Palm Gives Power to the People

You ever check out some of the poorly built or just straight lame apps some of the app stores are carrying? Did you ever think that you could make something way better, if only you had the coding skills? Well here’s your chance to create that killer app without having to be a coding genius.

Palm has just launched Project Ares, a software development kit that allows for the creation of simple apps for the Palm Pre and Pixi with relative ease. Ares is being touted as the first in-browser development kit. Project Ares is basically a drag and drop affair, which means you can just grab buttons, images, an text boxes and drop them onto the Palm Pre in the browser. Of course, you’ll have to do some coding in order to tell your new amalgam which component should be doing what. But the tutorial should be able to help walk you through the process.

Ares features include:

• Drag-and-drop interface builder
• Code editor
• Visual debugger
• Log viewer
• Source control integration
• Fingertip access to the full library of Mojo UI widgets
• Push-button project and scene creation
• Drag-and-drop file upload
• Instant project upload and download for seamless desktop/cloud workflow
• One-click preview of apps in the browser
• One-click launch of apps in the webOS emulator or on the device (requires SDK installation)

This can be construed as a risky move on Palm’s end. On one hand, there’s the potential for some great apps to be created. It will also boost the number of apps available to the public, something Palm needs to do since the Android Market recently hit the 20,000 app milestone. The downside of this project is the overwhelming possiblity for Palm’s app store to be filled with tons of useless apps, making it difficult for Palm Pre/Pixi users to find the really cool apps. But Palm is going all-in saying:

Like webOS, Project Ares embodies Palm’s belief that the future of mobile will be built on the web. Project Ares aims to enable a next-generation mobile development workflow, in which developers move quickly and seamlessly from editing in a browser, to debugging on a device, to selling applications in Palm’s App Catalog or on the web.

Project Ares is now in public beta and is supported on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari (sorry IE, better luck next time!). If you’re interested in giving the system the once over, go to ares.palm.com and sign up.