Palm Developer Network Blog

Palm has a long history of creating innovative platforms with rich opportunities for developers. Over the years, we’ve sparked the creation of tens of thousands of applications, offering our customers a vast range of options and creating huge opportunities for our developer community.

Now that our exciting Web-based platform, Palm webOS, is ready for developers, the time was right to ramp up our Developer Relations team, to ensure the best possible developer experience. When we sat down to think about the type of person that needed to lead this team, two things were clear: we needed real developers at the helm, and they needed to be developers with a deep understanding of the Web environment.

I’m incredibly excited to announce that we have found two rare individuals to help us lead this charge. As of today, Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer are joining Palm to run the Developer Relations group. These guys have been in the community forever. They founded Ajaxian.com, a great community built around leading-edge Web development. More recently, they worked together at Mozilla to create some revolutionary forward-looking developer tools, such as Bespin, an innovative Web-based coding environment.

When I first met them, I instantly appreciated the passion that they had for the Web, and their desire to do great things to engage and excite developers. I expect them to think big and work diligently to make Palm webOS a platform you love to be a part of, and also one that helps you grow your business.

Join me in welcoming them to the fold, and also join us as we begin to take the wraps off what we know will be an exciting and compelling developer program.

They have both written on their personal blogs about the start of their journey at Palm. A lot of you already know them so you’ll enjoy reading what Dion and Ben have to say. (You can also connect with them on Twitter: @bgalbs and @dalmaer.)

Best,
Katie Mitic
SVP, Product Marketing

We have released Palm webOS 1.1 and your phones will be asking you to install the update.  You can get more info about the update from our press release and from the list of new features.

This release brings the phone’s OS version in sync with the SDK, which will simplify device testing.

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We’re really excited to share the news that O’Reilly Media is publishing a book about developing for Palm’s new mobile platform, titled “Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript Using the Palm Mojo Framework”. Since the book is being written by Palm VP and Software CTO Mitch Allen and the webOS development team, it will be provide a great inside and in-depth perspective on creating killer apps for webOS devices like the upcoming Pre.

And since the book is being published by O’Reilly, the definition of “book” is a whole lot more than the traditional one. You can read the first chapter right now for free at http://developer.palm.com.  Plus, in the coming hours, the first chapter will also be available on O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts service.  Rough Cuts lets you purchase the book in its unfinished form and essentially read it as its being written.  We’ll provide a link to that when it’s live on Monday.

More?  How about a free webcast for developers featuring Mitch Allen.  O’Reilly and Palm are teaming up on February 25 (10 a.m. PT), to provide a preview of the webOS development environment, and give you a great chance to fire away with questions and comments for Mitch.   The link to register for that webcast will be live very soon, and we’ll pass that along to you as well as soon as its ready.

So feel free to post your comments about this on this blog, because we definitely want to know what you think. We read (and love!) them all, even if we can’t always respond or answer all your questions.