HP webOS Developer Blog

We’re really excited to share the news that O’Reilly Media is publishing a book about developing for Palm’s new mobile platform, titled “Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript Using the Palm Mojo Framework”. Since the book is being written by Palm VP and Software CTO Mitch Allen and the webOS development team, it will be provide a great inside and in-depth perspective on creating killer apps for webOS devices like the upcoming Pre.

And since the book is being published by O’Reilly, the definition of “book” is a whole lot more than the traditional one. You can read the first chapter right now for free at http://developer.palm.com.  Plus, in the coming hours, the first chapter will also be available on O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts service.  Rough Cuts lets you purchase the book in its unfinished form and essentially read it as its being written.  We’ll provide a link to that when it’s live on Monday.

More?  How about a free webcast for developers featuring Mitch Allen.  O’Reilly and Palm are teaming up on February 25 (10 a.m. PT), to provide a preview of the webOS development environment, and give you a great chance to fire away with questions and comments for Mitch.   The link to register for that webcast will be live very soon, and we’ll pass that along to you as well as soon as its ready.

So feel free to post your comments about this on this blog, because we definitely want to know what you think. We read (and love!) them all, even if we can’t always respond or answer all your questions.

Last week I posted on my blog asking for input on issues around application distribution on the Palm platform. The post got a number of responses from developers (mostly via email), as you would expect given the size of my readership (low hundreds). Then it got linked on Daring Fireball and metafilter, and traffic took off – I got 11,000+ readers in a day and a half. There was also a flood of comments and private emails. The tone of the conversation was extremely constructive and I learned a lot from reading what people had to say.

But when folks at Palm saw how much the post had taken off, there was concern that people would think I was speaking for and promising things on behalf of Palm, even though I had issued a number of disclaimers to preempt that effect. Honestly, I can’t blame Palm people for being concerned – there were a number of people who linked to the post saying things like “isn’t it great that Palm is doing this”. The difference between me doing something as a Palm employee and me doing something as a representative of Palm is a subtle one, but it is something I’ve run into several times as a blogger – in my previous job lots of people used to attribute things I wrote as being the official word of Adobe despite my disclaimers to the contrary.

To Palm’s credit, though, after reviewing my post and the feedback it had received, there was a general recognition internally that the conversation was a great thing and that we’d like that conversation to continue. But rather than have it be a conversation between me and the developer community, we decided that it would be better if we could widen the conversation to include even more people at Palm. And so here we are.

This is your chance to let Palm know what you would and would not like to see on the webOS platform, in particular in areas related to:

• Application installation and updating
• Ecommerce (purchase, trials, coupons, etc.)
• Security (code signing, testing, anti-phishing, malware, etc)
• Browsing and searching for applications

Now we need to establish some rules of the road:

• Software features are pretty much locked down for the Pre – this discussion is primarily longer term in nature
• That said, there are no guarantees or implications that anything you ask for is or will ever be part of webOS
• The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Palm or its employees
• If you tell us your super great new idea, you give Palm an irrevocable worldwide right to use your super great new idea without royalty, acknowledgement, or any other form of compensation. Click here to see the relevant legalese.
• Be nice!

Please note that if you’ve already posted your comment on my previous blog entry, you do not need to post it again. I’ve saved all comments and shared them with the team already. But feel free to post again if you have more to say.

Thanks for visiting the new Palm Developer Network (PDN) blog.  This blog will serve as the one of the primary ways the PDN team will share information with you about building applications for Palm WebOS using the Palm Mojo SDK.  So please subscribe to our feed and look for additional information soon.