Develop for Mobile Devices

Palm has just opened up its developer program to the public. The developer program which started as a private beta to select developers. Since then, Palm has shipped a couple of WebOS devices around the globe (Palm Pre and Palm Pixi). To give mobile developers a little incentive, Palm is also running a developer contest that offers a total of 1 million USD to contest winners.

Palm’s unique WebOS incorporates familiar web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS. These technologies become the building blocks of mobile applications that runs on Palm’s WebOS. They have also setup their own mobile applications store which they call the App Catalog that currently lists more or less 1,000 mobile apps from different mobile developers.

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The Nokia N900 already starting to ship and Mozilla is in on its way to the release of the mobile version of Firefox that runs on the Maemo open mobile platform of the N900. What else can be better that to start it off with a mobile Firefox add-on challenge to stir things up a bit. Mozilla has started an add-on development contest that will end on December 7, 2009. The price? What else a brand new shiny Nokia N900 to the winner. You can check out the contest rules here. The judgess will select ten (10) mobile add-ons that best represent user experience and innovation on Firefox for mobile devices. The 10 winners will each receive a Nokia N900. Cool!

Developing software for mobile phones is such a challenge! Not only do you have to deal with the wide variety of hardware, you’d also have to deal with the different platforms available. Imagine trying to make your mobile application or game available on the Symbian, Java, Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone OS, Blackberry, Danger platforms! Continue reading …

Motorola has gone a long way since I first read about the news that it’s hiring some 300 Android developers. It has heavily invested in the Android open mobile platform that Google has initiated. Recently it has opened up it’s web site for Android development in preparation for its upcoming mobile phones based on Android. It has even started beta on its new MotoDev Studio for the Android platform.

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After several months from the release of the Palm Pre, Palm has finally opened the WebOS SDK to everyone. WebOS is the operating system that drives Palm’s new Palm Pre device. The Palm developer site is now accepting registrations to the developer program that is currently under beta. Registration is required and free. Upon approval you will gain access to download the SDK and documentation and start developing for the Palm Pre. You will also gain access to the Palm developer forum once membership is approved.

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I’ve just read an announcement that the Android SDK 1.5 will be released around the end of the month. In the mean time developers can get access to a pre-release version to enable them to start using the Android SDK 1.5 during development. It looks like a bunch of Cupcake mods will be made available in SDK 1.5 of Android. Some of the new features in Android SDK 1.5 include soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition.

In addition, the new SDK’s from version 1.5 forward will now contain different platform versions. For instance version 1.5 of the Android SDK will also contain version 1.1. One very nice thing about this new structure is that developers can create versions of their products that allows them to target different platforms.

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