> From: David Fedor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

> Seriously, we have been quite open with information; I gave a "sneak 
> peek" of Palm OS Cobalt multiple times, literally around the globe, 
> describing the new infrastructure and what it'd mean for 
> applications.  And we have seeded the simulator and tools to hundreds 
> of developers under NDA.  It isn't appropriate for us to do 
> everything in public, nor does it make sense to have every developer 
> working with alpha releases simply because it'd be a waste of most 
> people's time.

Let's recall the facts. PalmSource shipped Palm OS 6 to licensees in December last 
year. Nothing was published at that time in the developer seeding area (available only 
under NDA). In February, PS published the new SDK, and an alpha (0.1) version of the 
tools required to use it. 

Licensees are expected to ship first OS 6 devices in summer, so that would give us 
less than 4 months to port/enhance our apps for a completely rewritten operating 
system with the biggest changes in the history of Palm OS. Keep in mind that many, if 
not most, of the currently published applications do NOT work on the Cobalt simulator 
so there IS a lot of work to do.

Of course, if the majority of apps don't work on OS 6, licensees have less incentive 
to come out with hardware running the new OS. I think that's what the original poster 
meant with a chicken-and-egg situation. It could have been avoided by giving us more 
time, seeding us with prerelease versions, and maybe even take in a little bit of 
feedback during the development process (e.g. about removing several "rarely used" 
functions).

> And we 
> simultaneously cater to more conservative sets by having PACE do a 
> great job with compatibility so most well-behaved apps don't need to 
> change at all.

This doesn't become true if it is repeated again and again. Here is a short list of 
some major apps that currently don't work on the Cobalt simulator (they all work on 
the T3 simulator):

AcidImage 2.9 - changed density of drawing window bitmap, no longer supported
SplashPhoto 3.43 - WinInvertRectangleFrame no longer supported
Lemmings 4.3 - PalmSim disappears w/o any error message
StockManager 4.3 - invalid field length error (loop)
ZLauncher 4.01 - ZLauncherDB error
SnapperMail 1.9.2 - failed unregistering for notifications, read from 0
Insaniquarium 1.09 - native call can't find DLL, same with Bejeweled 2.23
PalmReader 2.4.2 - not resizable

Andreas
www.LinkeSOFT.com

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