Palm’s PDK to Allow Easy Porting of iPhone Apps
Palm’s single biggest asset is webOS. Sadly, the company’s single biggest deficit–aside from the public’s apparent lack of interest in its smartphones–is the webOS application ecosystem. But that’s changing.
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next week, Palm (PALM) plans to release its webOS Plug-in Development Kit, a set of tools to help developers create graphics-intensive games.
Perhaps more important, the PDK will allow developers to rewrite mobile apps created for other platforms to run on webOS with minimal modification. Apps that currently run on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, for example, can be ported over in a matter of days, sources close to the company tell me, and they don’t really suffer any degradation in performance.
That’s a compelling proposition for developers looking for additional distribution channels. And if enough of them take Palm up on it, we may see the current paucity of third-party webOS apps quickly head toward abundance.
If you’re tempted to raise an eyebrow over that statement, consider this: Since Palm announced the PDK at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, its early access partners–EA, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Laminar Research–have cranked out close to three dozen games.
“The webOS experience has been smooth and user friendly,” Baudouin Corman, VP of Publishing, Americas, for Gameloft told me. “We’ve been pretty aggressive thus far with the number of games hitting the App Catalog, so it’s safe to say that we plan to continue this momentum for the remainder of the year….We’ve seen strong interest from Pre consumers for the kind of games we are releasing. WebOS is going to bring a lot of value and competition to the mobile space.”
That bodes well for Palm, which has almost certainly been hurt by deficiencies in its App Catalog. The webOS PDK could do much to grow the company’s developer ecosystem and give it the critical mass of high-quality third-party apps it needs to really gain traction in the smartphone space.
Comments
This is good news for Palm if it works out. These would be real native apps, not just widgets which is all they've been doing so far. Native apps definitely sell smartphones. Widgets you can get anywhere for free.
Posted by JohnDoey at March 6th, 2010 at 12:20 amAll core applications of webOS has been written in mojoSDK, this means Javascript using services from the underneath linux OS. The core applications are full featured applications, as the one you can use in your computer, there is no difference at all in what you can do wheter you use java, ruby, javascript or objective-c provided the underneath layer gives you the access needed.
The fact that you can only assume that in javascript with an UI based in html and css you can only do widgets or “hacky” applications as in the old days of iphone is beyond me. Please just watch a webOS device working.
Still the PDK will allow to use native compiled code to be able to be called from your javascript bindings. Or a full compiled c application with your own UI.
Posted by menic at March 6th, 2010 at 6:20 pmDays? Seriously?
I'm sorry, but that's complete hyperbole.
Most iPhone apps don't contain a line of C++ code. Instead, they're based on Objective-C. Objective-C is based on different design principles, and is radically different.
Sure, you can port an Objective-C app to C++. Eventually. I would imagine it's roughly akin to porting Javascript to C++. But the only way you'll get it over in days is if it only took days to write.
Posted by sdfisher at March 7th, 2010 at 8:32 amTrue, but the problem with porting an Obj-C/UIKit app over to mojoSDK is that the underlying calls – from the application layer – don't exist. You'd really have problems developing some of the audio apps, for instance.
My suspicion is that what we're talking about here is porting OpenGL based games – as 90-95% of these are portable C and OpenGL anyway (first rule of games development on the iPhone – don't use ObjC).
Posted by trashbat at March 10th, 2010 at 9:26 pm