE minimum, we need a YouTube app like the superb one on the iPhone/Touch. Ideally, I just want Flash on that thing right out of the box. Not having it available at launch would be an even worse oversight IMO than not shipping the original T|T with mp3 player software in ROM.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

T|T shipped without RealPlayer and buzzy audio, despite the fact that Sony had been killing 'em with multimedia functionality ever since the OS4 days. Then Palm improved the T|T audio quality via a ROM update but that killed the output volume. Then the T|T2 bafflingly didn't improve on the volume problem. Only with the T|T3 (a year after the T|T) did they finally get it right! Let's hope it doesn't take that long to see Pre hardware improvements. And the T3 strill didn't have very good quality audio output hardware (amp, headphone jack etc) compared to any reasonable mp3 or audio player of that era.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?