If the question “What platform do you see yourself developing for in 12 months?” had been posed a few months ago, the responses for webOS would have plummeted through the floor. But with the power, scale, and enormous bags of cash of HP at Palm’s back, it turns out that developer interest has turned around. In fact, it’s a doubling of interest, though that’s not saying a lot when you were standing at 3% current interest (dead last).

The doubling to 6% ties webOS with Symbian for one-year-out developer intent, but it pales in comparison to Android (up 56% to 61-out-of-100) and of course iOS (still leading with a resounding 82%. Interestingly, it appears that developers are looking to expand their reach across multiple platforms, with interest in HTML5, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, and even Symbian up. The only platforms that are staring down the tunnel of declining developer intent are Java and Flash, which comes as little surprise to us. Now all we need is some kick-ass hardware from Palm and some gangbusters sales to get devices in hands and developer interest up.

Source: GigaOM; Thanks to Jimmy for the tip!

If you happen to live in the Bay area (or are looking for an excuse to go there) and are interested in node.js Javascript development, then Palm is hoping to get you involved with webOS. You see, with webOS 2.0 Palm is switching to node.js-powered JavaScript background services instead of the Java services currently in use. This means faster, better, and more webbier development for webOS, and it means that developers will now be able to roll their own services to make more advanced things happen.

To that end, Palm is inviting developers to their corporate campus in Sunnyvale, California on September 14th for a collection of node.js talks, drinks, and food. There’s sure to be plenty of developer elbow rubbing for the few hours of the meet-up, plus it’s always good to get free sustenance combined with free knowledge.

Interested? Of course you are. Head over to the Facebook event page and get yourself so more info and maybe even check off that “Attending” box.

Source: Facebook; Via: Ben Combee on Twitter

Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute - that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

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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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Over what the Palm Pre has right now, this sucker’s got a front-facing camera in addition to the one with flash on the back, dual SIM card slots, Java functions, a full QWERT keyboard, FM radio with recording, analog TV, eBook support, handwriting input, and a 3800 mAh battery.

And that’s just the stuff we’ve heard of before, it also comes with revolutionary technology like a gravity inducer, something amazing called “Magic Voice,” a TransFlash card slot supporting up to 8 GB, handshaking function (to avoid H1N1 transmission, we presume), a ‘spotwatch,’ and four common games. That last bit has our minds thoroughly blown: we always put four common games at the top of our must-have list. Strangely, Touchstone support seems to be missing, as is webOS; it must be some sort of marketing mix-up (like a Sprint Pixi with Wi-Fi)

We know, you're sincerely hoping that this is what Jon Rubinstein is going to pull out of his pocket on stage come Thursday. Want one now? The Cool K07 can be yours for a cool $128, with bulk pricing available if you want to buy one for all your cool friends too.

[via: Engadget]

[via: Golem.de]

Thanks to Hans for the tip!