PalmSource on Tuesday officially announced it will divide its operating system efforts, working on both entry-level and high-end versions of the operating system.
PalmSource embarks on new OS plans
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And they have a new developer environment too, based on the Eclipse framework. Read it in the official press release : http://www.palmsource.com/press/2004/021004_cobalt.html
Forgot to mention : some of the features of the new OS6 ‘Cobalt’ :
* Multitasking, multithreading;
* Memory protection;
* Support for more memory and larger screens;
* Industry standards-based security;
* Extensible communication and multimedia frameworks capable of handling multiple connections simultaneously;
And last but not least ‘Palm OS Cobalt provides rich graphics and multimedia features derived from the Be OS’
So basically they’re starting again, it will evolve into desktop one day, and ‘Palm will deliver’ as what’s his name predicted on BeNews once…
That is what apple did. They started anew, and now they have the benefits of new-world OS and software and backward compatibility 🙂
i am excited by the new devices we might see.
i want a palm os in a normal phone (former os 5) with a gui that does not require a stylus or qwerty keyboard.
I suspect cobalt will result in some fascinating new devices that push the edge in PDA and expand beyond PDA’s to larger devices.
I still think a palm os cobalt laptop would kill.
yea a laptop would be awesome. I hope the rumors are true about Palm working on a laptop.
The developer documentation is now available and downloadable for Cobalt. But it appears that the compiler toolset is yet to be released (in next few days?). The Palm site says they will be available soon to registered developers.
It appears they are freely releasing a complete toolset and IDE based on Eclipse. The ARM based compiler (gcc, I assume) is included, I think.
It’s nice that they are offering a complete solution for developers. Mixed with Cobalts new programming interface, this release should be very refreshing.
I’ve just downloaded several developers guides for the new Palm OS6 (some familiar names from the BeOS days), and the backend of these things looks nothing like BeOS. BeOS RIP.
This probably means that YC can finally shut up.
Well, after a more detailed look at the Cobalt docs, PalmOS 6 uses a plain old C API, no C++ goodness inherited from the BeOS API. The OS doesn’t seem to be as pervasivily multithreaded as BeOS was. The SDK even says that old PalmOS apps should work after a recompile. This means that there is virtually nothing of the BeOS architecture in here. So BeOS does not live on in Palm OS6.
Apple didn’t start anew. They’re just using mach-os with BSD and their own proprietary stuff. If you remember, Apple stumbled around for years with Rhapsody and other failed efforts in a new OS.
I noticed the same thing. At first, I was disappointed to see that C was still being used for the API. But I guess this was a conscious design decision so that multiple language interfaces would be easier to implement. I suppose also that it won’t take much for a variety of 3rd party OOP interfaces to be put together. The ubiquitous C still reigns.
Oh well, at least, there’s no kludges for native-ARM programming anymore.
Could an Objective-C wrapper be fairly easily developed which would provide OOP for those who want it?
Apple didn’t start anew. They’re just using mach-os with BSD and their own proprietary stuff. If you remember, Apple stumbled around for years with Rhapsody and other failed efforts in a new OS.
Nope, but Steve Jobs did at next 16 years ago.
That later went on to become OS X…
They didn’t start something completely new from scratch but then is there much point doing that is OSs these days?
I noticed the same thing. At first, I was disappointed to see that C was still being used for the API. But I guess this was a conscious design decision … The ubiquitous C still reigns.
I don’t know why and this is somthing of a guess but I’m thinking C was used because on a small device you have to be efficient.
That said parts of BeOS were coded in C and I know the API was limited so perhaps you are right and it is to allow multiple languages to be used.
Apple didn’t start anew. They’re just using mach-os with BSD and their own proprietary stuff. If you remember, Apple stumbled around for years with Rhapsody and other failed efforts in a new OS.
Thanks. I was just about to post the same thing. Now I don’t have to. 😉
Apple’s failure with Rhapsody was apparently due to management and not technical failure on the part of the developers. I have spoken with a few people who were testing it and it was the true followup to classic MacOS and would have been far better for users than OSX, had Apple been able to survive the development of it (like Be failed to survive the development of BeOS). I wonder if anyone still has “the OS that wasn’t” anywhere in their developer archives. I always wanted to see it. Too bad.
As for Palm and BeOS stuff… eh… whatever. Whatever makes a better Palm handheld (and I mean better, not “markets better”) makes me happy. I plan to buy my next unit when they sell with OS6/Cobalt. That would be my second PDA in total (still running an old upgraded Palm Pilot Personal and it still works great).
Aside from the idea of a backwards compatibility layer operating in a distinct window in the fashion of Virtual PC, I don’t see how Rhapsody failed.
It simply became OS X, didn’t it?
In fact, it’s hard to say that any of the OS rewriting projects at Apple truly failed. Even those that didn’t change things dramatically contributed improvements that were put into MacOS 8 and 9.
Did Plam just let it die?