Developer Pans Lack of OpenGL in Mojo SDK
A new blog post from seasoned iPhone developer Craig Hunter details some of the shortcomings in the new webOS Mojo software development kit beta. Primarily the author is dissatisfied that it does not yet offer access to OpenGL, despite the Pre's hardware supporting it, which is nearly a necessity for more robust and complex games.
The developer also feels the low sampling rate for raw accelerometer data, which he feels is too low for even casual game usage. The current SDK provides for a 4 Hz sampling rate (four samples per second), while the iPhone can offer up to 100 Hz.
This wouldn't be so bad for Palm if we were still in 2007, but in the age of sophisticated iPhone native apps here in 2009, web apps just don't cut it anymore. With such amazing software capabilities flourishing on the iPhone, Palm can't afford to wait a year while they make the transition from web apps to native apps in their SDK. Palm might have had a chance against the 2007 Apple SDK, but not the 2009 version. Not even close. With this limitation, webOS will not be taken seriously by consumers who place importance on games or sophisticated third party apps. The iPhone has raised their expectations too high.
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RE: Bad news...
I really hope that Palm will release an SDK like Androids "NDK" (native development kit, as they call it) to allow for using system APIs only exposed via C/C++ header files or something similar for developers that need it.
I wouldn't mind if they restricted that through a NDA and make more or less heavy restrictions on how much you may use (to limit the risk of too energy intense usage and making the system unstable) as long as you may develop real native applications with such a development kit.
RE: Bad news...
Pat Horne
RE: Bad news...
I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.
Anyone who buys a Pre or any other webOS device right now is taking a bet on future potential, just like any early adopters.
RE: I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.
Weren't you the one who said javascript was fast enough for video games - lol!
>OpenGL access is but a software issue.
LOL - so is the slow performance of webos.
>Dunno about accelerometer polling but I bet there's a setting somewhere that can
>be cranked up for that, too.
We'll see...
>Anyone who buys a Pre or any other webOS device right now is taking a bet on
>future potential, just like any early adopters.
They're also betting on the company being around too...
RE: I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.
> somewhere that can be cranked up for that, too...
Palm didn't set the update rate to 4 times per second because they wanted to irritate game developers.
Though undoubtedly configurable, I'm sure they had their very good, possibly "phone" reasons, to keep the update frequency really low.
Twiddling hardware config variables can have interesting side-effects.
RE: I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience.
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:AccelService
Empty Criticisms
Are there Pre shortcomings? Of course. But those cited as a result of this article are way, way down on the list of those looking at or buying Pre's
Dennis -==- Philly
RE: Empty Criticisms
Peace Out
Alan
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Bad news...