Stuart A. Malone wrote: > I hope that you have all seen the announcement that Access/PalmSource > made today at the 3GSM World Congress: > > <http://www.palmsource.com/press/2006/021406_accesslinuxplatform.html>
Thanks, I hadn't seen it. > My question is about the future of the Cobalt APIs, which are not > mentioned in the press release. I think it's pretty safe to say that you can forget about Cobalt. > What is the upgrade path for current 68k Palm OS Garnet applications to > become native on the new platform? What I have to go on is 25 years of experience with Unix and Linux, and a few press releases from Palmsource. Guess which one limits the validity of any information I provide? The press releases are a bunch of flashy public relations words that don't specify anything concrete, leaving the actual facts open to the imagination. I'll try to answer your question the best I can. Don't take this too seriously. Current applications are for 68k architecture, which Palm no longer sells, running on Garnet. It looks like Palm and Palmsource are focused on getting off of those and onto Linux running native on current hardware, and pretty soon, while still supporting their huge base of legacy 3rd party applications. If you want to get going with this ASAP, I suggest your "upgrade path" is to get a copy of Linux running on a PC and start writing some simple GTK+ applications. There are a few books on the subject (none that I can recommend), hundreds (thousands?) of Open Source applications that show the use of GTK+, and you can probably do a Google search to find tutorials and such on the web. Try starting at the GTK+ website: http://www.gtk.org/ Some years ago, I tried getting myself started with GTK+ programming, and discovered I didn't like it very much. I hope that by the time Palmsource ships a development kit, they include a decent, user-friendly UI editor, that will work about like the PODS Resource Editor! I expect that later, there will be alternatives to GTK+, such as TrollTech's qt (on which the very nice KDE desktop is based) and wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/). GTK+, KDE, wxWidgets, and others all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, which I will not discuss here. Palmsource did the logical thing by choosing GTK+. No surprise there. > Will the Cobalt APIs be supported, > or will applications need to be rewritten using Gtk in order to run > natively on the new OS? Apparently, Garnet APIs will be supported, and you will have the option to start writing native Linux applications when you feel like it. > Are there any estimates on when developers might start to see technical > details about the new platform? Well, as soon as the people at Palmsource know, I'm sure we developers will be the last to be notified. :-=) Again, keep in mind that my statements here may not be an accurate representation of what they ship. Please don't think bad of me if I turn out to be wrong. BTW, if you are new to Linux and want to take up my suggestion, I'm running SuSE Linux here, and it's great. Very easy to install, and they now have a version of SuSE 10.0 available for free. The overall user experience is the best of any Linux distribution I've run so far. Jay Ts -- For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
