Last night was the launch party for the Palm Pre and I was lucky enough to receive an invite. Originally, I was a little perplexed; the invite touted:

• The launch of the Palm Pre
• An Interactive Farmer’s Market
• Support for the Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan
• Jason Alexander as MC, Jerry Seinfeld as entertainment

This mish mash of options seemed a little confused, but the event panned out to be highly cohesive and very enjoyable.

Lisa, Greg and I (preDevCamp organisers) went together and had the opportunity to meet Pam Deziel (Palm) face to face for the first time. We also met some of the developers who’ve been working on the Pre these past months. We also ran across precentral.net‘s very own Dieter Bohn, who was one of the lucky few to get to review the Pre.

The Farmer’s Market turned out to be a very nice way to keep everyone fed as well as raising money for the IAVA. Each stall was giving away food as well as selling wares, with money going to support the veterans of the recent conflicts. You may have seen their advertisements (in the US); they do some great work and I would encourage you to find out more and make a donation.

The reason we were there, however, was the Pre. I finally got to get my hands on one. They had demo stands, with Palm reps showing them off. They were still a little guarded about giving them out, but I was allowed to hold one and have a go on the keyboard and with the touch screen. I think the keys will take a little getting used to, of me. I have big hands, so these micro keys are a little troublesome, but the Pre keys are bigger than my Blackberry’s (in terms of area) but flatter, so less tactilely pleasing; all in all, I’m happy with the keyboard. The phone itself is a great shape and weight. I love the rounded edges and, while they wouldn’t let me put it in my pocket, I think it will fit more comfortably than my past phones.

I didn’t get a chance to really play with the software as there were many clamouring hands. I did get the chance to load up the preDevCamp website, however and it looked HOT! It also loaded up pretty swiftly too, which I found quite impressive.

All in all, a great night; met the other preDevCamp organizers face to face, met some Palm muckamucks, played with the Pre, got free food. I classify this, a WIN.

The past week has seen a lot of change at preDevCamp. It’s been a busy time, but I believe we’ve found our footing again and it’s time to move forward.

Following our challenges with Palm, whurley and gio have opted to move on to other things. We wouldn’t be where we are without them and I’ve eternally grateful to them for all they did for preDevCamp. I hope I’ll see them at their local events and hope to work with them again on future projects.

Joining the organizing team are Lisa Brewster and Greg Stevenson. I’m very grateful to them, since preDevCamp is, in no way, a one person job.

We’ve spoken to Palm a number of times now and they’re very positive about preDevCamp. They’re offering support and we’re working with them to determine the best way for that support to manifest itself.

Finally, we settled on a date for preDevCamp which balances the various pressures of SDK availability, organization time and conference conflicts. We settled on August 8th and, so far, this seems to have gone across well.

Watch this space for more updates, as they come!

Back in February, Whurley, Gio and I heard about a new product called the Palm Pre.
I was excited at the promise of a new, open mobile development platform and we decided to recreate the success of iPhoneDevCamp by creating preDevCamp.

I never expected Palm to provide assistance, but I hoped they would. Apple was flooding the market with advertisements, not for the iPhone, but for the iPhone App Store and the abundant apps.
Clearly, a thriving supply of mobile applications was the way to sell a new mobile device.

I’d developed apps for Palm OS in the past and I knew that there was a devoted community of developers out there; however, they were rather neglected developers, since Palm hadn’t really been a major player in the mobile arena for a while. With the advent of the Pre, I thought things were changing.

Time went by and there were fleeting moments of contact with Palm. We spoke to them; they seemed interested but asked us to put a disclaimer that we were not affiliated with them, before they would enter into a relationship with them. This seemed a little backwards to me, but we complied. Not much transpired after that.

Then Mitch Allen gave his web presentation on developing WebOS apps and gave us a shout out. I was really excited about this; the CTO of Software was aware of what we were doing, but there wasn’t any follow up from Palm following that.

Finally, last week, Palm sent us some NDAs in preparation for a meeting this Wednesday. We signed them and prepared ourselves for an interesting update. Gio sent out a tweet simply stating that we had a meeting and it was under an NDA, as a result Palm then cancelled the meeting and cancelled any discussions covered by an NDA. At that point, my hopes for a useful relationship with Palm died.

As a corporation, I acknowledge that Palm’s only responsibility is to its shareholders. There’s nothing self serving or evil about that; it’s how things work in big business. However there are many keen and willing developers out there, who have been waiting for the arrival of WebOS. A development platform is only a success if it is broadly adopted. Instead of embracing the grassroots upswell of interest in WebOS that preDevCamp fostered, Palm seem to be, at best, oblivious and, at worst, disdainful of the enthusiasm and good will engendered by these folk. I think they are missing a real opportunity to be involved in and to help generate the growth of a vital community.

My fellow preDevCamp founders and I may have differing views on the impact of Palm’s interactions with us. Personally, I’m left disappointed at what I view as a lack of foresight on Palm’s behalf. Palm will live or die by the success of the WebOS platform. The preDevCamp community will be a large part of this. However, my excitement remains about the WebOS platform. I couldn’t really give two hoots about Palm at this point. I *do* want preDevCamp to be a success and I *know* it will be; we have dedicated organizers all the way across the globe. We have a release date, at last. We have a date for preDevCamp. It’s all systems go. I encourage you to stay focused on the product and on the exciting possibilities that WebOS brings. My only hope, now, is that Palm runs the course with their indifference to community. If they don’t want to help us, that’s fine. I just hope they don’t try and get in our way.

The other day, the preDevCamp team published our ‘PreView’ map at http://predevcamp.org/preView.html. In this post, I’ll talk about how it was put together.

PreView is a combination of the Google Maps API and the Twitter API. Without wanting to shatter the mystique, I’m going to outline how I set about creating PreView.

First, take a look at the HTML in preView.html. When you strip out the preDevCamp menu and Twitter Bird, you’re left with:

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<html>
<head>
<title>preView - Global Twitter interest in preDevCamp, Palm Pre and webOS</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/preView.css" >
<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&amp;v=2.x&amp;key=xxxxxxxx" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://gmaps-utility-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/markermanager/release/src/markermanager_packed.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/jQuery.js"></script>
<script src="/js/tweetList.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/preView.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="tweetAPI">Checking Twitter API</div>
<div id="preViewMap">Loading Google Map</div>
</body>
</html>

As you can see, the BODY of the page is exceptionally simple; just two DIVs with ids set and some basic content. All the hard work is done by the Javascript in the HEAD of the page. So how does it all work? The ‘preView.js’ script creates an object called PreView which pulls together jQuery, Google Maps and Twitter.

jQuery

jQuery is a library that extends the Javascript language and makes it easier to perform Web 2.0 functionality in a way that works independent of your users’ browsers. You can find good tutorials on jQuery all over the Internet and the docs are pretty good too, with lots of examples. One thing that I discovered the hard way is that your CSS links must appear before loading jQuery or else you can find you have problems when you try to access CSS properties in later code. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this is so, but that’s how it works.

Other people might say Prototype or YUI. I haven’t used either of those, so I can’t comment, but I will be learning Prototype soon, since it underpins a lot of the webOS language.

Google Maps

The next step is to create your map. I used the Google Maps API for this. To access the API, you need to get a key from Google. This allows them to track how people are using their API and who is making requests. Your API key is associated with a specific domain, so for preDevCamp, we need 3 keys; one for ‘.com’, one for ‘.org’ and one for ‘.net’.

In addition to pulling in the Google Maps API, we used the Marker Manager for handling all of those little Palm Pres dotted over the map. The Marker Manager improves performance of map panning by only drawing the Pres that are currently visible. As preDevCamp grows, we’re going to have more and more Pres on the map, so this will get more an more important.

Once the API is loaded, you have access to all of the Google Maps commands. The API documentation is the best place to go to understand what each object does, but here’s a breakdown of what PreView does:

1. Locate the destination DIV for the Google Map
2. Create the GMap2 object and associate it with this DIV
3. Add a small Zoom control
4. Centre the map on 50n,0E. This is in the English channel, directly south of London. There’s no great geographical significance of this point, but it makes for a map that feels reasonably centered, with regard to land masses.
5. Set the map to a Physical map instead of a Satellite Image map
6. Create a new Marker Manager and associate it with the map
7. Make a JSONP call to the preDevCamp website requesting the location of all the preDevCamps. This returns an array of JS objects, each containing the Name, Longitude and Latitude of each preDevCamp city (see geocoding below)

That’s it for creating the map!

Geocoding

Geocoding is the transformation of an address of some sort into a latitude and longitude. Google Maps provides a geocoding interface and you can translate addresses on the fly if you need to. However, the geocoding service is rate limited and if you request too many, too quickly, your requests will get rejected. In addition to this, it takes a certain amount of time to send the request and get a response. As a result, the geocoding results have been cached on the preDevCamp server and are taken from there. This also allows us to handle ambiguous locations, such as “Washington” or “Charleston”, which could refer to a number of locations. Since we know which city each preDevCamp is in, we can add special handling for cities such as these.

That said, the geocoding service is used to find the Latitude and Longitude of Twitter users, based on their reported location.

Twitter API

Once the map is created, all that remains is to query Twitter for relevant Tweets. Like the Google Maps API, the Twitter API is really well documented. They actually have 2 APIs. One is for searching the Twitter public time line, the other is for interacting more explicitly with Twitter. One thing to note is that the Twitter API is also rate limited. You’re restricted to 100 API requests per hour, unless you get a special dispensation from Twitter.

So, the first step PreView takes is to find out how many API requests are available. It also checks to see when this limit will be reset and will use that later on, if the limit is exceeded

PreView continues by sending out searches for ‘predevcamp’, ‘webos’ and ‘palm pre’. Each of these requests generates a list of Tweet objects which are put onto a central list which sorts by each Tweet’s ID. The ID is globally unique. At this point, PreView does not filter duplicated Tweets, but a future version will.

The next step is to go through the list one at a time and display the Tweet on the map. In order to do this, we take the location property of the Tweet and send it to the Google Geocoding Service. Although this Service is rate limited, we only show Tweets once every 8 seconds or so, so we’re not going to hit the rate limit that Google sets. However, asking Twitter where a user is located, does count against our Twitter API usage, so we make sure to cache users’ locations to prevent the limit from being gobbled up.

If the user’s location does not translate, we put the Tweet somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There may be a better way to indicate that Tweet cannot be located but, again, that is deferred to version 2.0.

Once all of the Tweets in the list have been shown, we send a second request to the Twitter Search API. Twitter has a neat trick to help us here. When we send a search request , Twitter gives us a list of Tweets as well as a URL that we can use later which essentially says: “Show us the Search Results starting from where we left off in the last search”. This means we don’t need to filter for Tweets that we’ve already seen.

Summary

Hopefully, that’s given you an overview of what I sought to achieve with the preView map. By looking through the source code and reading this post, you should be able to see what it takes to make something like this. The astute of you will also see areas where preView could be improved and, when I have time, I’ll be taking a second run at it. However, for now, I hope that it proves to be an instructive read!

On a number of occasions this weekend, while I was at the BLI Conference, I was asked the question: “Why are you doing the preDevCamp?” I thought it would be useful to provide an answer here.

With the ever increasing complexity of mobile telephones, we’re now carrying powerful computers around with us every. Unlike modern computers, the mobile phone has remained an arcane platform for programming. iPhone development requires a knowledge of Objective C. If you want to write for the Android, you’re stuck with Java. While these languages are hardly esoteric, they’re hardly an easy environment to use for creating simple applications.

I’m a firm believer that the greatest barrier to innovation should be imagination and not technology. The opening of the iPhone App Store presented the fruits of many a fertile mind; minds that had a good idea and coupled that with a sufficient understanding of Java to turn that idea into an app.

With the release of the Palm Pre, will come a new environment for developers. This environment is the webOS and applications will be based on HTML, CSS and Javascript. The number of developers who are comfortable with this development environment is vast, much greater than the number of Objective C developers. In addition to this, HTML and CSS are inherently visual languages, making te development of graphical interfaces well within the reach of the average coder.

I’m excited at the prospect of preDevCamps, because it’ll be an opportunity to see what developers can do when they are given the chance to spend their mental efforts on innovating instead of creating; the DevCamps will be run all around the world, bringing ideas together from cities ranging from Atlanta to Zagreb. Together, we’ll be able to demonstrate that the Palm Pre is a serious platform for developers and has a real place in market. Already, ideas are flowing on the discussion forums and we’ve only been going a week.

I urge anyone who is event the slightest bit interested in web development to take a serious look at the Palm Pre and joining a local preDevCamp. It’s a real opportunity to take the skills that you honed on the web and learn a brand new way to exercise them!

On Monday, I announced the launch of preDevCamp. There has been a fantastic global response and today I’d like to announce the fanclub that we’ve set up on Facebook.

Palm are taking some real interest in this camp and a Facebook fanclub is a great way to demonstrate the level of interest. Please show some support for preDevCamp by signing up.

While you’re at it, swing over to http://predevcamp.org and sign up to one of the events. Coding the Palm Pre is going to be a dream if you have any experience with developing with AJAX, so get involved! If there isn’t an event in your city, let us know and we’ll guide you through the process of setting one up.