Palm will be at OSCON next week in Portland. Josh Marinacci will be joining the rest of the HP crew in the HP booth, demonstrating Ares and webOS. He will also be giving away T-shirts, books, super nice water bottles, and you’ll even have a chance to win some phones! Here’s the full schedule [...]

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I thought I’d pass along pointers to a couple of videos you might want to watch.
The first one is to the Engadget Show, where Palm’s CEO, Jon Rubenstein, sits down for a talk about Palm, the Pre  and webOS.
The other video is the second webcast by Palm’s CTO Mitch Allen, this one covering webOS Application [...]

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Just a quick note to thank everyone who attended the Application Basics webcast on Tuesday (September 9th), and to thank the O’Reilly team for hosting the webcast. We covered a lot in the hour ranging from how to access and install the SDK, an overview of the SDK tools and building a simple application. The [...]

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Following up on the story we posted not too long ago, the Mitch Allen "Application Basics" free webcast went off without a hitch. Thankfully, for those like myself who missed it, O’Reilly Media has uploaded the recording of it to YouTube, though it looks like the last few minutes were cut off.

This is of course the second webcast in the series and as such, covers the second chapter of the WebOS book, of the same name.  While the first webcast/book chapter was a general overview and introduction of what the WebOS is like, this webcast was a perfect introduction to the fundamentals of the WebOS.  The appinfo.json file and basics of scenes and their controllers are explained quite well.

This webcast series is just the thing that I’ve been wanting Palm to do; not only just giving an SDK and the option to buy a book on how to program, but actually engaging the developer community.  What better way that a free video webcast to explain the book and the WebOS platform, both explaining how the various components work, but also giving practical examples of usage.

If anyone reading this has ever thought about programming for the WebOS, I highly recommend this webcast series, and await eagerly for the next one.

Update: The Palm Developer Network Blog has some Q&A up from the event.

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Palm’s own Mitch Allen is teaming up with O’Reilly Media once again to bring us another free webcast on WebOS development.  Mitch Allen, Palm’s Vice President and Software Chief Technology Officer, previously did another WebOS development webcast way back in February, so it’s good to see some follow-up now that the device is out in the public in two countries.

The webcast is scheduled September 9th at 10am PST, will last 1 hour, and is titled "Application Basics."

This session begins with an overview of the basic webOS application structure and a demo of the core SDK developer tools, and includes detail presentations on the application launch lifecycle, and Mojo controllers and methods.

Keen readers might remember the title "Application Basics" as the name of the second chapter of the Palm WebOS book.  Indeed this webcast will be covering this chapter, as an aid to the book (and a nice resource for those who haven’t bought the book).

That’s not all. It appears Mitch Allen will be doing a webcast for each chapter of the book in a webcast series:

The webcasts in this series follow the Developing Applications for webOS: A Preview webcast (based on Chapter 1) presented in February 2009, with in-depth presentations on individual chapters in the book. Each webcast will cover concepts and background material, followed by a detailed example built using a sample application, News. Over the course of the series you will step through the construction of the complete application.

This is perfect opportunity for those interesting in developing for the WebOS to take a stab at it, following this free webcast series and learning how to make an application that takes full advantage of the Mojo SDK.

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Chapter 11 of the O’Reilly Palm webOS Rough Cuts is available now – and you keep all those bankruptcy jokes to yourself. Heck, Appendix A is available now as well (thanks jbern8!). Since we missed reporting on Chapter 10, which is also available, we’ll give you a quick run down of what to expect in both.

The tenth chapter is perhaps one of the most important, covering Background Applications:

Whether you’re interested in building an advanced application or just want to add notifications to a basic application, this chapter covered some essential topics. There was a broad review of advanced multi-stage applications with an introduction to Notifications and Dashboards. You learned that advanced applications are based on an Application assistant, which can handle external launch requests and potentially run in the background. You were also shown how to customize your application’s behavior when minimized, meaning switched out of the foreground view, and how to use the internal application notification chain to coordinate actions between assistants or share events and data.

As for Chapter 11, Localization and Internationalization (yep, thats a word) is the name of the game.

In this chapter, you will GET an overview of the framework’s locale support and learn how to localize your application. We will localize the News application to Spanish and we will walk through each step of the localization process. In the last section, we’ll cover some of the Internationalization APIs available in Mojo.

Between what we know of the leaked SDK, and what’s being published in Rough Cuts, the webOS platform is shaping up to be a-plenty powerful, and certainly seems to be giving developers the freedom they need to develop quality applications. Let us know what you think in the comments!

(Thanks to mahootzki for the tip and the joke)

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It’s that time again, folks!  Chapter 8 of Mitch Allen’s Palm webOS Rough Cuts has just surfaced.  This chapter covers system and cloud services, which include a wide range of things such as alarms, sounds, power management and location services, to name a few.

While chapter 8 may be out now, it appears chapter 7 has caused a bit of a stir in our forums recently. This particular line from the book is the apparent cause of the commotion:

Both Contacts and Calendar will allow applications to add information that will get merged into an integrated view. They don’t allow applications to read, delete or update any data that wasn’t created by the same application.

Essentially this means we won’t be seeing any today-screen apps anytime soon.  While a well-done today-screen app can be very handy, the above restriction does make some sense security-wise, especially if Palm wants to try to sell the device to business professionals.

That being said, another reason they may have done this does come to mind.  It’s very possible Palm wants users to only be able to use the built-in Calendar and Contacts applications to get people used to them and like them. See, if Palm removes the restriction (even partially to just allow reading the data) then developers would be able to make replacement contacts and calendar apps (perhaps DateBk for webOS) and still be able to import synergy via the built-in calendar. Palm wouldn’t want that kind of competition, especially while their own apps are still fresh and new.

We do hope Palm will eventually update the SDK to allow such things, but considering it was in chapter 7 of the book, this restriction will probably make it to the first public SDK release.  Not that its a completely bad thing.  Increased security during a new OS’s release definitely has it’s advantage and it’s not as if the built-in Calendar and Contact apps look bad.  So far they look quite the contrary: beautifuly designed and extremely functional.

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Ladies and Gentleman, chapter 7 of Mitch Allen’s programming guide for the webOS is now live.  This time around we’re getting nitty gritty with Application Services – namely what applications and services you can access from your app.  This is basically where the Pre gets a chance to shine when compared to the iPhone — there appear to be plenty of hooks here for helping your app reach out to the rest of the data on the phone.

You can, for exampe: launch the browser, dial a number, turn on the camera and take photos (in-app), browse photos, pull up the map application with driving directions, add information to contacts and calendar, pull information from conacts, launch the email app with specific messages, open a specific file (but there is not a built-in file browser that we’re aware of yet), launch the music player and the video player, and — finally — use the applicaiton manager service to launch any other app that’s been opened to it (i.e. other third party apps).

If you’re a user – your takeaway is that the apps are able to talk to each other and that’s a good thing.  If you’re a developer – your takeaway is that you should go read this chapter and see how easily it’s done.

Thanks to mahootzki for the tip!

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The fourth and fifth chapter of the Rough Cuts version of Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript using the Palm Mojo™ Framework by Palm Software CTO Mitch Allen is now available from O’Reilly.
Chapter four is “Dialogs and Menus” while chapter five covers “Advanced Widgets”.
Please visit Safari Books Online to download this chapter.

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The third chapter of the Rough Cuts version of Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript using the Palm Mojo™ Framework by Palm Software CTO Mitch Allen is now available from O’Reilly.
This chapter is titled “Widgets”. Widgets are dynamic UI controls, that can be integrated within any application. They can be tailored to the application, yet [...]

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