Palm has released an updated version of its webOS Mojo software developer kit, a set of frameworks and APIs for building native applications for the Palm Pre smartphone.
The changes fix a number of problems when loading the SDK on Windows XP and Vista and Mac OS X computers. Though Windows 7 is not currently supported by Palm, developers have been finding workarounds that permit them to load Mojo on a pre-release build of the forthcoming Microsoft release.
The update corrects the following:
– system DLLs being wrongly replaced in some cases when installing the SDK on Windows XP
– failure to install, causing a rollback at the end of the install process, on Windows XP and Vista
– on Macs, the install process could short-circuit when an older version of the Palm Emulator program wasn't removed first
– on Vista-64 machines, shortcuts to launch Emulator didn't work; they now point to .bat file instead of .exe
Palm made Mojo generally available in mid-July, weeks earlier than anticipated. The webOS combines a Linux kernel with an embedded version of Webkit, the open source HTML/JavaScript rendering engine. Webkit acts as the native execution environment for webOS applications written in Javascript, HTML/HTML 5, and CSS, an approach that promises to simplify development of mobile Web applications. Early Mojo users have generally been enthusiastic in their assessment.
