Palm opens webOS development to all

Chuq von Rospach at Palm mailed to let us know that they've now wrapped up the "early access program" and have opened up the SDK to all comers, under the name webOSdev. Hopefully they'll be able to attract a decent amount of high quality apps and start to compete with Apple's iPhone platform.

Sign up at http://developer.palm.com/.

Native Code for Android in 1.5

Google have announced the availability of a native SDK for Android. For people like me who have a lot of code written in C & C++, this is a big deal. It also stands to appeal to the huge number of people developing for iPhone at the moment.

If only RIM had the smarts to do something like this for Blackberry (and ironically the first-pass SDK was C based) the world would be a better place.

App Store Refunds Brouhaha

TechCrunch is running a piece (picked up by slashdot) about a potentially developer-unfriendly clause (6.3) of the App Store contract: If the user decides they don't want your app within 90 days of buying it, Apple may choose to refund them. If they do, they charge you the full sale price of the app, including the 30% commission they already took.

Now, it's Apple's choice whether to make that refund, and it seems a tad unlikely that they'd do it for no good reason, but 90 days is a long time for some of the apps in the app store to remain useful to users. And let's face it: there's no small amount of people out there who are happy to save money at others' expense.

How realistic the danger is remains to be seen, and the fact is that it's part of the price of doing business in the App Store.

HTC Magic due April

Via Wired.

The specs of the device seem to be broadly similar to those of the Dream (aka T-Mobile G1). No mention of a capacitive touch screen, but then there isn't on the Dream's spec sheet either.

BSQUARE to port Flash to Android

According to InformationWeek, Android will soon be getting a Flash interpreter, courtesy of Windows experts BSQUARE.

Lack of Flash is often cited as a major shortcoming in iPhone's browsing experience, so this could be one-up for Google and the OHA.

Samsung consolidates developer sites

Samsung has got rid of the old developer.samsungmobile.com, and rolled Windows Mobile and J2ME support services into its previously Symbian-focussed innovator.samsungmobile.com. The company says it'll begin redirecting browsers from the old site to the new one, but no word on exactly when this will happen.

It feels good to know I'm an innovator, and not just a plain old developer, though.

Update: they've now announced that it'll all happen on 2009-05-15. The old site is already read-only in preparation.

2nd chapter of Mitch Allen's webOS book available

Chapter 2 of the Rough Cuts version of Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript using the Palm Mojo™ Framework is now available for people who've bought it. Not being one of those people, I don't have anything more to offer.