Why Palm Still Covets Palm OS

munchola wrote in with news that Palm has just announced a one-time payment for perpetual, royalty-free use of Palm OS. In 2005 Palm spun off PalmSource to an outside company, Access Systems Americas, and since that time has been paying out royalties for its use. At the same time Palm announced products based on Windows Mobile. Palm's latest announcement reduces the uncertainty among Palm OS developers. From the article: "In an unsurprising but symbolically important move, handheld and smartphone maker Palm this month signed a perpetual license with Access Systems Americas, which gives Palm the right to use Access' Palm OS operating system in whole or in part in any Palm device forever more. It sounds like a no-brainer, but the context is interesting, in particular what it means for the army of Palm OS developers out there. Believe it or not there are at least 160,000 Palm OS developers — and they're just the ones that Palm knows about."

Comments

Lying with numbers

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You say you have 160,000 PalmOS developers. I say you're lying.

What you have are 160,000 people who may have once downloaded an SDK.

Or maybe you have a few thousand people who forgot their account information and created a new account.

Or maybe you're trying to count anyone who may have ever been a developer once for the OS in the last 10 years.

But any way you slice it, there's no way in hell you've got 160,000 developers actively working on your OS.

Neither Netcraft nor Kreskin need be sought out. Reality confirms it, PalmOS is dead.

Re:Lying with numbers

[PinkPanther]

Palm OS is a great environment to work in specifically because it is not "feature rich". There is one way to create a button, one way to create a form, one way to talk to various OS services, etc...

The people I know who "hate" Palm OS coding are either trying to do wonky things that the device was not completely designed to do or they are use to working in another environment and are trying to force their (wrong) model of an OS onto the Palm APIs.

Re:Lying with numbers

[mspohr]

The original PalmOS was very "close to the hardware" but was very stable and predictable as well as useful. It was a very elegant design. Later versions of PalmOS have improved in features and abstraction so now it runs on ARMs, MIPS, etc. processors. There is even a Linux based version.

In the early years, the PalmOS was a joy to work with compared to MS WinCE which was bloated, unstable and seemed to change every 6 months.

In order to deal this both PalmOS and WinCE (and it's newer versions), I've been using CASL (caslsoft.com) which is a VB type language that compiles on both PalmOS and Windows handhelds. The nice thing is that I can develop one application for both platforms (and all of their variations)... plus it runs on a Windows desktop. CASL uses a high level editor which makes it easy to program plus it has the ability to incorporate C code if you need to do something that is not part of the standard feature set or get close to the hardware. The language has a built-in database as well and communications functions (serial, bluetooth, TCP/IP, HTTP, etc.).

Re:Lying with numbers

[pruss]

Actually, with tools like Peal (open source, I am pretty sure), doing completely or almost completely ARM-based applications (e.g., tcpmp) is not hard at all. One issue is calling back to the OS, which normally goes ARM->68K->ARM, but this can be fixed by using the unofficial Mobile-Stream SDK which lets you call the OS directly from ARM code.

I do a lot of programming on the ARM side as I sell an antialiased font hack (FontSmoother), and in my experience ARM code is, if anything, more stable.

That said, for standard applications, one doesn't need ARM, except maybe for some small CPU-intensive procedure. With practice, these are easy to do and do not affect stability.

It would have been nice if Palm/PalmSource released an SDK for doing ARM-only applications, but the reverse-engineered stuff in the Mobile-Stream SDK is pretty good.

Palm OS is the better OS honestly.

[falcon5768]

And Im being very truthful about it. One of my biggest problems with the Windows line of OSs has been how bloated it is. True Palms might not be as capable BUT honestly, its a PDA... do you REALLY need it to be a full blown computer when most of the time your going to be using it to take contacts and stuff. Whats worse is how even Windows Mobile emulates a full size Windows OS when on a 2x4 screen its uncalled for, even our barcode scanners piss me off because of that. And the sheer library of programs out there for Palm OS means you can tailor it for anything.