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First Look At Palm's Mojo SDK
snydeq writes "Peter Wayner puts Palm's Mojo SDK through its paces and finds the general outline of the system solid and usable despite 'numerous rough edges and dark, undocumented corners.' The main draw, of course, is the reliance on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which lower the barriers to entry, though with Mojo, HTML and JavaScript do at times work against each other, with JavaScript occasionally 'wiping out anything you do with HTML.' But more than anything, Wayner sees the current version of Mojo as 'merely the start of access to a very fertile platform. 'Developers are actively digging into the Linux foundations of the Pre and finding they can build tools that work with the raw guts of the machine. Some are talking about writing Java services underneath,' Wayner writes, pointing to sites such as PalmOpenSource.com and PreCentral.net that are cataloging dozens of apps that come complete with the source code. 'I know people are doing similar things with the iPhone — such as selling the source to people who must install it themselves — but the entire scene emerging around Palm has a much more organic and creative vibe. It's not getting hung up on parsing and reparsing the App Store rules.'"
Seems like it was this same type of development culture that helped to launch the first Palm Pilots to popularity.
Palm doesn't like this, but it's awesome so do it.
http://forums.precentral.net/homebrew-apps/191213-my-tether-tether-over-wifi-usb-bt.html
Wish they'd support some decent languages like C/C++ and Python or even regular Java. because JavaScript is the most awful excuse for a scripting language I have ever tried to work with
Think of it this way:
iPhone == Windows (closed source)
Palm Pre == FOSS
Does that mean in future:
iphone == 95%
Palm Pre == 1%
I've been developing applications for the Palm Pre for about a month and this article does a pretty good job of summarizing the state of the SDK. I was never a Javascript fan and was disappointed at first to learn that it would be the language for developing apps. However, I've since discovered that there's actually quite a bit of power in Javascript. One of the big hurdles for 'traditional' developers approaching the Palm Pre is that you have to learn up to five new technologies at once: Javascript, HTML, CSS, the Mojo framework and, optionally, Prototype. None of these is difficult on their own. Diving head first into all of them leads to a bit of confusion at first as you wrap your brain around them.
I have set up a blog where I discuss some of the more user-facing aspects of the Palm Pre: Pre101.com. I hope to bring out a more developer oriented site later.
Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
"Tethering"? I don't need to "tether" my Pre.
It's just an ordinary Linux computer that runs iptables and iproute2 like any other Linux computer. If I want to forward traffic over it, I can do it in exactly the same way I would forward packets through any other Linux machine. (Hint: the wifi interface is called eth0. The cellular interface is called ppp0. And it supports USB networking.)
The Pre is mind-bogglingly banal. We're so accustomed to twisted, badly-designed platforms in the mobile world that when we're confronted with what's more or less a boring old Linux system, our jaws drop in flabbergasted amazement.
But not it isn't Linux.
Uh, what?
I wouldn't be so sure. I'm a Pre owner and pretty much everyone I know is an iPhone owner. The reason the iPhone's been so successful thus far is that it's really lacked any competition. The G1 was both aesthetically and technically inferior to the iPhone, and Android itself has been taking it's sweet damn time growing into a powerful mobile OS. It's only now, in the latter half of 2009 that we're seeing it grow into something really worthwhile, especially with the coming explosion of new hardware for it.
But I digress. All of my iPhone owning friends have played with my Pre for a bit and have conceded that it is indeed a decent rival, technically speaking, to the iPhone, but the conversation didn't stop there. Pretty much all of them agreed that their current iPhone would be the last one they own. Why? A few reasons. Some feel the hardware's appearance is beginning to look dated, especially compared to the Pre and HTC Hero, others are sick of waiting for a decent multitasking solution for it, which both Android and WebOS already have, some are sick of AT&T's horrible network, and still others are just tired of being forced into using iTunes, which in recent years has become an immensely bloated app in it's own right.
Admittedly, none of these people are Apple fanatics, though some do own Apple computers. Their primary reasons for using an iPhone, as I said, were because until recently, there wasn't much in the way of competition that could even approach the iPhone's usefulness and usability. I'll be the first to admit that my personal friends, family, and acquaintances are likely far removed from the average cross-section of iPhone owners, but they brought up valid points, and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the next iteration of the iPhone doesn't sell nearly as well unless Apple begins looking into some pretty big ways of updating the device, something they failed to do with the 3GS imo. It's kind of telling when WebOS, which is still very much in it's infancy, is already being seen as a legitimate threat to the iPhone by CNet and others, even though Apple has had such a huge head start with both their OS and hardware, and that in a similar time span, Android has gone from a crawl to a run, with each new OS update bringing tons of new features, and with handset manufacturers building some amazingly slick interfaces on top of it.
Your post is pure FUD. The bottleneck in any application worth writing isn't actually laying out the widgets on the page. Also, I can't see why using a graphical HTML editor if you were so inclined would be out of the question.
It's not how many "languages" or "syntaxes" one needs to learn that counts, but the complexity of the whole system. The system complexity is roughly comparable, and if anything, favors the Pre. Objective C is still an esoteric language; HTMl, Javascript, and CSS have been universal for 15 years.
I'll raise you FUD with FULL OF SHI*! CSS has not been universal for 15 years. Objective-C has been universal since 1989. I'm sorry you're to f'n lazy to write with it as part of GCC, but that's not stopping the massive surge in books being published for ObjC now that Apple is finally pushing Cocoa [NeXTStep made the Browser viable first: so much for the esoteric language] and with LLVM GCC can no longer keep politically delaying additions because let's face it, LLVM is pairing up with GCC and beating it on performance.
HTML 5 is the first version of HTML in 10 years. It's not because it's so universal and standard. It's because people spent 10 years trying to make XML be the end all, be all, of web development. And ten years later Apple and Google bring us HTML 5 with really useful CSS APIs now in WebKit dealing with 2D/3D space.
Meanwhile, we are just getting bits and pieces of CSS 3 with CSS2.1 still not universally adopted and implemented. I'll stop here. I could go on and on.