Last week was the big 2004 PalmSource Euro Developer Conference in Munich, Germany. I was there, along with over thirty other PalmSource employees, a lot of our licensee friends, and a whole lot of developers. I think the final attendance count was around 400 people, and they all were excited about doing cool things on Palm OS.
I had two talks at the conference; the first was on enhancing your applications to work well on smartphones. This is the big growth area in the Palm OS economy, in my opinion. While PDA sales are growing again, especially in Europe, the growth in the number of phones running Palm OS is running near 100% on an annual basis.
My tips came down to a few key things:
- Make sure your application is usable with a small screen and a person's fingertip.
- Make sure your program reacts acceptable to being interrupted by a phone call.
- Add support for five-way navigation, as phone users don't want to have to move their fingers up to the screen.
- Use the web browser to communicate with the customer and add connected features to your application.
- If appropriate, SMS can be used to push information to the device on a timely fashion.
My second talk was about the new applications that PalmSource has developed and how programmers could interact with those programs. The PalmSource Mail program and PalmSource Mail for Blackberry Connect have interfaces to let you send messages and handle attachments, but the real attraction in the talk was PalmSource Web Browser 3.0. This is a new browser built for Palm OS Cobalt that provides lots of desktop browser features on your handheld. We've got an SDK for this Web Browser posted on the PalmSource developer site which includes a version of the browser that runs in the Palm OS Cobalt 6.0.1 simulator. That version of PalmSim is a but picky about its network connection, but if you can get it working, it's definitely worth checking to see how your websites look with the new rendering engine.
There were plenty of other big announcements. Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 was released; it builds on the foundation of our original 6.0 release and adds a user interface refresh, a lot of telephony and wireless networking support, and support for QVGA and VGA screens in both portrait and landscape mode. Samsung announced that they are working on a smartphone based on this OS release, but I can't say anything else about that project.
Blackberry was there in force. They were promoting their Blackberry Connect client for Palm OS, which lets you use the addictive Blackberry email platform on your wireless Palm OS device. This is going to be really big, and I'm glad we have them as a partner. PalmSource was also pushing the PalmSource Package Installer, a new technology that simplifies the process of downloading and installing software on Palm OS devices, providing solutions for both desktop and over-the-air software delivery. If you distribute Palm OS programs, you really ought to look at this system which we are providing free to our developers.