PalmSource 99
Volume Number: 16
Issue Number: 1
Column Tag: In the Palm of Your Hand
by Marshall Clow
Report from the Palm Developers' Conference
PalmSource '99 (aka the Palm Developers' Conference) was held in the Santa Clara
Convention Center on October 19-22, 1999. It was attended by over 2000 developers,
almost twice as many as last year.
The opening keynote was given by Eric Benhamou, CEO of 3Com. He introduced the
catch-phrase for the entire conference, the "Palm Economy", referring to all the
people involved in creating, selling, buying and using Palm Platform devices. He
claimed that there were over 5 million users of Palm devices, and that there were
over 4000 software titles available for the platform.
You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and this was certainly true at
PalmSource. Palm Computing, Inc (which will be spun out of 3Com early next year in
an IPO), has several groups, all pulling in different directions. It is made up of three
divisions:
Palm Platform
This is the group that licenses PalmOS and hardware designs. They work
with licensees such as IBM, Symbol, Handspring, TRG, and so on. The OS
development happens here, too.
Palm Devices
This group designs, builds, and sells the Palm-branded hardware, such as
the Palm III, Palm V, and Palm VII.
Palm.net
This group sells/manages/develops the data services used by the Palm VII
(and no doubt soon, other wireless devices).
News
The big news of the conference was that Nokia and Palm announced an agreement to
implement the PalmOS on the kernel that runs in Nokia cellular phones. Since these
phones use the ARM chip instead of the Dragonball processor that is in current PalmOS
devices, this will take them a while (think of Apple and the move to the PowerPC). On
the other hand, there are millions of Nokia-based cell phones out in the field, and
there are thousands more sold every day.
Alan Kessler, president of Palm Computing, laid out a roadmap of the future of PalmOS.
He talked about things that Palm will be doing (in the next year or two):
• Hardware Abstraction for the OS (esp for ARM processor)
• Produce Reference Hardware Designs - These reference designs will be
licensed to Palm Platform developers that want to create Palm compatible
hardware.
• Produce models with differing screen sizes - Right now, all Palm
Platform devices have the same screen size, 160 x 160 pixels. In the future
Palm (and their licensees) will be producing devices with larger and smaller
screen sizes.
• Better audio
• Maintain compatibility with current devices
• Better modularity for the OS (less interdependence between modules)
Development Info
PalmOS 3.5 framework
If you signed an NDA at the conference, you could take home a CD with a bunch of
development info about the next major revision of PalmOS, called PalmOS 3.5. The new
feature that generated the most excitement at the conference was support for color
screens in 3.5. Since there are no Palm-compatible devices out there with color
screens, this is clearly an "important future direction" for the Palm Devices group.
A lot of this information is available online at
http://www.palm.com/devzone/docs/palmos35.html and
http://www.palm.com/devzone/pavilion.html.
Poser 3.0
Palm announced at the conference a major revision to its excellent debugging aid, POSE
3.0. POSE (or POSER, as it is sometimes called) stands for Palm OS Emulator. It is a
program that runs on Macs and PCs (and some Unixes) that emulates a Palm OS device.
Since POSER runs on the host and can interact with your development system, this
makes debugging much easier. You can debug your program in POSER, using the
source-level debugger that comes with CodeWarrior.
CodeWarrior r6
Oh yes, CodeWarrior. Metrowerks and Palm announced that CodeWarrior r6 for
PalmOS shipped the first day of the conference. This is the same CodeWarrior that mac
developers use every day. The same IDE, the same debugger, and so on. It does come
with a different linker and resource compiler to generate PalmOS-specific binaries.
Palm Application Framework
Palm announced that they would be teaming up with Bear River Associates to produce
the Palm Application Framework. This is a C++ application framework for writing
PalmOS applications, similar in principle to MacApp or PowerPlant on the Mac or
MFC on Windows. The framework will be released under an Open Source license.
To find out more, you can send email to paf_info@bearriver.com;.
Other sessions
There were also sessions on debugging, memory management, conduits (many, many
sessions on conduits) how to write apps for the Palm VII, development tools, and much,
much more.
Summary
PalmSource '99 was a great deal for anyone wanting to start or continue a business
programming for PalmOS computers. It was a resourding success, with over twice as
many attendees as last year, and a great way to get to meet the people developing the
Palm OS.
If you couldn't make it to PalmSource '99, check out
http://www.palm.com/devzone/index.html, where Palm is making much of the
material from the conference available..
See you at PalmSource 2000!
______________________________
Marshall Clow is a programmer. He has worked for Palomar Software, HP, and
Aladdin Systems. Among other things, he has written PICT Detective, Aladdin's
Resource Compression Toolkit, and way too many resource-processing tools. He
currently works for Adobe Systems, where his title is "Bad Influence". When he's not
coding, he can be found mountain biking with his kids or checking out microbreweries.
He can be reached at mclow@mailhost2.csusm.edu.