Getting Their Mojo Working: webOS Developer Profiles
Part 4: Rocketouch—It’s about touching people and making a difference for them
Editor's note: "Getting Their Mojo Working: webOS Developer Profiles" is a semi-regular series of interviews with developers who were among the first to use Palm® webOS™ and the Palm Mojo™ SDK and get apps into the Palm Application Catalog. If you submit your app and it's accepted to the catalog, you just might find your story here, too. But hurry, lots of new apps are coming in all the time.
Early in the morning, you can find long-time Palm aficionado Mark Ferneau busy over a hot Mojo SDK coding webOS apps. During the day, he goes off to his regular job working on military command and control systems. When he gets home, he becomes Rocketouch, the company Mark is building to develop mobile apps that are “fun, fast, and relevant.” webOS and mobile app development is a labor of love for Mark. Read our discussion to find out why webOS puts the joy back in coding for him.
webOSdev: So what got you interested in webOS in the first place?
Mark: As soon as I heard about it, I was just ecstatic about Pre. I’ve been a Palm guy since 1998, and I think webOS provides small developers like me a great platform with tremendous possibilities. This might sound a little over the top, but it’s a great, sexy, fast, and easy development environment, and I have lots of apps I’d like to develop for it.
webOSdev: To bring you back to Earth for a second, what’s so great about it?
Mark: To put it really simply, anyone doing web development could be doing webOS development. It’s easy to get going on. You don’t have to download all these APIs or tools and get trained up on a new, complex language.
And that’s great for people like me. My day job has nothing to do with this stuff. I work on military command and control systems. But having a platform like webOS means I can leave my day job and be creative at nights and on the weekends when I can pursue what I truly enjoy. It’s a little like the early days of web development, when people realized that HTML gave them this simple way of expressing themselves and delivering something useful very quickly.
webOSdev: Fair enough. So, you mentioned the possibilities of the platform. Can you tell us what they are?
Mark: When you think of the integration that Palm has provided with GPS and other services as well as some of the sensors, the touch screen and keyboard, your mind starts racing. If you have ideas about bringing things together and expanding on them, this is a great vehicle for that.
Like I said, I have many apps I can think of. And, from what I’m tracking in Twitter, a lot of people are picking up the Mojo SDK every day and building their own apps. We really have no concept of the volume and capabilities of apps that will be available a year from now. Just to think about one area, location-based services stuff could be huge—we can’t fathom how creative people will be.
webOSdev: Obviously we agree, but glad to hear others see things that way, too. Let’s talk more specifically about your app, Kosher2Go. Tell us how you got started with it on the webOS platform.
Mark: Most recently I had been a Treo guy, using the Treo 755 and developing for Palm OS. I’m also an early adopter kind of guy. But I just wasn’t that interested in other mobile platforms. But the Pre had a touch screen, GPS, and other things that I had been waiting for a long time. Also, webOS seemed really easy to get going.
By going the JavaScript route, Palm makes it possible for the number of potential developers of apps and the quality of those apps at the beginning of the adoption curve much higher than it has been for other systems. The tools are there: Eclipse is free, and you don’t have to use Eclipse if you don’t want to. You can use any existing JavaScript tools. So developing for webOS was a no-brainer to me.
I have not developed on Palm OS since the 2000-01 timeframe. I have, however, been doing a lot on the web. So, even though there were some transition issues since I’d been using Palm OS, my more recent experience with JavaScript made for a nice dovetail with Pre and webOS.
It’s interesting—the development I’d been doing back in 2001 is almost exactly what Kosher2go is. There is an area of the Shamash.org web site, actually shamash.org/kosher, that people use to find Kosher restaurants all over world. In the 90s, as someone doing a lot of travel, I used that web site. I wanted to put the Shamash database on Palm OS back then. With Palm OS 7, you had the ability to connect to an online web-clipping app. So I basically wrote the web site that provided the interface between Shamash.org and Palm OS.
webOSdev: How did you get going on the development of Kosher2go?
Mark: I was accepted into the Early Access Program—in fact I was involved in the early rounds of it, a few weeks before webOSdev opened to the world and the community at large could download the Mojo SDK.
I had looked at early chapters of Mitch Allen’s book (that is, Palm webOS) and every time an SDK or any documentation update came out I pored through it to get a better understanding of what I was trying to do.
I started off by building the first page, or I should say, the first scene. Then, I added incrementally to that. For example, next I built the connection to the database. I used a lot of trial and error, but I found it faster using the emulator than using a typical development environment. It makes for a very iterative process where you can do things one step at a time.
webOSdev: You were new to this environment so you must have encountered challenges along the way. What did you do to meet them?
Mark: The webOS concept makes it easy to solve problems: just as you can with traditional web apps, you can just look at the code of other apps. It’s mostly just JavaScript, and you can see how the apps have been developed. So, when I ran into an issue, that’s what I did.
webOSdev: So, you finished coding. How about the process of getting it in to the catalog?
Mark: That’s kind of a funny story. The day I submitted my app to Palm was July 16—the same day that Palm opened up webOS to the world with the first public release of the Mojo SDK. I thought, “I missed the boat. Now my app will never get looked at, and there will be a flood of apps.” But that turned out not to be true. There was lots of email back and forth. First there was a functionality thing, and I fixed that in a day. I had a healthy discussion with Palm about the UI, since there is so much concern about consistency and design, but that was resolved in a day or two. In the end, I was approved for review very quickly.
webOSdev: Now that you’ve gotten your first app done and in the catalog, any thoughts about where Palm could be taking all this to improve the experience?
Mark: I was talking about how you can just look at webOS JavaScript code that’s already been written to solve your own development problems. Well, I think that ability—to look at other people’s code—makes webOS a lot like an open source environment.
And, along those lines, it would be great if people started writing and contributing standard ways of doing things to the community. I’m hopeful that we will see people building features, tools, capabilities that can be used by a variety of apps. Someone should write a standard color-picker. Or a cleaner way to leverage maps for everyone’s use. There are a lot of ways people can improve on what’s already done and push it out for others to use, too.
webOSdev: Nice. Now, on to some standard questions we’ve been asking everyone: How many mobile phones have you owned in the last five years?
Mark: Maybe 4.
webOSdev: What do you remember about the first one?
Mark: It was a Samsung IPH-300. I bought it because it was a PalmOS-based phone, and it integrated my two most important mobile devices. It was a game changer for me just like Palm Pre.
Now, if you want to know about my first network-capable PDA, it was a Palm. I had a Palm 5x with an OmniSky dock for web access. That first phone-web integration was glorious. Compared to Palm Pre, it seems prehistoric. Makes you wonder about the next thing that will go into a phone that we will just end up taking for granted.
webOSdev: When you pull all-nighters, what keeps you going?
Mark: I used to be a late night guy, but now I get up at 4:10 AM to do my coding. That means I can do development without any distractions. My love for development is what wakes me up and keeps me awake. I don’t write software for my day job. This gives me the buzz and high of doing something that helps people. One of the things I’ve been doing is writing backend code for Shamash.org in order to help people.
A little more about that: The market for Kosher2Go is not huge. I’m not expecting 60-80,000 downloads. But the fact that someone wrote to tell me about that my app has already helped them, that it’s touching people and is going to help them when they’re out traveling, I think is great.
webOSdev: That’s a great thought to end with, Mark. Thanks so much. We’d like to send you a copy of Mitch Allen’s book Palm webOS for taking the time, and we wish you all the best.
Want webOSdev to interview you, or do you want to help create technical content that might help other webOS developers? Then be sure to submit your app. Once it’s accepted, Palm will tell you what the next steps are.