Palm Dev Day NYC - Day #2

Day 2 was awesome.  The day started off with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer talking about how far the web has come, and how HTML5 and mobile are changing things.  Followed by an Oprah moment, we all got Palm Pre 2s!  Phil McKinney spoke next giving HP's position on the mobile field and webOS.  He seemed really excited about the possibilities.  This only encouraged the crowd.  He gave a bunch of good ideas.  I really enjoyed his ideas about education and how we are currently raising test takers and not creative minds.  There are plenty of opportunities for apps out there.

Next i went to talks on the PDK and how I can leverage my C/C++ abilities within the webOS framework.  I also learned about the apps currently out there that utilize both JavaScript and the PDK.  The PDK presents a unique opportunity.  After that I attended Greg Simon's talk about optimizing performance of webOS.  He had a few tips on things not to do, but mostly he was talking about the webkit browser and JavaScript engine.

Lunch was after and it was awesome.  There were shrimp po boi sliders, jambalya rice, corn and bean salad, and cornbread with jalapenos.  They also served sweet tea of the mint, raspberry, and lemon varieties.  For desert there was ice cream and bourbon bread pudding.  Everything tasted so great.

Following lunch there were lightning talks.  In these talks webOS developers gave 5 minute presentations on how they overcame a problem they had with webOS.  It was a good lessons learned teaching experience.  There was a Cross-Platform Apps panel, developers of different frameworks talked about how they came about and how they are used to develop web apps across multiple platforms.  Really cool stuff, especially since you can develop a single app that works on webOS, IOS, Android, Symbian devices and more.  This gives developers a wider market to spread their app to.

The last couple talks I attended were about using HTML5 to spruce up your apps and the different JavaScript frameworks out there for us to take advantage of.  The last talk of the day, focused on the next generation webOS framework, Enyo.  Enyo take a lot from Ares to build a webapp.  They are trying to abstract some of the JavaScript setup work from building a webapp.  They are also working to make the process more stream lined and object oriented.  They demo'd an email app that was really slick.  It adjusted to different size windows very well, and looks promising.