In article <82662@palm-dev-forum>, [EMAIL PROTECTED] says... > While I am unhappy with the lack of progress CodeWarrior has > shown in years from v5 to v8 and consider the upgrade price too > high it is, overall, a good development environment with good > tools. I suspect that the work involved in keeping up with PalmOS > changes forces many client-requested changes to be pushed back > to lower priority.
I came on as technical lead for the Palm OS tools group about six months before V8 was released. Here's my personal view of what happened before that: V6 was pushed out as part of the Palm-Metrowerks OEM agreement where Palm actually sold the tools, but Metrowerks was the supplier. It was also the last big release that the original tech lead did before he left to go work for Palm. After the agreement lapsed and Metrowerks regained control of the tools, upper management decided to do V7 and get it out for PalmSource 2000. The total engineering schedule on this release was less than six weeks, so the team focused on cleaning up lots of bugs, moving to the new IDE, updating to the 3.5 SDK, and making something stable. However, the v7 team didn't have anyone who'd actually spent a lot of time programming for Palm OS, so they didn't see a lot of what could be improved. I came back to Metrowerks in April 2001. V8 shipped in October. In those six months, we did a lot of things. We build wizards, we updated to the 4.0 SDK, we revised the pref panels, we wrote out own tutorial, we developed expanded mode, and everything else I mention at http://www.palmoswerks.com/stories/storyReader$10. I had some bigger plans, but the tight schedule to get it ready by the original date of PalmSource 2001 caused us to push some things to the next release. In retrospect, the new V8 features weren't drastic enough... the wizards are nice, but not a must-have for experienced developers, while expanded mode and the debugger improvements weren't big features for most of the people out there. The UI improvements in the pref panels made figuring out things easier, but if you already understood them, it didn't matter. I still think V8 is underrated by lots of people, but at the same time, I recognize that if someone was used to V7 and happy with that, V8 wouldn't make them much happier. Talking with developers on these boards and at PalmSource 2002 has been really helpful. I'm working hard to put together a V9 that will solve a lot of the biggest problems that people have with the current toolset, while also providing new functionality that people won't expect. I can't say too much just yet -- however, if you replied to the mails that went out to registered CW users, know that someone on our team has looked at your feedback, and it will be affecting the final product. -- Ben Combee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CodeWarrior for Palm OS technical lead -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
