New in the App Catalog for 17 November 2010 4

I'm actually one of those old PalmOS developers. Let me break it to you softly...well...webOS is NOTHING like PalmOS. PalmOS had a simple api, single tasked, and was pretty straightforward to write apps for (provided you knew c or c++). But just because you can use c++ on both webOS and PalmOS doesn't mean there isn't a steep learning curve (pardon the litote there).

Plus, guys like me, when PalmOS looked like it was fading away and there didn't seem to be anything taking its place, did Windows Mobile dev. None of us expected Palm to throw their entire approach to writing apps away and start over completely webcentric...which is practically the pure opposite of what PalmOS was. You "can" port apps from PalmOS, but you might as well scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch.

I also wrote apps for Symbian, so yes, I get the joke. Symbian was the goofiest platform I've ever developed for. There's a good reason hardly any third parties seriously wrote and completed (keyword there) software for it. I did, and I still, to this day, don't know how I made it all work.

Apparently you need Windows Mobile or Blackberry instead. I'll usually push webOS since it's simply a better phone OS from a user's perspective and has more upside, but the bottom line is that Microsoft only lets some platforms play ball with them, and very rarely do they play fair (don't even get me started on Apple, they're even worse). You have to have a phone that is pretty much directly integrated into the Active Directory on your company network, and that generally means WinMob or Blackberry. I suppose Palm could make their calendar able to create meetings and assign folks out of your contact list, but that might not always work right for a lot of contacts in your address book because they might be on Facebook or some goofy web mail that doesn't let you do that.