Sep 99 Factory Floor
Volume Number: 15
Issue Number: 9
Column Tag: From the Factory Floor
A Palm Update, Part 1
By Eric Cloninger, Phillip Shoemaker, and Dave Mark, ©1999 by Metrowerks, Inc.,
all rights reserved.
A lot has changed since we last covered the world of Palm development. Things are
really heating up these days with new Palm hardware, new Palm software, and a new
release of CodeWarrior for Palm OS. This month's interview is with Metrowerks' own
Eric Cloninger and with Phillip Shoemaker from Palm Computing.
Eric Cloninger is the technical lead, product manager, and utility infielder for
CodeWarrior for Palm OS. When he's not pounding the keyboard, you can find him
showing his son how to throw a slider or lamenting the Rockies' pitching staff. He can
be reached at ericc@metrowerks.com.
Phillip Shoemaker is the Manager of Developer Tools at Palm Computing. When he's
not harassing his engineers, he can be found riding his mountain board down rocky
terrain. He can be reached at phil_shoemaker@palm.com.
Dave: In the early days, all Palm development was done on a Mac. What is the
situation these days?
Eric: Palm developers can take advantage of the benefits that the Macintosh provides. If
you recall from our previous discussions (From the Factory Floor, March 1998),
Palm devices use the Motorola MC68328 and MC68EZ328 processors. These
processors, nicknamed the DragonBall and DragonBall EZ, are 68000 core processors
with built-in serial and LCD controllers. The device runs at 16Mhz and has between
512KB and 4MB of RAM. If you look carefully, you'll recognize that a Palm device has
more computing power than the original Macs that we all bought in 1984!
Phillip: It has always made sense to develop for a 68k on a 68k and, as Eric just
mentioned, the Dragonball processor is a 68K. It's easier for us to write our tools and
OS where we can take advantage of the 68K emulation that the MacOS provides-so our
development tools have always been first on the Macintosh and later on other
platforms. A lot of our developers have strong Mac backgrounds, some came from
Apple, some from Newton, some from Metrowerks, and the tools show their Mac
heritage.
Dave: There's a Palm developer's conference coming up in October. What can you tell
me about the conference?
Phillip: This is the third developer's conference for the Palm Computing
Platform[TM], now named PalmSource 99[TM]. We have added more tracks to the
conference, which now spans four days. It's packed with sessions targeted towards
doing new business development, marketing your applications, etc.
The majority of the conference is targeted towards doing serious development on
our platform. Some of the sessions we have planned describe how to write Conduits to
transfer data between your Mac or PC and the Palm device. Other sessions will
describe how to take advantage of the wireless capabilities of the Palm VII, as well as
how to write localized applications for English, Japanese, and other languages.
There will be several labs for developing on the Palm OS and showing how to use
our tools. The labs will be open late, until 2:00 am, I think, so Mac hackers should feel
right at home.
Dave: Is Palm planning to release a new set of SDKs there as well?
Phillip: Yes we are. We expect to have a final version of all our SDKs a few weeks
before the conference. Metrowerks will incorporate our SDKs into the CodeWarrior
environment in time to bring to the conference.
Dave: What can you tell me about the SDK?
Phillip: The latest SDK for the Palm Computing Platform supports a variety of
connected organizers, including the Palm III, Palm IIIx, Palm IIIe, Palm V, and the
Palm VII. This also includes devices from Qualcomm, Franklin, IBM, and Symbol
Technologies.
The SDK includes updates to our headers and libraries to support all devices, as
well as updates to the Mac OS-hosted simulator and the Palm OS emulator (aka
CoPilot). The SDK also includes sources to many sample applications, including the
organizer applications that are in the devices' ROM. Additionally, the new SDK contains
documentation on all the OS calls and a detailed tutorial.
Using the updated SDK, developers can write applications that run on the original
Pilot 1000 devices, the Palm Pilot, the Palm III, Palm V, and Palm VII. Developers
can write applications that utilize the wireless functionality in the Palm VII, as well
as write applications for Japanese-enabled devices.
Dave: Eric, what can you tell me about the new version of CodeWarrior that will
be released at the conference?
Eric: The latest CodeWarrior tools for the Palm Computing platform will be based on
CodeWarrior Pro 5 that was released in June. This means that Palm developers have
access to the new CodeWarrior browser, the new XML import/export facilities, as
well as updated compilers and libraries. Palm has added features to Constructor and
the PalmRez post linker that allows users to create applications for Japanese versions
of the OS. Those users who already use CodeWarrior Professional will see slightly
newer versions of the IDE, MSL, and the compilers.
Dave: OK, you've convinced me. Let's say I go to PalmSource 99, attend the sessions and
get the tools. Where do I start? What do I do? What kind of resources are available to
me?
Eric: Well, you can start right now, before you go to the conference. CodeWarrior for
Palm OS Release 5 is available from Palm or Metrowerks. The samples and tutorial
that Phil mentioned earlier are available for the 3.0 version of the OS (Release 6 will
have versions 3.1 and 3.2). There's a lot to learn about the core OS that will take most
developers a while to learn.
Phil: We can also walk through some detailed code on the OS in next month's MacTech.
In the mean time, here are some web sites that interested developers can start looking
at:
• http://www.palm.com - Palms' main web site.
• http://www.palm.com/devzone - Palms' developer zone
• http://www.palmsource.com - Information on the Palm Computing
Platform developers conference
• http://ls.palm.com - List server run by Palms' developer group. Users
can sign up to receive email forums on the OS, conduits, and emulator.
• http://www.metrowerks.com/pda/palm/x - Metrowerks' main site for
the Palm product. Metrowerks is planning to add a tools support site located
off this site where users can download tools and documents that aren't on the
CD, such as the HackMaster sample, Eric's PRC viewer, the CodeWarrior FAQ,
etc. We don't have a definitive location for this yet.
• http://news.massena.com - Darrin Massena's private news server is a
high signal-to-noise ratio news server where many experienced developers
hang out.
• http://www.roadcoders.com - A good place to get tools, SDKs, samples,
and utilities.