After a long time off from developing palm applications, I found out that PalmSource has released an PalmOS IDE they’re calling the PalmOS Developer Suite. It’s based off the Eclipse IDE and it kicks some serious butt.

A little history is probably in order. My first job out of college was writing and maintaining X11 GUIs and UNIX applications using C and perl. While in college I paid the bills by writing Visual Basic applications. I’ve been writing code for a while, but I’d gotten pretty burned out and took some time (a few years) off. Then I found NS Basic and started writing PalmOS applications. I like NS Basic and really think it’s a good development environment, but it’s sadly lacking in that it can’t produce native code applications. Everything’s interpreted, so you’ve got to package a 100 kilobyte runtime with your app. Talk about bloat!

Back in April, 2004 I released my first real app, a small utility to calculate the date of Pascha and the other feasts and fasts that are related to it. Unfortunately it used up 119 kilobytes of memory.

I’ve now got the new IDE up and running and am working on rewriting the Paschal calculator in C. It’ll take up a lot less space and should run just a little faster, though it’s not a computationally intensive application so that may not matter much.