Palm Ares : Palm’s New Candy To Attract Application Developers

Posted by Shahbaaz ||

November 7, 2009 ||

(No Ratings Yet)

Loading ...

palm-app-catalog We know Palm is just hit by two reasons to await a lawful fame. One – the GSM Palm Pre version hasn’t peeped out of the factory, yet (except the one in UK). Two – it’s got a very small application catalog for its mobile phone users.

For any gadget, tech specs, design, and all the ‘blah blah’ factors do a lot of publicity. But what does excessively more is just not these factors. Applications are the next big thing that attracts the users, and they bring the jail-bound features of the device to a very much explorable mightiness.

And everyone knows how Apple managed to pile up more than 100,000 applications for the iPhone – just another reason why some iPhone owners love their gizmo, and even Droid, which just broke out of the shell has somehow managed to count on more than 12,000 apps for its Android platform.

Do you see Palm even anywhere close to any of these? No. Because, Palm Web OS Development Tool, Palm Mojo SDK, is something quite new to application developers and does not seem to be interesting enough to draw the developer crowd.

Palm phones are different from the rest, because they feature Palm’s unique WebOS which is quite an isolated platform for application developers to venture in.

palm-pixi-hands-on
Palm Ares : Black Fate or Bright Future?

Palm, lately, took some pain to understand the need of the hour and has planned to introduce a Web-based development environment for WebOS applications, called Ares. It (Ares) was first demonstrated publicly at the Open Mobile Summit Conference in San Francisco, yesterday.

Palm Ares is Palm’s way of roping in more developers to build applications for both Palm Pre and Palm Pixi. Ares will allow developers to integrate various components in a drag-and-drop fashion using JavaScript to build applications easily.

Palm’s new WebOS development tool, Ares, should do some good to the snail-slow growth of its application catalog. There is a word in the air that Palm Ares SDK, which was reportedly released to a select group way back in April and later publically announced in July, has been downloaded innumerous times since then.

The Palm Ares SDK (software development kit) will not require the developers to make any configurations or downloads to develop the applications. Instead, environment will include debugging tools and mechanism for developers to share libraries and APIs.

Within the phone emulator in Ares, developers can see what the application will look like in both portrait and landscape view. When the application is finished, the developer can package it up, download it to a phone to try it out, share it with friends or submit it to Palm’s application catalog.

Now that seems like Palm is getting firm on its feet to make a good business with everything that should contribute to keep it going. Palm Ares SDK should be working fine on Firefox and Safari and the full version release is slated to go on air later this year.

When it does, we are eager to see the applications count multiply in thousands. Meanwhile, we’ll think over if Apple iPhone is the chosen one that deserves the crown for owning largest application catalog or is it somebody else (in your dearest vicinity)?

Tags: Palm Ares, Palm Ares SDK, Palm Mojo SDK, Palm SDK, Palm Web OS