The New and Advanced Technologies track was aimed at experienced developers who want to learn about upcoming features and enhancements. The Technology Introduction track was aimed at folks new to Palm development. The Business track was focused on Enterprise issues and aimed at the non-programmers at the conference. The last track, the Sponsors track, features a series of presentation by the various sponsors and provided the opportunity to learn about specific products and companies in detail.
I attended mostly sessions in the New and Advanced Technologies track, although I did attend a few sessions in other tracks. I attended the following sessions:
- New Technologies Overview
- Bluetooth API
- External Storage and Expansion
- New and Updated Core APIs
- Zen of Palm
- Tools Now and in the Future
- Writing non-Simple Applications
- Entertainment and Media on Palm OS
All of the sessions were informative and helpful in understanding the direction Palm and more specifically Palm OS is headed with OS4 and the releases beyond.
The New Technology Overview was given by David Fedor, Developer Support Team Lead. It basically provided a quick list of changes and additions for OS4 including expansion cards, bluetooth, timezone support, the new attention manager, and security enhancements.
The Bluetooth API session was given by Tom Keel and Jaques Bourhis from Palm France. The first part of the talk was dedicated to a fairly detailed discussion of what Bluetooth is. The second part discussed how Bluetooth will interface with Palms including a detailed discussion of how to add Bluetooth calls to Palm applications.
The External Storage and Expansion session was also led by David Fedor. This session talked at length about the new Expansion APIs and features such as autorun on insert, cleaning up after expansion cards after they are removed, and using the bundled bit to ensure that both an application and its data are moved to RAM when the application is launched from the card.
The New and Core Updated APIs session was led by Ezekiel Sanborn de Asis and basically went through the new API calls related to timezones, the attention manager, the exchange manager, and the new interfaces to vObjects (vCards and vCal entries specifically).
Zen of Palm was a fun session led by Michael Mace, the Chief Competitive Officer. Based on an old presentation originally given by Rob Hitani, Zen of Palm presents the Palm philosophy of simplicity, listening to what people want, not necessarily what they say they want, and the thought process used to determine when to add new features.
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