Wired has an interesting editorial on how Palm is appealing to what is "arguably most critical to the new phone's success", which is the developer community. We heard from Pivotal Labs in an interview earlier, and as one of the key partners for the Palm Pre release, they were one of the first to develop for the platform. "You can do some great things with the iPhone, but if you are not a Mac developer you have to learn something new...and there are a lot more web developers out there than Mac guys", states Chris Sepulveda, VP of business development for Pivotal.
He was referring to the fact that the Palm Mojo SDK would be based on standard web technologies such as JavaScript and CSS, that is in contrast to the iPhone's C based SDK and Android's Java SDK. We saw how easy it was to create a simple program during the developer webcast held wednesday by O'Reilly Media, hosted by Palm CTO Mitch Allen and attended by hundreds from the developer community, including Sepulveda.
"The cost of learning is very low and people can use existing JavaScript libraries to speed up their development process", stated Ian McFarland, VP of technology at Pivotal. After the webcast, O'Reilly stated it was the largest webcast that they had ever held, indicating the mounting interest for the platform. "We had a huge crowd", they stated in a tweet. In spite of all the hype, Palm has managed to keep the release date for the SDK under tight guard so far, although they have strategically offered it to a few key companies to help build support.
Palm CEO Ed Colligan with Pre launch partners
Many sites had echoed the same enthusiasm, such as CrunchGear, who identify a practical advantage of developing for the platform: "The numerous iPhone developers' rags to riches story...people want money. Developers are finding that the webOS platform is much easier to work with, meaning even you can make some cash," they state. "PC developers should feel much more at home (than the iPhone tools)...hopefully this means the first crop of Pre apps will be killer."
Another example of the huge level of interest comes in the form of preDevCamp, a developer event to be simultaneously held in 60 cities worldwide as soon as the SDK arrives. In fact, several more cities requested to join the event after it got a plug during the course of the webcast. The camp has been steadily building support since the start of the month.
So how does appealing to developers so much help Palm, come launch day? Attracting developers has a waterfall effect; when developers create third-party software, it entices carriers to pick up the handset, which in turn makes it more attractive to customers. Wired is quick to note that this strategy has worked very well for the iPhone. In comparison, the Pre will best its rival with Flash Support later this year, although some are nervous that webOS won't be as good for games. Allen addressed this issue during the Q&A portion of the webcast: "There are great web-based games that will work well in the (Pre) environment...games that require deeper access ot the OS is something we intend to improve as time goes on".
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