Five Developers Who Think the Palm Pre is a Winner

Moreover, McFarland said he believes the uptake on the Pre will be substantial once it is released. While, he scoffs at the notion that he talks up the Pre simply because Pivotal stands to make money developing applications for it.

“It was not a chicken or egg scenario,” he said, “we chose to develop for the Pre because we believe it will be a game changer. I think we’re going to make money off of it because people are going to adopt it.”

Flight tracking on the Pre

Meanwhile, Mike Benjamin, CEO of FlightView, which makes a flight tracker application, said the Pre is; “really one of the first mobile devices that have things that the other devices don’t have; you can run tasks in the background and that is a big deal.” FlightView is a showcase partner for Palm and the Pre.

“We’ve been around for 28 years in the business of tracking airplanes and providing data to people on what’s going on in the sky,” Benjamin said, “and mobile devices are just a great thing for our business, because they enable users to have quick and easy access to data.” FlightView provides its applications on the iPhone and the BlackBerry, among other devices.

“We think, with the advantages of the Pre, it’s going to be the best flight tracker out there,” added Benjamin, noting the multi-tasking capabilities of the device.

In addition, developing for the Pre is extremely easy for the 30-person company, Benjamin said. “We’re building a special version of our software for the Pre. It has a lot of the same features as the other versions, except the maps have been customised and the user interface is a little different. The flow of what you do is similar, but the look is customised.”

“With the iPhone you’ve got to have a guy who’s an Objective-C wizard and we didn’t have a lot of those guys, so it’s more of an outsourcing play,” Benjamin said. “The Pre is web-based development, which is what we do anyway.”

Yet, among the challenges of writing for the Pre is its newness. “You don’t have a whole lot of applications you can look at to see how they handle things, but that also allows you to be creative.”

Benjamin agreed with McFarland on the potential uptake on the Pre, for both consumers and businesses. “It has a great feel,” he said. “It’s a lot smaller than the iPhone and it fits in your palm comfortably. It has keys, which i like. And the screen looks great and the integrations are very nice.”

But new handsets are unstable

When asked why his company is developing applications for the Palm Pre, Evan Conway, executive vice president of marketing at Handmark, said; “Handmark has a history of developing applications on new pre-production platforms. There is a reason why these platforms are called ‘pre-production’; they are often unstable and the specifications are still changing. That is the frustrating part. The exciting part is being in early on the first phone to challenge the iPhone in terms of top-to-bottom inside-and-out innovation.”

Moreover, Conway cited some of the challenges of developing for a new platform like webOS and the Pre. “There are inherent challenges when you are developing on a pre-production platform; you don’t have a wealth of tried and true expertise to consult, for one,” he said. “But in many ways, it is exactly those constraints that make the end result all the more fulfilling. Certainly there are times that we wished we could drop down into Java or C#, but we also built a great looking application with considerably less effort than it would take on many other platforms.”