Re: Re: Shadow Alterntive - Redux.

I am not a developer. I have been a Palm user for many years (since Palm III!) and I have always thought that Palm was great with third party developers, because of the amount of programs for Palm OS. But I gess palm only was a hit when it was (almost) alone in the market. But now with all these nice phones they just lost all of what they had in their favor, the market share, the larger expertise, the bigger number of programs and even the "loyal" consumers.

My Shadow Plan is in a Centro and I have nothing to complain, but I have a hole lot of other programs and the future of Palm does not encourage me to keep buying them.




  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Jeff Mitchell 
  To: [email protected] 
  Sent: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 1:17 AM
  Subject: Re: [shadow-discuss] Re: Shadow Alterntive - Redux.


    
  On Tue, 17 Nov 2009, Bert Latamore wrote:

  # if you do decide to go ahead with a new Shadow, I would really recommend 
  # that you do it in Java. This will make it relatively easy to port it 

  I forget if you're a developer or not; a lot of people seem to 
  always fall for the 'advertising' about java without knowing the reality 
  of it, however ;) It was pushed as a big cross platform language, and in 
  many ways that is true -- the language is cross platform; of course, most 
  languages are equally cross platform. Its the libraries (APIs, SDKs etc) 
  that are the problem...

  Android is actually a very compliant Java environment (on a 
  not-quite JVM), though they're not a certified Java partner. You can look 
  to RIM for being an official Java developer, but their Java environment is 
  terrible. Theres WinMobile (which doesn't count so much these days), with 
  no official JVM but a half dozen you could buy, but adds a lot of cost to 
  an application. Theres no real JVM for iphone or WebOS. And of course, any 
  mobile device that does have Java has a 100% custom API for its UI, though 
  you could of course at least share some back-end code. J2ME is a terrible 
  terrible thing, but perhap those days are more behind us (heck, using 
  phones without even a garbage collector for their JVM makes me cry inside 
  ;)

  So Java has never really been all that compelling on mobiles; its 
  slowly changing, but yet its always first on peoples minds because the 
  'advertising' worked.

  In truth, the only real cross platform environment is general 
  straight C (not even C++), with exceptions; RIM I don't think allows you 
  to make a native binary, but the others are either supporting it or 
  courting the idea. New technologies keep coming out, but they're never as 
  universal, which is a _Damned Shame_.

  So, as always it is complicated; as I mentioned the other day -- 
  with mobiles, it has only gotten _more_ complicated, when usually things 
  get better over time.. no mobiles, they get worse :) (in terms of making a 
  product across them I mean.. they do certainly get better for users.)

  *grumble*

  I used to sya many things, but one thing I used to say was.. you 
  could make a living on Palm and WinMobile because they were such a total 
  PITA to support that no one in their right minds would do it, except for 
  suicidal folks like me. So the market was medium sized, but the developer 
  base, the _Real_ developers who stuck through all the insanity for years 
  at a time.. were very few. It was a painful existance, but it was also 
  crazy fun :)

  Now I'm looking for a less painful approach, so I'm going with the 
  mobiles that are interesitng and don't fight against me every step of the 
  way; my heart can't take the fight anymore sometimes :)

  jeff

  --
  If everyone would put barbecue sauce on their food, there would be no war.


  

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