Long live PalmOS, Long live Universe

So, I just got a Centro the other day. It is a great phone! The PalmOS on it is very stable. Far more so than my Treo 700p (after both Maintenance Releases). But, this post is not to do a product review of the Centro. I may write up one of those some day (of course, from the point of view as a Palm employee...).

Anyway, on to the second part of the title and the main business.

Flash Sheridan, President of the Stanford Palm User Group (http://pobox.com/~spug/), invited me to do a demo of Universe. Of course, I just could not turn down the invitation. :) But, I was not sure that just a demo of the old beta was worthy. It has many nice features, but it is a bit buggy and not really demo worthy. So, I have decided to finish up the new user interface. Of course, just demoing a user interface would be boring, so I am going to get some other things working too....

My plan is to integrate the same rendering engine that Blazer uses (boooo! I know I know, but!), and including a few other (hopefully) features. I will not go into the specifics right now though, that is a surprise. :)

So... The details about the SPUG meetings:

The Stanford PalmPilot User Group meets at 7 pm on the first Tuesday of each month; the July first meeting will feature the Spugly Award for the Worst Palm OS® Software Ever. The first nominee is Paragon/Penreader's SlovoEd dictionary application, for its chunk over-locked crashes and robotic technical support responses. Members are encouraged to demonstrate their own nominees for the Spugly Award at the meeting, and to show technical support responses which fail the Turing Test.
The August fifth meeting will feature a demo of the Universe Web Browser by its developer, Donald Kirker of OpenMobl Systems, who is not a nominee for the Spugly Award.

Printer's Inc Cafe
320 California Ave,
Palo Alto

For more information, go to the Stanford PalmPilot User Group home page,
http://pobox.com/~spug/.

Attendees of the August 5th meeting will receive a free lifetime copy of Universe. Beta trial versions of the new version should be available to the general public that evening.

Enjoy the summer!
Donald

The Future... For now.

I posted this a few days ago: http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=127058&page=21#419

I am really not sure how I would want to word it here, so I'll just let you read my post on Treocentral.

I have been going at this non-stop for 5 years. I really need a break.

Libs almost ready

So.... It has been a month since my last post. I hadn't intended on that long of a delay. Unfortunatly this quarter's work load was very unexpected. I took 3 4 unit classes hoping for a nice break to have free time. Little did I know that two of my classes had a ton of work and would turn out being hell taken concurrently, so I have not really had time for anything, not even school. In about 5 hours I have the final for the one that will have the worse outcome.

I was in the process of getting everything (libc, freetype, libcurl, and a couple of my own libraries) ported and setup under gcc. Unfortunatly and fortunately the fact that they are ARM and need the NetLib required me to make a last minute change to CodeWarrior (this took some work). Dmitry Grinberg set me up with a little static library that will get the NetLib calls working nicely. I am hoping no more magic like that will be needed. The biggest mess was actually the assembly crap. Don't get me started on things like "standards" and the way compilers do things their own way.

At this point I am doing some testing of libcurl. It seems to have a few bugs (I am hoping that they are just bugs in a few things in libc that I may have rushed).

Once that is ready then I am home free to mess around with the WebKit source code. :) I'll mess with ICU and OpenSSL after I at least have the basics in. Hopefully FreeType won't be too much of a mess (I did drag it from a CodeWarrior project to gcc, so going back to CodeWarrior should not be too hard, right?).

Thanks to those that are still hanging in. I am definitely looking forward to having something ready. Maybe I can surprise us all before the summer (not a promise, but that is my goal). :)

Title change and lib c

I was bored of the old title, so i changed it.

As for lib c, I am sure that some people saw this: http://tamspalm.tamoggemon.com/2007/12/14/sdl-beeing-ported-to-palm-os/.

TomB on Nexave ported SDL to the PalmOS and included a pretty rich implementation of libc for use in ARM code. I have gone through the libc implementation and removed any compiler/linker dependancies that I could find. I have been using Tom's libc (with my modifications) in some ports of other common libraries that will help to make up the lower level of WebKit. Once I implement wide character support (for ICU) and network support (for, hopefully, cURL) I will post my sources to libc.

Edit: And for those interested, here is TomB's work: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sdlpalmos/. I'll post my changes at openmobl.com after I redesign the site.

Happy Holidays

Have a very safe and happy holidays!

Where things are going...

I have had a few questions regarding when I am releasing the next version of Universe. I will give as much of an answer as I can.

The short answer: Before the summer.

The long answer: Since I have decided to redo the *entire* browser (for a very good reason :), more to come on that) I have decided (silently) that the last release candidate (you can find it on the forums at http://community.openmobl.com/forum/) is the 3.0 "release" since there is no sense in trying to clean up the bugs and then redo eveything. So there is a ton of work to do for the new version. Because of this I do not have a specific date that I would feel comfortable giving (in the event that I need to adjust it) a specific date. There is a lot of work going into this, especially for one person. But, I have made good progress.

What you can expect:
- The next version should be based off of WebKit
- A whole new UI. By new I mean not just new to Universe, but fairly new to mobile browsers. This will be a surprise.

So, for those of you dying for Universe (yes, I am dying for it as well, I had to pain through Blazer and Opera Mini today), it is coming.

5 Years

This month marks my fifth year with the PalmOS and mobile computing.

I got my first Palm handheld, a Palm IIIc, when I was a freshman in high school. The first datebook entry that I have is for 8am on December 2nd "Telecom: tech report" for a technology report that was due that day in my Intro To Telecommunications class (I have the teacher of that class to thank for getting me into Palm handhelds). Even though the event is in December I had received the PDA in November.

In those 5 years I have owned a Palm IIIc, Tungsten T3, TX and Treo 700p as my main handhelds/smartphones. I have also owned (either to add to my collection, or test with) a Pilot 5000, Palm Pilot Pro, Tungsten T, Kyocera 7135, and Xplore M68.

I have also gotten to work with some cool devices, including the Foleo.

It has been an awesome 5 years.

Here is to another 5 years!!

Popularity of WebKit

Wow. WebKit has been picking up momentum in the last few months. There are a ton of projects that use WebKit, and a ton more that are working to incorporate WebKit into their solutions. It seems that webKit is popular. :)

So, instead of re-writing what has already been written, I will just redirect you to the article: http://webkit.org/blog/143/webkit-in-the-news/trackback/.