Wednesday News Roundup – Developer Day Wrap-Up
Welcome to the first Wednesday News Roundup since the HP-Palm merger. This week we’ll cover a few of the interesting tidbits from the last week and see how you like ‘em. First up we’ll wrap up the Developer Day conference then we’ll dive right into the Roundup for some quick shots of info. Stay close.
Palm Developer Day Wrap-Up
Until now, I hadn’t had the chance to write up my final thoughts on the Palm Developer Day that was held a week and a half ago. In case you were wondering what happened you can check out the slides and the videos from the conference. Here’s the keynote speech from Ben and Dion.
Palm’s Developer day was a fantastic experience that allowed developers and Palm employees to get together, share ideas and learn more about developing on webOS. A lot of information was packed into the two days of the conference. I would say, without a doubt, that this was the best $25 (we’ll forget the hotel and airfare) I have invested ever. And a smart new Pre Plus for doing development work didn’t hurt things, either.
Not only was the content great but it really reinforced for me how terrific the team at Palm is. Every Palm employee there was enthusiastic and eager to share their webOS knowledge. Palm certainly went out of their way not only to impart knowledge but also to impart some fun. The scheduled off-site trip to the Tied House Brewery with the jQuery conference folks was a really nice touch. And the Palm cafeteria wasn’t too shabby either.
As you may have heard, Jon Rubinstein made a surprise appearance at the conference. He quipped that he was ‘still here.’ Little did we know at the time but he had probably just come from meetings with the HP folks about the merger and knew that he was going to keep manning the tiller at Palm.
I, for one, left the conference feeling very motivated to develop webOS apps — and that was before we found out about the merger. Things are moving forward with webOS and I expect that the pace will accelerate rapidly as the merger closes. Both developers and end-users can be excited about what the future holds.
Roundup
Now, for a few quick tidbits from the last week you might be interested in:
- webOS 1.4.1.1 finally dropped for our Verizon friends. Welcome back to the future!
- The next version of webOS appears to be scheduled for late May or early June. If you check out the keynote above you can get a sense of some of the things that may be in the offing.
- Another interesting development is the introduction of some PDK games from the non-premier partners. Just recently we saw the release of several titles from Mobile 1UP. Hopefully we’ll be seeing many new apps that take advantage of the power of the PDK in the coming weeks, particularly as Palm fleshes it out with more capabilities.
- The folks at Quickoffice have asked on Twitter what webOS users would be willing to pay for a full-featured Office suite (one that allows you to not only view but also edit Office 2007 documents). If you’d like to share your thoughts, drop them a tweet or send them some feedback on their site. [Update: See our full article here!]
