Mar 01 Viewpoint
Volume Number: 17
Issue Number: 3
Column Tag: Viewpoint
By Marshall Clow
Report from the Palm Developers' conference
PalmSource 2000 was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center on December
12th-15th, 2000. There were over 3500 developers in attendance, up from about
2000 in 1999. As a result of this growth, Palm announced that starting in 2001,
PalmSource would be held in the (much larger) San Jose convention center.
Carl Yankowsi, CEO of Palm, Inc. gave the opening keynote, setting the tone for the
week. He described Palm's vision of the "Mobile Internet", where people have access to
on-line resources no matter where they are.
Slides and WebCasts of the many of the conference presentations are available at
http://www.palmsource.com.
News
Palm is currently riding high, with an 83% (US) market share in the handheld
computer market. This was reflected in the list of Palm OS licensees. There are large
consumer electronic companies like Sony, computer manufacturers such as IBM, and
Palm-only companies like Handspring and TRG. Symbol is making Palm OS-based bar
code scanners for use in enterprise applications.
They have created partnerships with several cell phone makers: Kyoccra, Nokia,
Motorola, and Samsung. Palm is working with these companies to put Palm OS
capabilities into the next-generation (also known as 3G) cell phones.
Palm announced at the show that they have more than 130,000 registered developers,
up from about 20,000 last year.
Palm OS 4.0
Each developer (after singing an NDA) received a prerelease version of Palm OS 4.0.
There were several sessions devoted to features that will be introduced in Palm OS
4.0, and how to take advantage of them. Slides of many of these presentations are
available on the PalmSource website. Some of the new features are:
• Secondary Storage
Palm OS 4 will support external file systems and secondary storage. This will
allow users to keep data on devices such as smart cards or CompactFlash. Sony,
a Palm OS licensee, was showing a Palm OS device with a slot for a
MemoryStick.
• Attention Manager
As Palm OS devices are used for more and more tasks, more and more
applications need to get the user's attention. Under Mac OS, this is done using
the Notification Manager. In Palm OS, applications use the Attention Manager.
This allows the user to respond to single or multiple events, and allows the
applications to prioritize notifications (simple vs. insistent, for example).
• Exchange Manager
In Palm OS 3 and before, the Exchange Manager was tied to the IR port, since
that was the only way that people could exchange data. In 4.0, exchange is
transport-independent. The big driver for this, as far as I can see, is
BlueTooth. However, this will also allow people using pager cards, SMS, etc.
use the same mechanism as the built-in IR port.
• Telephony
Since Palm is building relationships with several mobile phone vendors, you
should not be surprised to learn that Palm OS 4.0 will contain a full "phone
control" API. As well as the basic functionality, there will be also support for
SMS (via the Exchange Manager).
Palm OS 5.0
As well as 4.0, Palm gave attendees a glimpse of a future OS that they were calling
Palm OS 5.0. (this is not an official name) David Fedor of Palm said that they expected
that devices would ship with this OS in 2002. A few of the features previewed are:
• Support for ARM processors
• Better multimedia support
• Support for different screen sizes and resolutions
• A wide range of devices, both in price and capabilities.
The big change for 5.0 is the change to the ARM processor. This will be quite an
undertaking for Palm, since all existing Palm OS applications are written for the
Motorola 68000 processor. In some ways, this will be even more difficult than
Apple's switch from the 680x0 to the PowerPC because the ARM is "little-endian",
like the 80x86, rather than "big-endian", like the 68K and PowerPC. Palm will be
supplying a 68K emulator in their new devices, so that existing applications can be
run on new machines.
Developer Tools
Metrowerks announced at the show (and shipped soon thereafter) CodeWarrior 7 for
Palm OS. It includes an updated C/C++ compiler, all the IDE enhancements from
CodeWarrior 6 for Mac OS and Windows, and several Palm OS-specific tools, including
a debugger plugin that lets you symbolically debug your Palm OS applications either
inside POSE or on an actual device. CodeWarrior for Palm OS runs on both the Mac and
Windows.
Developer's Nation has formed a partnership with Palm to maintain and extend the
Palm OS knowledge base, which is a great resource for Palm OS developers. This online
Q&A database should be available by the time you read this at
http://www.DevNation.net.
AppForge announced the release of Visual Basic for Palm OS, allowing developers who
prefer to write their applications in Basic to create Palm OS applications. More
information is available at http://www.appforge.com.
Extended Systems <http://www.extendsys.com> announced a set of developer tools
geared towards the enterprise market, for integrating Palm OS devices into a medium
to large company.
Last year at PalmSource '99, Palm and Bear River announced that they would be
developing and releasing the "Palm Development Framework", a C++ class library for
developing Palm OS applications. This year, Bear River announced that they had
completed the Framework, which is available at
http://www.bearriver.com/developer/palm/.
Summary
Last year, at PalmSource '99, I thought that this was an exciting time to be a Palm OS
developer. If anything, this year promises to be even more exciting. Even though Palm
has an 80% market share, they aren't sitting on their laurels; they are working hard
on improving their products.
Last year, Palm beat the drum about enterprise support. Most of the sessions at
PalmSource '99 were about getting into and supporting the enterprise market. This
year while Palm talked quite a bit about the enterprise market, there were "personal
sessions as well.
If you couldn't make it to PalmSource 2000, be sure to check out
http://www.PalmSource.com where slides for most of the sessions are available.
See you at PalmSource '01 in October!
______________________________
Marshall has worked for Palomar Software, HP, Aladdin Systems and Adobe. Among
other things, he has written PICT Detective, Aladdin's Resource Compression Toolkit,
and way too many resource-processing tools. When he's not coding, he can be found
mountain biking with his kids or checking out microbreweries. He can be reached at
<marshall@idio.com>