It’s a question we’ve been pondering for a while, and with much more intensity in recent days: does Google care about Palm webOS? It is something we have to wonder about, with Google Maps on webOS lagging greatly behind its iPhone and Android counterparts, webOS being at first excluded from the Buzz party and then only invited inside the lobby, and the general lack of effort Google seems to be publicly exerting in getting their products to work to their full potential on webOS.

It all came to a head last week, with Google making a change to the way Google Voice works that ended up breaking webOS Google Voice clients, such as the popular gDial Pro. Nathan, the developer of gDial, learned that the change was not a move to break compatibility with unofficial Voice clients like gDial, but a natural progression of the development of the Google Voice system. In fact, Google has no problems with such unofficial clients and is pretty much willing to turn a blind eye to them so long as they aren’t acting in nefarious ways. Unfortunately, that blind eye doesn’t come with any support.

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Windzilla points us to this article over at Ajaxian [via EverythingPre] about a talk Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer gave out in London. Those two, you’ll remember, are the rockstar hires Palm made back in September. Apparently we can expect more speed to come to webOS, courtesy of CSS transformation support:

On ease of use, multitasking has been great; UI latency is still an issue even though the hardware is comparable to 3GS. The problem is the path to the GPU didn’t exist, but now with CSS transforms, that will be solved in the immediate future

CSS transformation is essentially animation using CSS (some examples here for you coders). The two also noted that Palm is still considering options for obfuscating code (since looking at another developer’s source code on webOS apps isn’t much more difficult than hitting ‘view source’ on your browser).

Back to the speed front, we are also pleased to hear that OpenGL support is very much on Palm’s collective mind:

However, they can’t say when all this will happen, as they’re evolving the platform pragmatically and they feel other things might have more immediate impact, e.g. OpenGL support.

We still hold out hope that OpenGL will come to webOS via WebGL, which is already in the latest builds of WebKit. Speed-hunters should also remember that Palm just hired Matthew Tippett, AMD’s now-former engineering manager.

Now that we’ve confirmed that webOS 1.3.1 is coming down the pike, we’ve been wondering what the ‘big new feature’ was that would justify a full point update. The whisper is speed, let’s hope that’s the case.

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Our friend Marco went out to the preDevCamp at Palm HQ in Sunnyvale, California, and lucky us, he took a video camera and blogged it up (mad props to you, mate!). Aside from some delicious-looking pizza, we also got a look at a few applications that were developed/refined during the programming sessions.

First up is an app that pulls dream summaries posted online down to the device, refreshing with the accelerometer shake API. Next was a video poker app, followed by Word Ace, by Self-Aware Games, described as a combination of Texas Hold’em and Scrabble. Word Ace was demonstrated working on multiple platforms and playing together in peace and harmony on two Pres and an iPhone. Once released, Word Ace looks to be a very in-depth application, with profile support, awards, and more. Another attendee coded up a simple little accelerometer app that bounces a tiny Palm logo around the screen as you tilt the phone. The developer behind Twee was also in attendance and demonstrated the slick CSS3 animations used in his application.

Lastly there’s Marco, who showed off his amazingly slick scientific calculator, inspired by those classic 1980’s scientific calculators. The app supports haptic feedback (it vibrates with each virtual button press) and includes a very useful in-calculator unit converter. The latest version of Marco’s Scientific RPN Calculator app is available in the PreCentral.net Homebrew Apps center and will land in the App Catalog as soon as Palm opens it up.

Tony Peric of PreThinking was also at the preDevCamp at Palm HQ and provided a liveblog of the event. Interesting notes include an application development checklist and Palm’s preferred UI development tool (Adobe Fireworks). Palm even gave away a copy of Adobe CS4 to one lucky attendee.

Oh, and by the way – the preDevCamp Developer Challenge is on!  They’ve published the official rules and we’re publishing the apps they’re creating — all right here at this special homebrew apps page.  Be sure to rate the apps you see there – the top app will garner a Palm Pre for its developer.  Meanwhile, developers from preDevCamp have until this Saturday, August 15th, midnight Pacific time to submit their apps – be sure to contact us to learn how to submit!

Were you at preDevCamp? Sound off in the comments a let us know how it went where you were!

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Pre week is here, so that means its time for all the tech pundits to strap on their thinking caps can come up with provocative things to write about the Palm Pre. There are two camps that these writers can jump into that will be sure to rile the masses: the Pre will succeed and prove a worthy challenge to Apple and RIM, or the Pre will fail and Palm will see its last days. Over at ZDNet they’re expecting a homerun, and PC World doesn’t anticipate much success for Palm.

We’ll try our best to play the reasonable devil’s advocate along the way, and we’ll start with the bad: PC World. To boil it down, their five points are as follow…

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5. Despite successes of the past, Palm of today is not the same Palm that brought us the Palm Pilot or even the Treo. PC World says, “Palm is effectively, a start-up.” Things can go wrong, despite all the fresh blood. Of course, the fresh blood is what has brought us a device as revolutionary as the Pre (and it was fresh blood that brought us the Palm Pilot and the Treo), so despite the missteps that fresh blood can bring, it was needed.

4. Users today won’t think much of multi-tasking on their phones. While everybody but the iPhone supports multi-tasking, without having been able to truly leverage its full capabilities people just won’t be able to fully comprehend what to do with it. This assumes that users are not smart enough to fully leverage the capabilities of webOS, and with how dead simple Palm has made it, it’s hard do believe that would be the case.

3. On a similar note to #5, the new blood in Palm does not have the same experience with developers that Old Palm or even Apple today has. Without a strong developer base there won’t be enough applications to justify getting the Pre over something like an iPhone of Blackberry.

2. In a stretch, the slide-out keyboard was a bad call. Apparently people don’t want a compact device with the best of both the iPhone and BlackBerry/Treo hardware worlds. Whodathunk?

1. The biggest and most relevant point of all: Palm just doesn’t have the cash to compete. The assumption is that even if Palm makes all the Pre phones they possibly can, but still can’t meet demand (that’s bad?) and can’t capture market share to gain third-party developers.

 

So, that’s PC World’s take. Ready for ZDNet’s positive spin?

5. Palm has experience building the ecosystem of software. Much more so than any other mobile platform, Palm has worked with third-party developers until the cows came home. Only problem is, we’re working with a whole new platform right now and the SDK hasn’t even been made public.

4. The Pre is not the iPhone, and carriers like that. We all know that AT&T has (at least for now) the exclusive in the states on the iPhone, and everybody else is looking for a phone to compete. Moreso than any phone in the last two years, the Pre has been hailed by the media as that phone, and Sprint is pleased as punch to be the exclusive launch partner. So excited is the mobile industry by the Pre that even Verizon (despite the BlackBerry Storm) and AT&T (despite the iPhone) both want the Pre and other webOS devices on their networks.

3. webOS development is easy as pie, and developers like pie. With the SDK application development environment centered around HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, developing for the Pre will not only be easy, but it will be easy for the tens of thousands of experience web developers already out there. Unlike the iPhone (Objective C) and Android (Java), very little specialized experience will be needed to develop a lean and powerful application. There are, of course, two problems. The first is that there’s only so much you can do with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Developers are going to want deeper native access so they can code more powerful applications. Second is the limited deployment of the Mojo SDK. Eventually it will go public, but for now only approved developers are getting it, which means there will be fewer applications in the App Catalog.

2. Standing in stark contrast to PC World’s #2, ZDNet thinks that the combination slide-out QWERTY keypad and the full touchscreen is 100% win. The full screen is great for reading and web browsing, whereas the physical keyboard is great for entering text with ease. While the sliding design is a compromise between the two, all compromises come with parts that people are bound to not like: it makes the device thicker and generally results in a smaller screen and keyboard (or a relatively large device, like the G1).

1. Multi-tasking. Sure, all of the Pre’s competitors (iPhone excluded) support multi-tasking out of the box, but none have found so elegant a solution to managing multiple applications. The cards metaphor utilized so effectively by webOS combined with the unobtrusive notifications are so reminiscent of desktop applications that users will feel right at home.

There you have it, five points against and five points for the Palm Pre. Give it a few months and we’ll have an idea of which side was right. But you know who we’re pulling for.

Thanks to no1smartphone and clevin in our forums for the tips!

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It wasn’t just D7 with Pre action, it also popped up yesterday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. The web developer get-together is all about web applications and standards, and of course has a heavy emphasis on Google (and their Android operating system). But if there’s anybody that leverages the latest web standards to their max, it’s Palm and webOS. Every application on the Palm Pre (with the notable exception of Palm OS emulator Classic) has been built using HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS. SlashGear subsidiary MyPre.com was on hand at I/O to see Palm’s presentation on webOS and its standards.

For those not familiar with how all that works, HTML defines the layout of the application, JavaScript allows for fancy transitions, animations, and access to local storage, and CSS is used to style the page/app. Palm’s music app was briefly demoed, and while not anything we’ve seen before, the album art browsing was shown to be based on CSS transformations. Also shown off was the web browser – your history and local application data (like offline Gmail) are all stored using HTML 5.

Thanks to mahootzki for yet another tip, and check out the video after the break!

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And then there was the accelerometer API. We’ve known since January that the Pre was going to have an accelerometer at launch, and at the very least it would be used to rotate the web and pictures browsers, but Palm’s gone a step further (like Apple) and opened up the accelerometer API (application programming interface, i.e. the codes that programmers need to use the hardware) for third party programmers. The presentation touched on the various functions available via the API via some specialized DOM Level 2 JavaScript:

Shake: rapid up-down/side-to-side acceleration
Orientation: angle from vertical/horizontal (e.g. to orient the web browser)
Raw Acceleration: both individual axis acceleration (webOS can tell how fast the Pre is moving in any direction…) and individual pitch, roll, and yaw acceleration (…and how quickly the phone is turning to any orientation)

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