Life at the Developer Conference gives you little chance for reflection; you're rushing around, trying to meet with people, see talks, catch the exhibit floor, spend time in the labs, do some networking, and getting the occasional nap to keep your energy up. I'm writing this early on Friday morning at the gate for my flight back to Austin; this really has been my only break since my last posting.
Wednesday morning opened with a great keynote talk by author Don Norman. It was about the emotional aspects of design, how the shape, functionality, and aesthetics of products affect how we perceive them. He had customized his talk a but for the Palm OS world, using examples of good and bad PDAs and smartphones, and it was both entertaining and insightful. After Don's talk, Larry Slotnik, PalmSource CTO, talked about their OS roadmap, about what they'd done in the last year and what was coming. There are no big surprises; they are expecting an alpha-quality release of Palm OS for Linux to licensees this fall, with the 1.0 version coming in the first part of 2006. They had shipped Palm OS Cobalt 6.1.1 to licensees a few months ago, an update to the release last fall to fix stability and five-way navigation issues.
Mark Bercow from palmOne gave a talk later that morning, highlighting the current product line. He commented on the reports about palmOne losing market share, noting that a lot of the reports depend on how you define the PDA or smartphone spaces. It's good to note that we've had seven quarters of year-over-year sales growth, our margins are going up, and volume continues to increase. Also, about 70% of Zire purchasers are buying their first PDA, showing that there's still plenty of growth room in the entry-level market.
I had my talk on NVFS on Wednesday afternoon, right after Chris Dunphy's talk on the PalmSource Installer. I really like where the PSI format is going, and they've built some nice tools to prepare both over-the-air and desktop installer versions of your application. Chris really showed that it's easy to setup your XML files and configure the installation process, and the PSI system will generate all the HTML pages you need to automate installation of applications from your website. My talk went better than I expected; I'll be posting both my notes and the notes from the follow up lab session in a separate entry.
Wednesday night featured a loud and dark party, and bright and active developer labs. Some devs were busy getting their entries ready for the PalmHack VII contest, while others were just taking advantage of the many PalmSource and palmOne engineers that were hanging around. I was one of the hack judges, so in-between giving people CodeWarrior tips and diagnosing memory leaks, I got to see some interesting and completely wrong applications. The judges were up past 2:00AM debating which submissions should get which prizes and what jokes we were going to make onstage, but I think the late hours were worth it.
I missed the early presentations on Thursday; I slept in an extra hour and then was working the palmOne booth. However, I did get to catch David Fedor's excellent talk on going wireless. The main thing I took out of that talk was to try out the AppNetLib code that's on the conference CD; this is an HTTP library that PalmSource is providing in source form for all developers, and it makes it easy for your applications to ask a web server for information.
The conference closed with Michael Mace's keynote talk about the Palm OS market. He showed clips from several focus groups highlighting the three main markets for smartphones: communicators, information junkies, and entertainment users. Each type of customer related to their PDA or phone in different ways: communicators tended to have a more emotional relationship with their device, but while they spent a lot of time with it, they didn't use a lot of extra applications. The information junkies were most likely to use vertical applications and load their devices with data, but they viewed them more as tools and not something they used for fun. The entertainment market was younger and easily bored; they saw a PDA as a necessary tool, but also something that they could use to keep stimulated during the day.
After the keynote was announcements of various contests. I'm glad that my friend Scott Maxwell won the Aceeca virtual sheep shearing contest. For PalmHack, we gave our grand prizes to a "Crazy Clock" application for Palm OS Cobalt and a WiFi Theremin application on Palm OS Garnet that varied the sound playback based on the current WiFi network signal strength. A dishonorable mention was made of Scott Corley's "Sock Monkey Knife Fight" game which wowed the crowd with bloody puppets jumping around the LifeDrive's screen. Scott had left already, so I accepted his award doing my best rabid monkey impersonation.