PalmOS 5 Turns Gold

Stalke writes: "On sunday, PalmSource (the spinoff from Palm responsible for the development of the PalmOS) announced that PalmOS 5 has gone gold. This latest version of the operating system includes support for ARM processors, Bluetooth and 802.11b, high-res displays (320x320; although Sony already uses even high res displays in its NR70) and more. Products with PalmOS 5 should start shipping in just over a months' time!"

Comments

Is evolution inevitable?

[CaptainZapp]

Call me a ludite, but as an avid Palm user (Vx) this might well be a step backwards.

The thing I love most about the Palm and the PalmOs is that it works, that it's extremely simple and that it's extremely reliable.

I didn't like when they introduced colour and I care even less for all the fancy features promised with PalmOS 5.

Frankly, if the only direction is more colours, better resolution, more MP3, full feature video and other such assorted crap, then I guess it's time to ditch the Palm and go for a Symbian smart phone.

At least then, when the good old b&w simplicity of the V series is no more supported.

Re:Is evolution inevitable?

[kisrael]

Ok, you're a luddite.

Not really, though: I see where you're coming from, but I think the real key to Palm's wonderful simplicity is in its UI. Color Palms, for better or worse, don't make tremendous use of color--generally just getting better readability and color icons, and of course allowing games and image viewers and what not to be in color. The UI is the same, and for my money is about as simple and reliable as ever.

Same thing with "more colours, better resolution, more MP3, full feature video": if there are seperate MP3 and video apps, and the UI is the same as always (without CE's "i think i'm a small desktop" mistakes, and "Aqua"-like "enhancements") then what does it hurt?

It's always a set of trade-offs. If you want really robust, really simple, you mighta been happy with one of those old school keyboard/character based PDAs...a few even offer synching to the desktop. Palm needs to keep pushing its capabilities, since eventually those gee-whiz features will be cheap enough (in terms of battery life and usability) to make sense.

Of course, the super hightech feature I'm really jonesing for is a clipboard that can hold an entire memo (and maybe ditch the 4k memo limit while they're at it...) I mean, Microsoft finally made Notepad so it didn't choke on 32K files, can't Palm do the same?

Re:moving slowly...open the source!!

[Burgundy Advocate]

Open the source, Palm!

So they can get the nimble development cycle of such projects as Mozilla and Gnome? I'm sorry, but I don't think so. Any operating system -- especially something embedded like PalmOS -- is going to be over the level of many programmers. I certainly wouldn't want to have to deal with lines and lines of palm assembly...

In the case of PalmOS, I don't see any advantage to opening the source. Palm does a good job with it, and I don't think there's enough "flashy" jobs to keep OSS programmers going.

Not to mention that they need the royalties from other companies licencing it.

I don't see them open-sourcing it anytime soon.

320x320

[cdipierr]

For reference, the hi-res support in OS/5 is not limited to 320x320 per say. Though it's likely that is what many devices will come out with, the choice is actually up to the OEM, but the API is reasonably generic so that it abstracts real screen pixels away from internal pixels.

As was clearly stated at the PalmSource conference back in February, the OS is equally suited to a 640x640 display or even the odd resolutions like 320x480 (like the NR70).

Not that revolutionary...

[pstreck]

As a Palm OS developer by trade I've been using the OS 5 development kits for about 4 months now since they were released at palm souce, and I must say that the end users really aren't going to get that much out of this latest release. Reasons being are that the ARM enhancements are designed as what are being called "armlets", small peices of code within the m68k code that is accellerated for an ARM proccessor. Palm isn't pushing native ARM applications which has pluses and minuses, new apps will still run on the older devices minus any armlet functionality, but the new ARM devices are going to have apps that are running slower than they should be do to the m68k -> arm translation. The other thing about this release new API, they've cleaned up a lot of the garbage and added a lot of new functionality so as a developer you got lots of more toys to place with, but as an end user don't expect this to be some holy grail of pda os's. Another downfall of Palms current plan for OS 5 is that they are targetting a handheld unit with a 66mhz arm proccessor, yes a 66mhz proc.. It's rediculous because the new xscale arcitechure which has 400mhz+ cpus has dropped the ARM prices dramatically. But anywho, I am excited to see a unit running OS 5.

5.0 SDK also released; "GCC not supported"

[John Marshall]

The final 5.0 SDK was also released today (interim development versions have been available in beta for a while).

There are two C/C++ development toolchains for Palm OS: Metrowerks CodeWarrior and what's called prc-tools, which is GCC, GDB, etc configured and patched as a cross-compiler for Palm OS. Some surveys suggest that each of them has about 50% of the market of Palm OS developers.

In the past, Palm OS SDKs have supported both toolchains: the 3.5 and 4.0 SDKs contained various linker (static) libraries in both CodeWarrior format and, for GCC, COFF format. The 4.0 SDK was even available from Palm as an RPM as well as a Unix tarball.

The 5.0 SDK's ReadMe has this to say about GCC:

This release of the SDK does not provide any support for the GCC development tools for Palm OS. GCC-specific components have not been updated for this release. SDK 4.0 Update 1 should be used for development under Linux and for using GCC on Windows.

There are no GCC libraries and no Unix SDKs.

I've also posted to palm-dev-forum about this.

In practice, it's not a show-stopper: the header files, which are all you really need to use the new 5.0 APIs (notably high density graphics and ARM subroutines), work fine with GCC. There's a bit of extra pain on Unix due to line termination issues and PalmSource's lack of familiarity with case-sensitive filesystems, but it's not too bad.

The GCC link libraries are entirely missing from the 5.0 SDK. This is unfortunate: while you can easily write an application without using them, the glue routines in one of the libraries makes compatibility with various versions of the OS easier, and PalmSource recommends their use.

Curiously, while the ReadMe says the SDK "does not provide any support for [GCC]", PalmSource were happy to fix showstopper GCC-usage-related bugs in the SDK's header files when they were pointed out to them during the SDK's beta period. Thus the note in the ReadMe is not really true.

All that's really missing is the GCC linker libraries and the Unix builds of the SDK. Because they were happy to fix those header bugs, because their Web pages still claim to "support prc-tools", and because of what various PalmSource employees have told me, I don't believe there's been any conscious decision (or conspiracy :-)) not to support GCC. I think the problem is that, even though the GCC library and Unix build scripts are still lying around from the 4.0 SDK, it's simply nobody's job to take responsibility for maintaining the scripts or for pressing the button that runs them.

It's all very disappointing: in all probability, there's no technical reason why the 5.0 SDK doesn't include GCC libraries or an easily installable Unix package, it's just that no-one cared enough to make them. It seems like it was always just Someone Else's Problem.

It's not too late to fix this. The company I work for and I know how to build these things (I wrote the scripts in a previous life :-)), and we've offered to help PalmSource build them several times. Hopefully they'll take us up on it, and make the users' lives easier.

Oh, disclaimer: I'm a prc-tools maintainer.

Innovation has left Palm in the dust

[Melantha_Bacchae]

In the early days of the Palm Pilot, all was shiny and new. Developers loved it, and cranked out tons of shareware and freeware. All the software expanded its scope far beyond being just a PDA.

Some of the original people left the company to found Handspring. They created the Springboard module for their PDAs, and everything was exciting again. Palm *followed* by adding a SD card to their PDAs. Instead of market leader, Palm became market imitator. In fact, their attempt at OS X desktop software (version 4.0) was so bad that Handspring was recommending that their Mac customers stick with version 2.* under Classic! Then again, Handspring abandoned the Springboard, leaving the Palm world pretty dull except for some of Sony's hardware.

So, does that leave us with Microsoft? Hardly! Some time ago, Microsoft drove Sharp out of the US market (basically Sharp wasn't going to play umpteenth fiddle in the Pocket PC world in the US, and so took its toys home in a huff). Sharp worked hard back in Japan, and built themselves up into the leading PDA there, with enough marketshare to become the fifth largest PDA maker in the world. Still Sharp wanted to come back to the US with a bang, so they decided to carve out their own niche that they could be #1 in. Taking a page out of Apple's book, Sharp built their best Zaurus ever and took an open source operating system (Linux), a very cool GUI (hey, Qtopia isn't Aqua, but it leaves other PDA GUIs looking, well, flat ;), and added some yummy Java. They ran a beta version past developers, who enthusiastically saluted, and released it this spring in the US. Like in the Palm's youth, applications are being rapidly developed for it (and anything that doesn't get away quickly enough is getting ported).

I've got a Palm III and a Handspring Visor Platinum. My Zaurus blows them away. There is really no comparison. The Zaurus is a tiny but real multiprocessing Linux workstation that is a worthy companion to my OS X Macs. It coexists beautifully on my Airport network, sharing files (via FTP) with my Macs and browsing the web with a real browser capable of reading Slashdot (not those dinky postage stamp "pages" for PDAs). It can read and write Word and Excel files (even those created in AppleWorks). It can view pictures from my digital camera, play MP3s, and even view a GMK trailer ("Honey, I shrunk Godzilla and Mothra!";). I can create full tar'ed backups with a couple of taps, and use FTP and my G4 iMac to back the backups up on a CD.

The one thing the Zaurus lacks is a desktop with sync support under OS X. I only use the Zaurus with my Macs and I'm not missing the ability to sync. In fact, I use the cradle as a charging station, I've never plugged the USB cable into anything. The Zaurus is powerful enough to stand on its own as long as you do backups often. If Sharp and Trolltech never get the Mac support done, a third party could write what they need, since the data is stored in XML and both the Zaurus and OS X have good Java support. Wireless syncing via Java would be more fun anyway.

"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
"Mosura", 1961