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Palm Pre SDK Problems
As a proud Pre owner and hacker, I had a blast downloading the SDK this week. I'm planning a fun side-project, and the Pre looked like a cool platform.
And then I took a look at some of the limitations.
No access to the contacts list. Really? You mean if I go to all of the trouble to write an app, get it signed, and get it into the Palm catalog (wherever that is), I can't access the user's contacts? It boggles the mind. The whole point in having a smart phone with extensibility is to allow me to do new things. Color me stupid, but what kinds of things do you think I might want to do if they don't involve my friends? The entire point of a cell phone is an easy way to contact people. Stands to reason that cell phone apps are going to have a lot to do with people.
Can't use the google maps widget to display groups of points. Let's say somehow you come up with a list of people or places. And you want to show them to the user. Sorry! The nifty rotating-scaling-panning google maps gizmo only works with one point at a time. Once again, what was Palm thinking about? You have a GPS, but you can't easily show lists of things on a map? Huh?
Emulator doesn't do any of the things you want to code. Want to play sounds? Use the accelerometer? Sorry -- the emulator doesn't handle that. So you're faced with using the emulator as kind of a quasi-testing platform. Make it run on the emulator, then make it run on a real phone. That's doable, but a royal pain. The SDK also doesn't install on Vista-64 or Windows 7, but users have posted workarounds for these issues.
Unable to hack into system internals. If you want to do the really cool stuff, like have your app check incoming phone calls to see if they match somebody on the contact list, forget it. You don't have access under the hood. Just the toy stuff.
In a way this is a great thing -- it means that any Palm app is going to be trivial. No need in worrying about complex solutions. But Palm has really dropped the ball with this. I'm not an iPhone developer -- perhaps they have similar constraints -- but all of the cool stuff I'd like to do is prohibited.
All of this is just the stuff I gathered while going through the motions of downloading and setting up the development environment. I haven't even gotten into the real meat of the system yet.
Does this amount to deal-breaker? I don't know; but it's certainly disappointing.
> You don't have access under the hood. Just the toy stuff.
That's what is keeping me from porting the SQLCipher lib and our iPhone apps to the Pre.
Re: accessing contacts...
I've only played w the SDK and emulator, but I've been using this the Contacts Service to access contacts in my in-development app. That doesn't do what you need?
http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1701
Andy.
The contacts service will only allow you to access the contacts created by your app, not the global contacts list.
http://developer.palm.com/distribution/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=512
In addition (which I forgot to mention), you can access the email and SMS features, but the user has to hit Ok every time you do! So forget about features that automatically send an email or text message every so often.