Palm Arena

We’re in a new year and we’re already hearing news that Europe will be getting the likes of paid apps coming this March. According to Palm’s developer blog, paid apps will bring developers “leverage,” “freedom,” “choice,” “control,” and “speed,” as well as something about “faster cycle times.” Interesting terms wouldn’t you agree?

That said, you can imagine that there will be much talk of this later this week at CES. We’ll have the info in a few.

We might have jumped to conclusions too early today involving the rejection of the NaNplayer from the App Catalog. Chuq Von Rospach (Palm Developer Community Manager) has responded with a rather unique comment to the companies decision.

We have gotten a lot of feedback about NaNPlayer which is great. We love that people are excited about the application, and that developers are able to be creative on the webOS platform.

We reached out to JC (the developer) and discussed our reasons for not accepting the application at this time, but we also wanted to be open with you about this.

NaNPlayer is using APIs that are currently private because they will change significantly in a future release. Although we aren’t able to support the functionality that JC needs right now, we are listening to the community to help prioritize which APIs and features we put into webOS.

Chuq Von Rospach
Palm Developer Community Manager

While we can’t accept NaNPlayer into the App Catalog right now, we are not rejecting it, and we are happy for it to continue life as a homebrew application until we get to the point where we can release public, supportable APIs for the functionality that it requires.

Thanks for your passion, and we can’t wait to enable even more fantastic creative applications via an expanded set of public APIs.

To say the least we’re quite surprised (and proud) at Palm’s response. To say the least it is in high contrast to certain actions of a certain Cupertino company….hey are you taking notes Jobs? Oh I forgot, you cannot run notes and Safari simultaneously on those damn things…

Palm end user agreement

Well this one has been something that many people have been praying for. And finally Chuq Von Rospach has helped in getting it done. For those developing for the webOS you now have more flexibility in what you can and cannot share involving your development of apps. We would love to go into the whole story but kinda bored at the moment and not interested in rehashing old events. But if you’d like to read the whole story for yourself, check out the read link below.

Palm alters Developer Agreement

Mike Meyers, Palm Pre

There has been a lot of bickering in the developer arena that Palm is taking its own sweet time in releasing an SDK for the Pre. That said, we should point out that Palm did not plan on releasing the App Catalog until after the Pre was released. However they decided to change their mind. Further more they did say that it would be a while before the SDK was available and we should wait. Wait we have been doing but some are getting the jitters and so Palm’s own Chuq Von Rospach (Developer Community Manager) decided to set the record straight as to who what and when regarding that early access to the Mojo SDK.

The primary limitation we have today is the capacity of our developer area, which wasn’t built to support the number of developers who want access. That’s actually a good problem to have, and we have a team working on bulking up the infrastructure, too. There are some really interesting things just over the horizon here, but it takes time.

If you think about it, if we let too many people in too fast and everything does the fail whale, we’ll get yelled at and developers will give up on us. I realize that there are some developers who are tired of waiting — and I fully understand — but I hope they’ll come and take another look at us later when we finish the SDK up and get it out to everyone. If we mess up the SDK or the tools, we risk driving away lots of developers and convincing them not to come back. It’s a fun and challenging balancing act.

Our current admission policy is fairly simple: we’re accepting in applications based on how complete and detailed the applications were. I’ve broken that up into a few different piles of applications, and within each pile, we’re admitting them based on when they sent us the application. Right now, the most detailed applications are going in; when we finish that, we’ll grab the next set and do the same until everyone is in the program or we release the SDK to the public and end the early access program.

Satisfied now? Yes we know you’re itching to put your HTML and JavaScript knowledge to use but wait a bit will ya. All good things will come in due time.