Palm Confirms Further PDK Details At GDC

Palm has confirmed further details regarding the native PDK during GDC specifically relating to development support and hardware compatibility.

First, the most recent version of the PDK released recently is compatible with the Pixi for application development, rather than being limited to the Pre and Pre Plus as first thought, which means that all currently available hardware is supported. The developer preview of the PDK issued to select game and application developers before its public release did not include such support.

Related to that front, the first applications developed using the public PDK release have been given a vague availability timeframe between the middle of the year or a few months depending on the possibility of another webOS update to enable full support for PDK applications on the Pre and Pixi. The PDK has also been confirmed to support the Linux SDL library in order to ease porting of Linux applications to webOS with the PDK beta, along with being able to mix both webOS and PDK elements for application development.

Currently available PDK developed games do not utilize additional Palm hardware elements such as the QWERTY keyboard and the gesture area, but they are available to developers to integrate along with any other element of webOS that the Mojo SDK supports. The only exception in the plugin is that Flash only works in the web browser and can’t be embedded into a webOS or PDK application, with no further details on future support at this time.