Dave Balmer, Palm webOS developer extraordinaire, is jumping from the creation to the support side of the development field by joining Palm’s Mojo SDK development team. Dave, who runs Gobico Games and built the popular webOS games Wobble Words (swoon) and Poker Drops, was recruited to join the Mojo SDK team and, as he puts it, to help “take a great SDK to new heights.” We’ll agree that the SDK needs some new heights, and are excited to see an accomplished developer like Dave joining the team.

If you’re fearful that your Gobico Games apps are going to fall be the wayside, fear not. Dave assures us that he’ll still be working on improving Wobble Words and Poker Drops, and may even push out some new apps if time permits. He’s also going to continue work on his open source JavaScript and HTML5 app framework “Jo.”

So congratulations to Dave! And golf claps to Palm for picking up another fine programmer to keep pushing the SDK forward. Now bring on those APIs!

Source: Palm Developer Center Forums

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We’ve recently seen NBC and Vimeo make their content available using HTML5, and we’re beginning some great demonstrations that showcase what’s possible with burgeoning set of technologies that make up the standard.  Engadget has put together something of a roundup of some of the more cutting edge stuff that’s floating around on the ‘net, and one that really caught our eye was Akihabara. Akihabara is a collection of 5 open-source games that aim to emulate the 8 and 16-bit games of old (think Super Nintendo) that all utilize a small subset of HTLM5 to get them up in running in most modern web browsers.  All of the games here are playable through the browser in webOS, and they run great, though the user-configurable keyboard controls are somewhat difficult to get used to on the Pre.  

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An increasing number of companies are changing the way they serve up content on the web by moving away from Adobe’s Flash technology to HTML5 and/or direct streaming.  Two notable sites, NBC.com and Vimeo, have made it so any modern smartphone platform with a decent WebKit based browser can view their content.  Why are an increasing number of media companies making this move? It’s probably safe to assume that Apple and its recent success with the Flash-less iPad has something to do with it.  

As evidenced in the above video, performance isn’t terrific on my Sprint Palm Pre when using either site, as things bog down considerably when more than one browser instance (or just one browser instance) is open. Overall quality seems to be much better when viewing Vimeo content, as NBC.com content is consistently too compressed on both the audio and video fronts. Still, it’s great to have access to more of this kind of content without having to have Flash, because who knows when it’ll actually come the way of webOS.

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We know that HP is hot-to-trot to get webOS up and running on a tablet/slate device and obviously webOS is going to continue to run on smartphones, but this article on Forbes has us thinking: is HP thinking bigger?

"Smartphones are a part of this, but this is really about the Web operating system," Shane Robison, HP’s chief strategy and technology officer, told Forbes. "It’s a change in our business model to a connected device model." HP, he said, is assuming a world in which almost everything needs at least the potential to connect to the Internet.

Long-time followers of mobility may remember that 3Com (former Palm owner and soon-to-be fellow HP-owned subsidiary) had just such a vision with the Audrey. It didn’t work then (the dot-com bust didn’t help) and in general the dream of every device in your house getting an internet connection has always been of the pipe-variety. Perhaps HP thinks that time is coming?

We’re not arguing that webOS should be slapped on any old thing – but it does raise an interesting question for us: what, at its core, is webOS? If it’s a great multitasking smartphone OS, well, then shoehorning it into other devices isn’t going to work so well. But what if HP buys into Palm’s argument that webOS is, at its core, the best way to take the web and modern, HTML5 standards and turn it into a touch-friendly operating system? If so, then HP could be making a play to make webOS the best way to put "the web" on devices.

It very similar to the ideas behind Google’s Chrome OS, but the direction that Palm has already said they are taking with the future of webOS sounds much more robust than Chrome OS.

Toasters? Bad idea. But HP is definitely thinking outside the smartphone box:

In his call to analysts Wednesday, Bradley identified vertical markets like health care and education in which devices might soon appear, sold through HP’s partners.

What do you think is the essence of webOS? Do you think that HP could help make it the de-facto way to get the web on internet-connected devices, supplanting Android and WinCE?

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Multitasking. Unified email inboxes. Multiple Exchange accounts. Welcome to the future, our iPhone-toting friends. Well, eventually you’ll get there. Apple last week provided a preview of iPhone OS 4.0, and it looked vaguely familiar to those of us that have been using webOS. There are two truly big features that will be part of iPhone OS 4.0, with multitasking being the one that most users will care about. The implementation, however, is less than impressive.

Here’s the thing, as Rene Ritchie over at TiPb has pointed out before, webOS’ cards metaphor for multitasking seems to be an extension of what Apple did for managing multiple open pages in mobile Safari, with a dash of gestures thrown in for good measure. If you were to ask me, I’d say that’s more than likely what Steve Jobs and Co. would have preferred to do (and probably were preparing to do) for multitasking on the iPhone. But as important as multitasking is for the future of the iPhone platform, their perception as a leading innovator is also important, so just copying what Palm has done would be a PR disaster.

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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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The HTML5 specification came another step closer to becoming a Web standard today, as the first editors draft of the technology was released to the World Wide Web Consortium. HTML5 is the technology that makes up a significant portion of webOS, the new and improved Google Voice mobile web portal, YouTube and a few other notable Web services. This is great news for the Web as a whole and for the webOS platform in particular, but what are the implications for Adobe’s Flash technology?

Despite Steve Job’s recent comments about Adobe and the fact that the iPhone and iPad won’t support Flash, the proprietary Web technology won’t be going away anytime soon. As Dion Almaer (the guy Palm hired last September along with fellow Mozilla luminary Ben Galbraith to head up developer relations) noted in a post to his personal blog, Flash has good penetration and Adobe can rapidly evolve the technology. There’s no question that HTML5 is powerful and will one day be as ubiquitous as Flash is today, but it’s still a young technology, and short-term expectations need to be tempered with some perspective:

[…] And, this brings me to the Adobe half of the Steve Jobs equation. Flash isn’t dead. HTML5 is slowly going to put a dent into it if we ever get some of the use cases just right (e.g. video), but Adobe has a good penetration and can move at the speed of a dictatorship. The iPhone/iPad combo not shipping Flash will have an interesting dynamic here too, hopefully helping the HTML5 video cause. There is still much more work to be done. Flash and browser plugins have had a long history at forging new paths, and the Web can come in behind them and standardize. May that continue. […]

It also helps to keep in mind that HTML5 is still some ways away from becoming completely standardized. The W3C website spells out the process of a specification from start to finish, and the HTML Working Groups’ own website anticipates a candidate recommendation later this year, and a final recommendation sometime in 2012.

So, while HTML5 continues to evolve and companies such as Palm, Apple, and Google continue to go back and standardize on it, Palm is also going to give this Flash thing a go.

Meanwhile, we’re excited for the features possible with HTML5. Developers: anything in this spec making you giddy? 

Thanks to flea for the tip!

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At a Mobile World Congress demo this morning, Google’s VP of engineering, Vic Gundotra showed the Palm Pre running a webapp version of Google Maps coded totally in HTML5, and which operated exactly as native software might. The app – which supported all the Pre’s multitouch navigation, together with the usual search, zoom and other [...]

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