Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 24th Feb 2004 18:34 UTC
The voice, the man, the... machine. That's George Hoffman for you. According to people who have worked with him (including my husband) he is one of the brightest Be, Inc. engineers ever. These days, George works at PalmSource, Inc. as the Director of Applications and Services. In his free time he sings with an (a cappella) vocal band of 4, Hookslide (check out their .wmv promo video clip)! In this interview we talk about PalmOS 6, aka Cobalt. We discuss the architecture of the OS, its capabilities, its market targets and more. Screenshots of Cobalt are included.
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PalmSource has no intention of helping other manufacturers compete with Sony (nor helping Sony compete with anyone else). We provide the platform, and allow each licensee to customize it and differentiate it as they see fit. (And that goes for palmOne, as well.)
I agree it is unfortunate that the improvements to the UI in this release are very small in comparison to how much has changed underneath. However, there is a tremendous amount of exciting technology in the system and available to developers; I think this will become apparent as we see the kinds of applications our developers are able to do on Cobalt that you just won't get on Garnet. A small little example: the system now reports pen pressure information; in conjunction with the new drawing model, it should be easy for a developers to create vastly better sketch and drawing apps.
There are also a lot of really significant user-level improvements in the base operating system, especially in areas such as communications, and many smaller but very welcome improvements all over such as the addition of many more fields to the Address Book and the ability for users (and third party developers) to extend it with their own fields using schema databases.
I also think the new status bar and slip mechanism is very slick... and keep in mind that this is now a multithreaded protected memory system, so you can hit stuff on the status bar and bring up slips regardless of what the current app is doing, without disrupting it. Not to mention little things such as if the current application crashes or gets stuck, the system will gracefully just kill it and let you continue. Though it may look familiar at first glance, after using Cobalt a bit I think it will become very apparent that you are holding in your hand a much more sophisticated OS.