Palm handhelds are Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) which run the Palm OS. Palm OS which is also known as Garnet OS, is a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc. for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Pilot was the name of the first generation of Personal Digital Assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996.
Palm devices have evolved from handhelds to smartphones which run Palm OS, WebOS and Windows Mobile. This page describes the range of Palm devices, from the first generation of Palm machines known as the Pilot through to the latest models currently produced by Palm, Inc including their new Palm Centro line of consumer smartphones.
Developing applications for the Palm OS is a bit different than developing applications for desktop computers such as the PC or a Mac. First the Palm computing platform is designed differently than a desktop computer. Also, users simply interact with the device differently than they do desktop computers. Palm OS applications are generally single-threaded, event-driven programs. Only one program runs at a time.
Palm Development process
The following steps for Palm application development:
- Obtain the Palm OS SDK
- Choose A Development Tool
- Building Your First Application - Start your application in Xcode, Visual Studio, or your preferred IDE. If you use an IDE other than Xcode or Visual Studio, then you need to have it point to the PDK header files ( …/PDK/include ) and libraries ( …/PDK/host/lib ) to run your app on the desktop.
- Setting Up the Palm Testing Environment
Palm OS Garnet applications are primarily coded in C/C++. Two officially supported compilers exist: a commercial product, CodeWarrior Development Studio for Palm OS, and an open source tool chain called prc-tools, based on an old version of gcc. CodeWarrior is criticized for being expensive and is no longer being developed, whereas PRC-Tools lacks several of CodeWarrior's features. A version of PRC-Tools is included in a free Palm OS Developer Suite (PODS). There are development tools available for Palm programming that do not require low-level programming in C/C++, such as PocketC/PocketC Architect, CASL, AppForge Crossfire (which uses Visual Basic, Visual Basic.NET, or C#), Handheld Basic, Pendragon Forms, Satellite Forms and NSBasic/Palm (Visual Basic like languages).
