Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

PalmSource has just released its first developer newsletter since its acquisition by ACCESS near the end of last year. It's about time, since Palm developers have really been needing more guidance about what to expect from the ACCESS Linux Platform (ALP) and how they should prepare themselves to develop for it. ACCESS has not done a good job in reaching out to them to date.

Most of the newsletter is aimed at reassuring Palm developers that "both ACCESS and PalmSource value the renowned Palm OS user interface" and will preserve its heritage while evolving it to "meet the needs of today's market" (read "to run on the vast majority of mobile phones that lack touchscreens"). We're informed that ALP's "MAX" application framework is designed to give easy access to multiple concurrently running applications and tasks using five-way navigation and two dedicated soft keys similar to what are found on most mobile phones today. We also are treated to some rosy projections from the analysts at Informa about the mobile Linux market growing from shipments of 3.5 million in 2005 to 28.1 million by 2010. Even if those numbers end up being way off, they're still cause for some optimism, especially since ACCESS seems to be pretty well placed to take advantage of this growth. Most of that growth will be in Asia, but I think there's good cause to be hopeful about Linux becoming a major phone OS here in the US as well.

PalmSource included a link to a short article about Getting Started with GTK+ on ALP, which I'm glad to finally see. It's very short actually, and it has more to do with getting started with the Gnome Toolkit for Linux GUI development than with ALP, which is still many months away from release. But that's ok. At least they're giving us some hints about how to gear up. Those hints can briefly be summarized as "get an x86 box, install Linux (Ubuntu recommended), install GCC 3.4 and GTK 2.6, and work through the online GTK+ tutorial at www.gtk.org/tutorial. They also recommend Matthias Warkus' book The Official Gnome 2 Developers Guide and warn against older books that cover the obsolete GTK+ 1.x. We're told that ALP will support a subset of GTK+ 2 for native application development.

Still no word as to whether ALP's GTK implementation will use X Windows or DirectFB or something else completely. But since PalmSource could as easily have recommended these GTK/X Windows resources back in February when they announced ALP would include GTK, you might rightly wonder if these recommendations aren't a sign that they decided to go with X after all.

The changes in the development environment for Palm developers transitioning to the MAX framework look something like this (keeping in mind that the old tools will work for ALP if you only want to code for the emulated single-tasking legacy Palm OS API):

	Palm OS	MAX framework
Preferred host system	Windows	Linux or Mac OSX
Preferred development environment	CodeWarrior	GCC (Eclipse CDT hinted)
GUI building tool	PRC Tools or Constructor	Glade
Conduit development tools	Visual Studio with Palm CDK	???

Based on the schematic previously published of the ALP system I think it's reasonable to expect that there will be a native API for implementing over-the-air OMA Data Synchronization (SyncML) with servers and desktop PCs, but we really don't know what ACCESS has in mind as far as the SDK or tools for the PC side of the synchronization. They'll probably be Windows hosted, though, since they need most of all to support Windows PCs.