Here’s something to tide you over until we can get our hands on the video of Palm’s presentation at last week’s Game Developer Conference.  Youtube user Monarchy (@HenryLevak) found himself in the Palm booth and fired up the browser on the Palm Pre Plus to see how flashed worked.  Naturally, the first site visited was Hulu.com which (shocker!) didn’t work.  The next site visited was Miniclip, a website featuring Flash 10.1 optimized games that take advantage of on-device hardware such as accelerometers, and the game played – Alien Attack – looked as if it were a native app.  

Everything Flash-based has been looking pretty slick on webOS so far, so tell us: is the anticipation killing you?

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Palm has released their Plug-in Development Kit Beta for developers to allow them to create rich, 3D games and other native linux apps for webOS. The PDK is available now at the Developer Center.

Palm looks to be making a pretty big push with this – they’ve released at the Game Developer’s Conference and are pushing that they are offering great gaming experiences on multiple carriers:

"Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks," said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. "We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it."

Full press release after the break. So, developers: how’s it look? Legend79 emailed us to note that Palm has chosen to use Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) for hardware access – which to us looks like yet another way to enable easy porting.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

As we already know, Palm is set to present at the Game Developers Conference in sunny San Francisco next month, talking about the future of gaming on its webOS platform and releasing the PDK (Plug-in Development Kit) in beta form to the masses. This is exciting stuff, to be sure, but it should be noted that developers from the WebOS Internals group have been bringing us binary-coded games for some time now, even before the PDK was a twinkle in our eyes.

This means two things. First, that developers interested in writing their own binary based applications or porting others over to webOS don’t have to wait for the official PDK to become available to start coding. The WebOS Internals PDK, using the same underlying technology as Palm’s PDK, enables developers to port games now and get a head-start on development against the official Palm PDK.

Second, that there’s a laundry list of great (and free!) emulators and games available through Preware and WebOS Quick Install thanks to their hard work, including but not limited to:

• Quake
• Doom
• Visual Boy Advance
• Stella Atari 2600
• Invaders
• TetriCrisis
• SuperTux
• NesEM

This is all in addition to the myriad of patches, tweaks, and other enhancements made possible by the team. If you dig their work, don’t be afraid to hit that donate button.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

We’ve all wondered what Palm would be talking about in March when they present at the Game Developers Conference, but now we’re getting a better idea. We have confirmed with Palm that the clearly awesome webOS Plug-in Development Kit will be released as a public beta in March. Putting two and two together, we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the PDK beta announced at GDC. In fact, we’d be surprised if it wasn’t (assuming it’s not unveiled beforehand). The full 1.0 release for the PDK is expected at some point later in 2010.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

While Palm’s spiffy new PDK (Plug-in Development Kit) is right now limited to bringing fancy binary apps to webOS only from a few select developers, that isn’t going to stop Palm from showing it off to the masses. To that end, Palm will be presenting at this year’s Game Developers Conference. GDC will be taking place in March in San Francisco, just up the road from Palm’s Sunnyvale headquarters.

The hour-long presentation, scheduled for 3:00 pm on March 12, has a title that tells us pretty much everything we need to know: “An Overview to Creating Games with Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit (PDK)”. But that’s not all, there’s also a description if that left you hungering for more:

“Come learn how to take full advantage of the advanced hardware capabilities of Palm’s webOS devices–including full OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0 support–using the recently announced Plug-in Development Kit (PDK). This technical session will provide an architectural overview of Palm’s hardware and software platforms and then provide hands-on details for how the PDK exposes these capabilities.”

Which makes us say “Ooooooh.” Will we see new game announcements? Considering that they’re planning to demonstrate the PDK to game developers, we wouldn’t be surprised if the PDK becomes widely available around that same time.

Thanks to Baryn for the tip!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>