All Palm Pre fans know the lack of apps around at the moment there are some 400 odd in the app catalog. Gizmodo recently found that there were 3 paid apps to make your Palm Pre fart which is quite sad that despite their being a lack of apps out there people cant come up with original ideas of how to use the Palm Pre.
My real frustation is the fact that as a UK user all I get is 93 apps and no access to paid apps , also there has been no update to the app catalog for days now. Franky speaking i’m getting a little bored of this and I don’t need an app for everything I’d just like to have aceess to some of the damned things Please.
So I am almost seeing why people would want an iPhone just for all the apps because I cannot use my phone for half the things I’d like to at the moment.
Tagged as:
apps,
Pre Apps
Apps are the big thing in the mobile world, Apple lead the way with it’ app store and everyone else followed. The reasons for this were not only to show off the capability of smarter phones but the realisation that you could make a hell of a lot of money from someone else’s hard work. With most app stores taking upto 30% of the earnings from the apps sold as well as charging for the privilege of selling apps through their stores.
Palm is no different and who can blame them? They have a fantastic product in the Pre and an OS to compete with anything Apple can conjour up. The great thing about the Palm Pre app development is that it is supposed to be fairly straight forward. I say supposed to, because I haven’t given it a whirl yet, I have however in my time tried out the other SDK’s for Apple and Blackberry and before I move on I am going to briefly describe what I found with the other SDK’s.
Apple iPhone
Hailed as the king of the smartphone world everyone wants to create a killer app for the iPhone, one that will make them a little pocket change in the bargain. However there is one major problem, you need an Apple Mac which not everyone has do they ? So any thought of just having a little play with the dev kit is thrown straight out of the window and NO before you say it “there is NO app for that”.
But I have a Mac , I do , I do , problem solved right ? errrrm NO. My Mac is a little old bought just before Apple switched to the Intel based hardware, and the iPhone SDK refuses to install so now I need an Intel Mac. Other then going down the “illegal route” of installing OS X on your PC there is now way for the PC user to even getting started with the iPhone dev kit.
I did go down the Hackingtosh route in the end and found that the Apple SDK was a straightforward install if you have an Intel based Mac that is.
Blackberry
The Blackberry Dev Kit is based on Java and much of the development is done in Java which is no bad thing, however there is one little catch. Java can be one crazy thing to install and get working right on any environment at the best of times. The experts may disagree but for me this was the case. Having downloaded, installed and run the Dev Kit and followed and finished the first example. I got a list of Java errors (sorry this was so long ago I don’t actually have them to hand now), having looked through forums and done everything suggested from updating the Java Virtual Machine I could not for the life of me get the damn thing working. Nothing on the Internet seemed to know how to solve the problems.
So I gave up as I was only wishing to have a play with the idea of devloping Blackberry apps for an intellectual excersice.
Palm Pre Mojo SDK
Another SDK based on Java with a required Virtual Box installation thrown into the mix , surely this was bound to go wrong sooner or later.
A visit to the Palm Pre dev site shows that the SDK is available for download (after registering) in three flavours. Ubuntu, Mac OS X , and Windows a far cry from Apples Mac only operation. The first two options only require you to install Virtual Box before you can download the SDK, where as the Windows version asks you to install Java 6 too.
I installed them in the following order:
Java 6
Virtual Box
Palm Pre Mojo SDK
All this went quite painlessly and I could then follow the rest of the installation instructions and test the various aspects of the SDK. All these tests worked fine so the basic software was ready to start developing on.
The whole process took about 20 mins and that included downloading and installing the various bits needed. The installation process was straight forward and I had no problems with the tests at all.
Conclusion
My point with this comparison isn’t to suggest that one SDK or development method is better then the other, this would be a foolish comparison as they will have all their merits. I want to highlight from my own experience why the Palm Pre SDK was the easiest to set up and run for the basic fact that it worked out of the box and it is available on multi-platform. This is something it has in common with the Blackberry SDK but seen as the Blackberry gave me major problems with installation and testing it is out of te equation.
Taking into account that the problems with the Blackberry SDK were not insumoutable, and that the iPhone SDK relies on Objective C and the Cocoa framework hence excusing the Mac exclusivity both can be forgiven for their performance in these tests.
However with the objective of this brief analysis being how quick, easy and accessible each SDK is to set up the Palm Pre SDK comes out on top every time. It worked out of the box first time and within 20 mins to half an hour I was ready to start coding.
Tagged as:
apps,
mojo sdk