The New York Times reports that Palm plans to sell 2 million Centros in 2008. That’s 1/5th the number of projected iPhone sales (and 1/10th of the analyst’s expectations of 20+ million by 2009). I smell a spanking in the works.¹

1. Dear Palm, the end is near. ↩

A human interface design story about the Zire 71 camera (pdf).

The Palm OS uses Mac-style tap-and-drag selection and persistent scroll bars, but (a) a stylus is far more precise than a fingertip, so their scroll bars are thinner, not thicker; and (b) no one has raved about how cool the Palm OS is since the ’90s. –John Gruber of Daring Fireball

(it’s funny because it’s true)

HOWTO learn like a beginner. Sometimes we have to think less to learn more.

Another nail in Palm’s coffin.

A great Palm development weblog (thanks Steve).

A few popular commercial 2d gaming kits:

• PTK (library-based, Linux/Mac/Windows/PPC)
• Torque2d (full framework w/scripting, 2d via GL, Linux/Mac/Windows, scene-graph based). A T2D developers blog. Some examples
• Popcap (library-based, Windows, Palm/PPC, 2d via GL or without)

Some pictures of Linux booting on a Palm Treo 650.

Palm will work with… Microsoft?
“Odds are strong that Palm will be releasing a Treo smartphone next year that runs Windows Mobile. Palm, once proud champion of the PDA world and parent to the PalmOS, is turning to Microsoft for OS support for at least one Treo phone.”

Palm with their on-again, off-again entirely unclear Linux direction:

“Company says the Linux version of its platform will be available for so-called feature phones next summer, with a smart-phone version to follow.” (InfoWeek)

In the end, Palm has to switch to something with free tools (all major vendors do). Paying for tools is pointless when the leading competitors don’t require it. Consider:

“Back in 1993 we had to buy and continue to pay for maintenance on everything we needed just to build our service — operating systems, compilers, web servers, application servers, databases. You name it. If it was infrastructure, we paid for it. And, not only was it costly, the need to negotiate licenses took time and energy.” (It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur)

We’re seeing at least two major shifts here: shrinking development/OS costs and shrunken (more powerful) hardware platforms. And as long as a few major vendors are borrowing from Free software (making it freely available to developers) the others are forced to follow. Microsoft is especially challenged by the shift as their staples are no longer stable — hardware vendors don’t want to pay for operating systems or tools, and most PC applications have to be reinvented for smaller devices.