Patience is a virtue.
Its a ramp up game for Palm and their webOS efforts. It would be ill advised of them to release new hardware on a new OS and day one open up to ALL developers to do EVERYTHING on the platform, no company in their right mind would attempt such a thing. That being said, with their webOS dev program now in full swing the already fair amount of feedback and opinions they were getting is bound to turn in to a firehose of feedback around the restrictions and dislikes.
SAI has a post quoting a developer’s initial feedback regarding downloading the SDK and going through the documentation. He talks about webOS’s lack of native graphics support via OpenGL and equates the development environment to that of the iPhone when it first came out. His feedback is both on point and wrong at the same time. The lack of OpenGL support is on point while relating the mojoSDK functionality to that of Apple’s web app widget functionality is way base.
The thing most people tend to forget is that Apple had no SDK and no app store when the iPhone launched. They took a phased approach with first getting the device to market, ironing out the OS bugs with updates while finishing a first version of an SDK in the back ground to be released at a later point in time.
Palm is taking the exact same approach with one caveat. They are way ahead at Pre launch time where both Apple and Android were. New hardware, new OS, SDK, app store, all there on day one. In order to play catch up they had to launch with these items at the same time. They are still taking a staged approach to the whole matter by not fully opening up the dev program on day one, keeping it restricted to a few developers from professional consulting firms or established businesses.
Even though they cannot move any faster then they are currently people still think that Palm is moving too slowly by restricting their App Catalog and not releasing a flood of apps until fall. I tend to disagree with that notion. Although it would be nice to have a few more apps at my disposal 99% of the things I do on the device are covered by native apps and the browser: browsing, email, calendar, twitter, SMS/MMS, camera phone, etc.
I am not a gaming enthusiast. I can sympathize with gamers complaints that the Pre sucks for games but most Pre users, like most mobile users are data and task driven, not graphics driven.
The webOS has already displayed its abilities to allow native code/hardware support with the Motion Apps Classic emulator that allows one to run old school Palm apps on the webOS operating system. There are also examples of developers making use of native hardware … although not "officially" with a NES and Sony PS1 emulator, clip below.
Overall there is no such thing as too much feedback. The more there is for Palm the better they will be able to navigate the gauntlet of building a solid dev community for the webOS and staking their claim in the mobile market place.
