Keith Rollin wrote:In what way are we not being open? I thought that we were very open about our direction and upcoming releases at the PalmSource conference, which has continued through to answering questions on this and other forums.
Microsoft will throw a beta of an operating system/SDK/Framework (.Net being my example) out to the development community years before it is actually officially released. I remember playing with .NET when it was in it's infancy. It wasn't very stable, but we got familiar with it long before we ever used it.
One advantage that Microsoft has over lots of other companies is that it can afford a higher level of support. It has its hosted newsgroups, MSDN subscriptions with "incidents" levels that allow you to submit questions, MSDN magazine, several conferences per year, outside consultants like Wintellect, authors like Jeffrey Richter, etc. With all of that, it can provide support for early releases. For us, while a leader in operating systems an applications for mobile devices, providing that level of support is not yet reachable. And unless we can support a pre-release, I don't think it would be responsible for us to provide a pre-release.
That is the type of openness that a development community expects. Hell, we couldn't even squeeze a data out of PalmSource for when the new tool chain was going to be downloadable.
Hey, if I had a date I could have told you, I would have. :-) But we missed our 2/13 deadline, and I didn't want to give you another unless I was sure of it. I expect that also goes for all the other PalmSourcies lurking here.
Should those of us that did not make the conference be left in the dark?
It's not clear that you are being left in the dark. We've been open with the information provided at the conference, and I expect that the presentations will be available for download. At least, they have in the past:
<http://www.palmos.com/dev/dl/dl_pandw/>
It's certainly not in our best interests to keep our developers in the dark, so don't feel you have to assume that that's what we're trying to do. :-) If you feel you're being left in the dark, it's safer to assume that it's a mistake, an oversight, or that information will be coming soon and that you need to be more patient. :-)
-- Keith
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