Game Development for the Palm Pre

Palm has now launched their “Plug-in Development Kit” (PDK) for the Palm Pre. The PDK is based on the following core technologies:

  • GCC for compiling C/C++ code to ARM native code
  • SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL ES, and a 2D video frame buffer

So, you can now finally develop C/C++ applications for the “web-only” Palm Pre device. It will be interesting to see how much developer interest there will be for the Palm PDK once it’s released publicly in Q2 2010.

The Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (Palm)

Windows Phone 7 Series MIX Sessions

The Windows Phone 7 Series sessions at MIX 2010 have now been announced and they look quite interesting:

  1. Changing our Game – an Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series
  2. Building Windows Phone Games
  3. Building a High Performance 3D Game for Windows Phone
  4. Designing and Developing for the Rich Mobile Web
  5. Overview of the Windows Phone 7 Series Application Platform
  6. Windows Phone UI and Design Language
  7. An Introduction to Developing Applications for Microsoft Silverlight
  8. Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 1
  9. Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 2
  10. Windows Phone Application Platform Architecture
  11. Development and Debugging Tools for Building XNA Games for Windows Phone
  12. Distributing and Monetizing Windows Phone Applications and Games
  13. Silverlight Performance on Windows Phone
  14. Unit Testing Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Applications
If I wasn’t already holding a seminar at Scandinavian Developer Conference on March 16 I would definitely have done all I could to get ahold of a last-minute airplane ticket to MIX 2010 in Las Vegas.

Windows Phone 7 Gaming

At the TechEd Middle East Dubai 2010 Opening Keynote, Eric Rudder demonstrated how XNA games written in C# will integrate across PCs, Windows Phone 7 devices and Xbox 360 consoles. And it looks very promising!

I like how they did not only make Windows Phone 7 Series cross-platform compatible with PCs and the Xbox 360, but how they have also added synchronization features to the platform.

Cufon: Custom Web Fonts the Easy Way

Inspired by Palm’s use of the Cufón JavaScript API to generate images of custom web fonts I have decided to try it out on my WordPress blog headers. Installation was very easy in four simple steps:

  1. Download the WP-Cufón addon, unzip and copy to wp-content/plugins
  2. Go to http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ and convert a TTF or OTF font to JavaScript
  3. Create the folder wp-content/plugins/fonts and upload the generated font.js file to this location
  4. Activate the WordPress plugin and go to settings, and choose your font name and what it should replace

Works very well with the WP-Thesis theme I use on my blog.