Why Palm Still Covets Palm OS 197
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."
Lying with numbers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lying with numbers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Palm OS is the better OS honestly. (Score:3, Informative)
The right word for Windows Mobile would be "clunky".
The more you do, the harder it is to do it elegantly. Once you have done something in a fundamentally clunky way, it's hard to streamline it. We see this again and again in Microsoft UIs: fundamental complexity is papered over with leaky facades.
Just try to resolve a networking problem on Windows Mobile. Sheesh. Reports are that Vista borrows some of this approach: hide the details not needed for the most common problems so deep that users can't find them, much less be bothered by them.
PalmOS 5 is different from Access lInux (Score:4, Informative)
PalmSource was NOT spun off in 2005 (Score:3, Informative)
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
In January 2002, Palm, Inc. set up a wholely owned subsidiary to develop and license Palm OS, which was named PalmSource in February. In October 2003, PalmSource was spun off from Palm as an independent company, and Palm renamed itself palmOne. palmOne and PalmSource set up a holding company that owned the Palm trademark.
In May 2005, palmOne purchased PalmSource's share of the Palm trademark and two months later renamed itself Palm, Inc. As part of the agreement, palmOne granted PalmSource certain rights to Palm trademarks to PalmSource and licensees for a four-year transition period. Later that year, ACCESS, which specializes in mobile and embedded web browser technologies, including NetFront, acquired PalmSource for US$324 million. In October 2006, PalmSource announced that it would rename itself to ACCESS, to match its parent company's name.
Re:I have been bought by microsoft. (Score:2, Informative)
PalmOS developers can work with:
1) Codewarrior for PalmOS (latest version: 9, $199.99)
2) prc-tools (gcc toolchain, $0)
3) PalmOS Developer Suite (prc-tools based, Eclipse IDE, $0)
4) For Java: IBM's WebSphere Everywhere Micro Environment (sold through IBM reps)
There are also a lot of other compilers and/or tools that can be used to develop PalmOS applications, most of them royalty-free.
What do Windows Mobile/Pocket PC/Smartphone/CE developers have?
1) eMbedded Visual Tools (no longer being offered, $0 at the time) .NET/2003/2005 Pro & up (offered via MSDN subs, $(thousands & up) )
2) Visual Studio
4) For Java: IBM's WebSphere Everywhere Micro Environment (also available for these devices)...
The Express editions of VS 2005 do NOT generate Windows M/PPC/SP/CE executables. Also, unless my googling is faulty, there are no royalty-free compilers/toolchains for these devices.
So, unless a) you have your own company, or b) you have a lot of money, then you can't possibly "fire up VC.NET and write a quick app for my phone" unless you're using your employer's work time to do it...
Re:Lying with numbers (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
I think you're wrong.
Palm's API has some good points, but it does, by and large, suck hairy goat nad. Want a scrollable table? You are writing the entire scrolling/selecting code by hand, because the standard table just can't hack it right. Memory management is also very much done manually, but as a C programmer I don't mind all that much. It'd be nice if the damn OS just returned a "memory already freed, idjit" instead of crashing out, though. Trying to do anything with background tasks? Welcome to hell.
Supporting old devices? Larger-screen devices? High-res devices? Your code gets nasty, and fast. Palm's API needs a major overhaul.
Re:Good tools and source code count a lot (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know how this is playing out in the phone/berry environment these days.
Re:Lying with numbers (Score:5, Informative)
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.).
The identity of a handheld platform (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Palm's design emphasis on elegance was a great asset back in the 1990s - I still think it's a good thing, but it needs to be modernized. Handhelds are capable of a lot more than they were in 1998, and PalmOS 5 isn't adapting well to the new capabilities. The original PalmOS was basically designed for simple record view/edit tasks - which it does well, but the GUI of the OS doesn't provide much support for more complex views. It can be fairly limiting even for rather humble projects.
Look at it this way: back in the 1990s when you had a Win CE machine, the thing was built like a brick in order to provide the horsepower needed for the OS and GUI, and its level of complexity was (IMO) overreaching, and as a result the thing ran slow, too. Plus (IMO anyway - and this has long been Palm's party line) the UI of a Win CE machine wasn't well thought out for handheld use, and so the actual process you go through to get things done on that OS is more cumbersome, too. At that point, Palm's ability to run well on a humble M68K processor was a serious asset.
So fast-forward several years: Win CE machines have closed the gap in terms of form factor and battery life. Palm machines use ARM processors, but the platform as a whole still hasn't successfully made this transition. (People are generally still writing M68K code for Palms, about five years after they stopped making M68K Palms) Win CE machines are now a lot more responsive than they were, and so the depth they can provide is now a major asset. Palm's approach to backward compatibility is a liability, as every application is run under an emulation layer. Palm's approach of having one application run at a time and having each application retain its state between sessions still works, but people want more flexibility and the hardware is perfectly capable of providing it - people want background tasks, let their MP3 player keep playing or their web browser keep downloading while they go do something else. Palm's ability to do this is limited, and Palm OS still is not a protected environment - not adequately so for this kind of activity. If an application crashes, the device crashes. If Versamail (Palm's own E-Mail client) crashes while fetching mail in the background, your device crashes.
My contention is that Win CE's approach has finally paid off - the hardware has caught up, and the fact that the OS is more feature-rich than Palm's is now an asset rather than a liability. Conversely, Palm is burning up the advantages they had: the (memory and CPU) efficiency of their applications is now wasted through PACE emulation.
When I bought my Treo I seriously considered the Windows versions. (I generally don't like Windows - it as a platform just doesn't suit my tastes) The deal-breaker was the screen resolution, and so I got my 650. I think it was the right choice for me but it's agonizing that they haven't modernized the OS. I want international text support. I want decent multitasking support. (I want my device to be able to fetch my e-mail without crashing the whole device in the middle of whatever I'm doing.) I want the ability to write a non-emulated application in a straightforward manner. Palmtops still need to do what they've been doing efficiently (and I think Win CE has gotten much better at that - application designs have been streamlined, maybe one or two pages were cribbed from PalmOS) but there's also expectations - quite reasonable ones, I think, these days, that they should do more. Palm has used the intent of simple design as an excuse to avoid necessary renovations and avoid providing services that are becoming more important.
Re:Lying with numbers (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:PDA's are for sissies^H^H^H^Hprofessionals (Score:4, Informative)
I think Palm will continue to survive, if not thrive in various vertical markets but their heyday is clearly over. When my T3 finally died, I thought about going to a PocketPC device, but it's just too easy to buy another Palm and plug it in (changing the sync cord of course grrrrrr) and get up and going.
Re:Why did they spin it off? (Score:3, Informative)
Palm wanted the OS to be in loads of devices by loads of manufacturers.
Their os partners didn't really trust the Palm OS folks because they kept thinking that the Palm hardware folks would steal any innovations.
So, they spun the hardware side of Palm off as Palm One and called the OS side PalmSource
their major OS customer (sony) ditched Palm OS and the new customers they must have been hoping for didn't materialise.
so PalmSource only had one customer - Palm One.
Gradually, the child has been buying back the parent - first they bought the brand, now they've bought the OS.
Re:Lying with numbers (Score:2, Informative)
read about how to track down the problems here:
http://www.hobbyistsoftware.com/InsideYourTreo/ca
Re:Palm OS is the better OS honestly. (Score:3, Informative)
Rich