Registered Palm Developers can now sample the new Eclipse-based Palm Developer Suite. The new suite, which is free, is a very impressive set of tightly integrated build tools covering a range of Palm OS technologies including Cobalt (OS 6). The suite (240 MB) includes gcc arm and 680×0 compilers, dialogue editors, application templates, full debuggers, class and project navigators, and more.
Does it have automatic Makefile generation? I found this to be an annoying lacking feature in eclipse’s CDT.
Does palmsource officially support linux yet? I know they used to treat linux a third world platform before
Gallen,
It appears they didn’t forget auto-generated makes . They seem to have filled in a lot of holes in CDT for the sake of their developer suite. I’m impressed with what I see so far, expecially the ease of use and comprehensiveness of the suite. And they say there’s more to come yet.
Just be careful that you don’t have some other “make” in your windows path or making a project won’t work. I had my first hiccup while trying to build the sample app: eclipse tried to run the Borland make executable instead of the “make” tool that the suite had installed. This should be fixed. It easily could be by just moving the included cygwin tools into the developer suite directory and referencing them directly instead of through environment variables.
I guess it’s still just a preview yet. 😉
From what the FAQ says, they are looking at the possibility of linux and Mac OS X releases too. Eclipse IDE, after all, is already available on those platforms, so it’s a very good possibility, I’m sure.
http://www.palmos.com/dev/tools/dev_suite_faq.html
I am just getting started on a $100K project and we are developing using either qtopia or wince. Since we mainly develop under linux qtopia would be prefered, but we were going to check out palm since we don’t want to deal with windows boxes… (supporting osx/linux is enough for us.) seems they don’t even let your register with mozilla or safari … they say that you must use IE to even get an account with them.
I guess I’ll evaluate this offering tomorrow by bring in a laptop running XP…
seems if palm wanted to survive, they wouldn’t be so picky about having their developers use windows products.
successfully subscribed there at Palm? First: I hate Internet Explorer Optimized Websites. And when I used IE it showed me the agreement twice and than ended up showing me again “This website is optimized for ..”. Can’t they afford a capable web designer?
I can’t remember what browser I used to register at Palm (it was a couple years ago); but I certainly have no troubles using my Mozilla Firefox browser for navigating the Palm developer site or logging in. It’s practically all I use on both Windows and Linux.
It would be very foolish for a company to optimize for IE these days since the alternatives are quite standards compliant and useful. I sure hope you aren’t right about the Palm site (I haven’t seen the IE requirement myself, yet). I agree that they should be aiming for support of a much broader group.
Personally, I would much perfer to be developing on Linux with the Developer Suite so I’m looking forward to seeing what will happen in that area. But I’ll play with the windows version anyway, since it’s likely to be almost identical across platforms.